Astounding Science Fiction (British edition) — page 54: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

a ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION like a nibbly as possible, electrically. And we'll have to—”’ “Look, my friend,” Hilda inter- rupted gently, shoving Chang toward the door, “‘when Wu comes back and I tell him I’m going to be working with you again, he’ll want me to leave my stuff down here in comprehensible order. Ill be up to your place in half an hour; try to be stupid that long so I won’t miss anything.” IV. WHEN Balch and Sumer got back, they landed the copter in the clearing instead of on the ship. This was so the two nibblies they had with them would not have to be exposed to Procyon-style air, but could be brought into the ship’ via the lift in a tank provided with Four’s air. (Four’s air was all right for humans, but it needn’t work the other way around. A trace of ammonia to breathe might be as essential to the nibblies as a trace of carbon dioxide to humans, or more SO.) They'd radioed ahead to this effect, so by the time they whirred to a stop there were already several people out- side waiting for them. Chandra Mel- kote left his row of samples and came over to the lift, where Chang Kwei- T’ao, Blanca Moreira, and Judy and Issy Jones were waiting with the nibblies’ air-box. The copter settled onto its skids and the ramp was let down from the door in back. Out of the door came the tan face and stubby body of Ranji Sumer, then the brown face and lanky body of Tim Balch—then two nib- blies, on leashes. The leashes and harnesses seemed unnecessary: the nibblies loped along behind the two men as docilely as if they’d been trained from childhood. The herd off in the forest unanimously stopped grazing to watch. From the moment Sumer and Balch got out of the copter, Judy Jones was calling a steady stream of questions at them. They answered all of them with cheerful, emphatic yeses. Yes, they had plenty of maps made; yes, they had samples of soil and lake- bottom as various as you could want; yes, they had collected the data on thermal updrafts and humidity over forests. The nibblies were loaded into their air-box, where they curled up com- fortably, interfering with each other a little in the cramped space. Then the lift started up. It was simply a platform hung by four cables at the corners; when these were reeled . in it retracted up into the ship. It was kept from swaying excessively, not by any guide rails, but by the cables themselves, which were not really cables, but narrow sheets of a ferromagnetic alloy, bent into the form of cylinders and held in that shape by their own magnetization. Inside the ship, at the top of the shaft, the sheets were demagnetized just below the drums, on which they were being reeled in flat. The next time the lift was lowered, they would be remagnetized as they left the drums, so that the edges would again snap together. The group on the platform reached the top, blinking a little to adjust to the dimness of the ship after the blue morning brightness outside. Chang interrupted Judy’s rapid-fire ques- tioning for the first time: “The nib- blies don’t seem to be conferring. Did they do it at all on their way here?” Balch said, ““Not while we were watching. We didn’t take movies of them in the copter. The one on this side is Rose; she’s from about five degrees north of here. The other one, with the slightly reddish color around connicloooks.conn