Ark of Venus
By Clyde B. Clason
Version 1.0

Young Adult Science Fiction
New York: Alfred A-Knopf, 1955
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 55-8954
© Clyde B. Clason, 1955
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK, PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.
Copyright 1955 by Clyde B. Clason.

Ark of Venus
by Clyde B. Clason

Inside Cover Blurb:
It is A.D. 2135. The Atomic Wars are over, and the world as we know it has been reorganized. All of North America plus the British Isles is now under one government and is known as Nusa. There are only six national governments on earth, the others being Susa, Euro-Russia, Panasia, Africa, and Pacifica. There are no more wars-the Atomic Wars have ended all that, but there is terrific overcrowding. It is imperative that the planets be colonized. Already Earthmen are living on Mars and the Moon, but those colonies are a disappointment. Venus promises better conditions, but all ten of the space ships sent there have been lost. The Nusan government has commissioned Jarvis Roberts to build a thrust-ship which will get through safely. When the Ark of Venus finally takes off, Jarvis Roberts is unable to be aboard, but his eighteen-year-old son Tal goes along as one of the three hundred colonists.
What happens to them on Venus makes a science fiction thriller that once started cannot be put down.

Back of jacket blurb:
'"Attention, everybody!"
"We are about to attempt a landing on Venus! I repeat, a landing on Venus. Here are your instructions:
"First: remove every metallic article from your person. I repeat, every metallic article: coins, knives, keys, pens, pencils - everything that has metal on it. Leave all these articles in your rooms. Then go quietly to the lounge and stand well away from anything that is made of metal. We are expecting a severe electrical disturbance."
That turned out to be the understatement of the twenty-second century.
The first symptom showed up when people's hair began to stand on end. That caused considerable laughter. It wasn't so funny when long sparks crackled from people's fingers. Still, these manifestations of static electricity did not seem particularly dangerous. But in just a little while, the Venusian clouds showed Earth's unwanted tourists what they really could do when they set about it.
Fortunately for the passengers, the deck surface on which they were standing was of a non-conducting plastic. The enormous potential that was accumulating outside the ship induced charges that affected every metal object.
Tables with steel frames became shrouded at the corners with blue flames. Aluminum chairs were silhouetted with the same ghostly jets of light. It was St. Elmo's fire, that strange electrical phenomenon often seen during a severe thunderstorm on high places such as church spires or distant mountain tops. Here, however, it was right in the room. Tongues of hissing flame several inches long leaped from metal tips and protrusions.
Frightening and dangerous as this all was, there was something worse to come. A ball of fire suddenly appeared out of nowhere. It was about ten inches in diameter and blood-red in color, and it floated above their heads as though it were rolling along on an invisible floor. Several women screamed. The fireball exploded with a loud report. More women screamed. Suddenly, every light in the ship went out. The screaming became general.
Like milling sheep, the frightened passengers might have trampled each other to death in blind panic. It did not happen. The strong voice of Miles Telford soared above the screaming women, above the crackling electric flames.
"Quiet, everybody! Let us sing a hymn. 'Rock of ages, cleft for me.
Down, down, plunged the Ark toward the surface of Venus. Would her thrust tubes hold out? Tal didn't know.
From Ark of Venus by Clyde B. Clason

CONTENTS
Venus Is Murder
Aren't Ten Lost Ships Enough?
Cheechako
Guns in the Valley
An Ocean or a Desert?
Wall Around Venus
Lost in the Dark
Sunrise on Venus
Exploring a New World
Down in the Gash
The Land Below
Guk
Through the Forest
The Serpent Worshipers
The Other Spaceship
Steve
Return to the Dove
Timing Is Everything
The Sacrifice

ARK OF VENUS

VENUS IS MURDER

Talman Roberts and Larry Stuart were in the living room of the Stuart home at Virginia Shore watching a newscast on three-dimensional video. Tiny figures materialized inside the transparent two-foot TV cube, dolls bearing banners. The dolls were parading down a street of New Chicago. On their Lilliputian banners were barely visible slogans:

VENUS IS MURDER.
TEN LOST SHIPS ARE ENOUGH.
MOON BUT NOT VENUS.
MARS BUT NOT VENUS.
HALT THE Ark.

"Stupid rot!" Larry Stuart switched off the current, and the dolls dissolved into nothingness. "If chuckle-heads like that had been running things a hundred years ago, we'd never have got to the Moon. We'd never have seen Mars."
"No," Tal agreed absently. "But some of their slogans make a kind of sense. Why do we have to keep on pouring men and materials into Venus? Ten ships are an awful lot to lose."
Larry regarded him with shocked astonishment. "And your father is Jarvis Roberts! The man the government sent up to the Cumchagwa to build the Ark of Venus."
"What's that got to do with it?" Tal asked.
"You don't care about space travel at all. I don't see how you can be his son."
"I'm eighteen years old," Tal answered. "Same age as you are. Do you know how old I was the last tune I saw my father?"
"No," Larry said.
"Thirteen. That was five years ago. I was just a kid then. Now I'm grown up. And I haven't seen him for as much as an hour in any of those five years. He's been on the Amazon. He's gone to the Sahara. He's taken Thrust ships to Mars and the Moon. Now he's up near the North Pole. But he's never once tried to see me. That's the kind of father I have."
"Don't be bitter," Larry advised. "He's taken good care of you."
The boys were interrupted by the peculiar chattering that announced a message on the teleprinter circuit. An orange light flickered on over the wall orifice as the tape started to unreel. Larry walked over to the wall and tore out the paper strip. "It's for you, Tal."
The message read:

TALMAN ROBERTS, CARE OLIVER J. STUART AX-134-896, Virginia Shore, District 393, Nusa. Have interesting plan for your vacation. Fly out to Seattle, and we'll get better acquainted. Pick up your ticket for tomorrow's transcontinental jet at Booth CV-43, Greater New York airport. If you don't see me at Seattle airport, go to the Enrico Fermi. Love, Dad.

"Bad news?" Larry inquired.
Tal handed over the teleprint slip.
"Why, Tal, this is wonderful!" Larry's whole face was shining with excitement. "We'll miss you, of course, but-oh, you lucky devil! Why don't things like this ever happen to me?"
Well, goodby summer, Tal thought. Goodby electro-tennis, swimming, sunbathing, sailing ... all the plans that he and Larry had been making for weeks. Goodby, Virginia Shore! Enter the Cumchagwa.
He could guess his father's interesting plan without any trouble. It was to go north of the Arctic Circle and freeze among yokels and farmers. Those starry-eyed dopes who were building a spaceship! Well, he had to go; at least to Seattle. Interesting plan, indeed!
He packed his bags and said goodby to Larry's parents. This chapter of his life had closed before it had even got itself written. Larry took the big Stuart ground-car to drive him to the local airport, where he just missed a shuttle helicopter and had to wait nearly an hour for the next one. Then it took another hour to get to New York. Air traffic was thick over the city, a swollen giant that included both sides of the Hudson.
While he waited for the slow heli to carry him to the Greater New York airport, Tal tried to reconstruct the past in his mind's eye. It was a game he often played with himself, and he was getting good at it. History had been almost his favorite subject. The history of Nusa, naturally; there wasn't much sense in going back farther than, oh say, one hundred and eighty years ago, just before the Atomic Wars. At that time, New York City had mostly centered around the tiny island of Manhattan. Too bad what had happened to Manhattan during the Atomic Wars! Now Greater New York included northern and central New Jersey, the entire southern part of New York State and most of Connecticut except for the part incorporated in Greater Boston. This, of course, was how you would have to describe it for the benefit of a man of two hundred years ago; nowadays, in this year 2135 a.d., the old state names were nearly meaningless. State governments had been abandoned as being "unnecessary duplication of function" at the time the old United States had relinquished its sovereignty to the newly created nation of Nusa.
It had been a peaceful merger. Nobody wanted any more war after the Atomic Wars had burned themselves out. The capital of Nusa was New Chicago, which was on both sides of the Mississippi River, where cities named Davenport, Rock Island, and Moline had once been situated. (Few people knew where Old Chicago had been, and Tal was not among them.)
Nusa-Northern United States of America-included all of the land that had belonged to the old forty-eight states. It included nations that had been known as Canada, Mexico, and various republics of Central America whose obsolete names no one could be expected to remember. It included that vast northern territory still known as Alaska. In fact, it included the whole of the North American continent. It did not, however, include any of South America. South America was all Susa-Southern United States of America. Some day in the future there might be a merger of Nusa and Susa, but for the present they preferred to go their separate ways.
So he had switched to geography, had he? Well, that was all right; he was good at geography, too. Nusa and Susa were two of the Six Nations-the only national governments existing on Earth. The others were Euro-Russia, Panasia, Africa, and Pacifica. The capital of Eurorussia was Berlin; secondary capitals were Paris and Moscow. It contained all the territory liberated at the close of the Atomic Wars. It included the old USSR and the peninsula (once mistakenly called a continent) of Europe. It did not include the British Isles, which were, rather illogically, a part of Nusa. Eurorussia was a peace-loving nation with a republican form of government.
Panasia, though built upon the ruins of the old Soviet states of India and Red China, was also a peaceful and prosperous republic. Its capital was the mountain city of Lhasa. Pacifica included the Malay States, Burma, Indo-China, Siam, Japan, the continent of Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, and numerous other islands scattered over the Pacific Ocean. Its capital was in Australia, and it was not quite so much of a peace-loving nation as the others. In particular, Pacifica had had a long-standing dispute with Nusa over the sovereignty of certain Mars colonies. So much for Pacifica. Africa was self-explanatory; its capital was Addis Ababa, and any dolt would know where Africa was and what it included. Tal leaned back, feeling well pleased with himself. The feat of recollection had served to pass the time away, and they were now about to land.
The Greater New York airport was considerably north of the old New York City, being located, in fact, in what had once been known as Ulster County. "A county," Tal recited to himself, "is an obsolete political subdivision pertaining to the original forty-eight states of the former United States." He didn't know why the old states had allowed themselves to be chewed up into such tiny areas as counties but for some reason they had all followed that practice. Geography lessons of the twentieth century must have been terrible. But the heli was down, and he could now unstrap his safety belt.
Many towering buildings fringed the vast flat space of the airport, and you had to know your way around or you could waste hours here. Tal, however, was a well-seasoned traveler. He found Booth CV-43 after only fifteen minutes on a rented airport scooter and picked up his ticket for tomorrow morning's transcontinental rocket, non-stop New York to Seattle. There was a message in the envelope with his ticket that a room had been reserved for him at the Airport Hotel. A whole room to himself; that was a real luxury.
It was the usual hotel cubicle, with a bed that lowered from the ceiling and a folding chair that would automatically disappear into the wall when you pulled the cord that brought the bed down. The shower stall was good, however; there were all the dial combinations that a man could possibly want. Tal set the dials to bring him a lukewarm spray with detergent, a tepid rinse, pine scent, and a warm-air dry. After this pleasant bath, he stretched out in a comfortable chair to snatch a few moments of rest. But his thoughts kept reverting to space travel.
When had it all started? A hundred years ago? Two hundred years? Two hundred years was probably too far back. They had rocket spaceships in the late twentieth century, but Tal didn't think they had ever amounted to much. It wasn't until the invention of the Thrust in the middle twenty-first century that Earthlings were really able to get their feet off the ground.
Tal didn't know very much about the Thrust; nobody did except a few highly trained specialists. His father, Jarvis Roberts, was one of them. One of the men who could supervise the construction of spaceships. The ships that had given Earthmen the Moon and Mars to play with. Not that either of them had proved to be worth much, now that they were colonized. Mars was a great disappointment-able to support only about sixty thousand people. As for the Moon-well, a handful of people managed to live there and mine tin and a few other metals that Earth could no longer provide.
But maybe Venus would be different. Venus was almost as large as Earth and had an atmosphere that was believed to be as extensive as, or perhaps even more extensive than, the atmosphere of Earth. From the point of view of distance, Venus was even closer than Mars. Venus was comparatively near to the Sun, but, unlike Mercury, not so close to the Sun that the Sun's gravitational field would be able to overpower the effect of the Thrust. Venus was not definitely known to possess either air or water, but then there might be anything below the perpetual cloudbank that veiled the surface of "Earth's twin sister."
Venus was warm. It was the only one of Earth's eight sister worlds on which life might be expected to flourish. It was the only world offering hope for Earth's surplus millions. Yes, Venus was a natural for colonization. But ten spaceships had set out for there during the eighty-five or so years that had elapsed since the invention of the Thrust. And Venus had never been reached.
Tal lazily flexed his big toe and corrected himself. Venus might have been reached, he conceded. For all he knew, for all anyone knew, every one of the ten ships might have made a successful landing. But not one ship had ever returned from below the silvery clouds nor had a single one sent a radio message to announce a landing. Radio communication with the Moon, with Mars, was an everyday routine but not a single radio signal had ever pierced the clouds of Venus.
Tal's mind refused to dwell upon the mystery any longer. It wasn't his concern, anyway. Maybe Venus was murder, as some of the banners carried by the protesting paraders had stated, but why should he care? He wasn't going there. He was going to zip on his clothes, get some dinner, and then see what sort of entertainment the Airport Hotel offered. Tomorrow would bring the meeting with his almost unknown father. He rather dreaded that meeting, for some reason.
* * *
But when he left the transcontinental rocket at Seattle, he wasn't dreading it at all. A tall, broad-shouldered man was waving to him. There was no mistaking the craglike features of Jarvis Roberts.
"Son! Son!" The big man was hugging him as though he never intended to let go. "It's good to see you again."
"It's good to see you, too."
"I had to come to Seattle to make sure that the last shipment of instruments for the Ark gets off properly. There's been a little sabotage; nothing serious, but I felt I had to come down here. Then I thought maybe you wouldn't mind flying out to meet me. After all, it's only one continent away."
"No, dad, I didn't mind."
"Tal, you're nearly as tall as I am! Not so much meat yet, but that will come. Hear you're quite a whiz at electrotennis."
He wants to be friends, Tal thought with surprise. He really does. And I thought he didn't like me! But he's not going to talk me into going up to the Cumchagwa. The line's got to be drawn somewhere.
His father, however, displayed no intention of talking his son into doing anything. He lapsed into an embarrassed silence as they climbed into a helicab. Tal didn't say much either. He couldn't think of any subject that wouldn't lead to the spaceship in the Cumchagwa Valley.
Their cab flew them to the roof of the Enrico Fermi, a hotel named after a pioneer atomic scientist of two centuries ago. It was an imposing circular tower: mostly buildersglas with a spiral ramp circling down from the roof to about the third floor. After seeing that Tal's bags were properly transferred to the elevator, father and son walked down the ramp to the door of Jarvis Roberts's room. It was wedge-shaped, with the broad part of the wedge at the glass wall by the ramp. There were two ceiling beds and two chairs, a shower cabinet, and a really deluxe meal panel. Tal read the menu plate and saw that you could dial almost any combination of food that anyone could think of. For the moment, however, he wasn't hungry.
Jarvis Roberts was opening a drawer of the built-in wardrobe. He brought out a tissue-wrapped parcel. "Didn't you have an eighteenth birthday not too long ago, son?"
"Gee, dad, thanks!"
It was a calendar-watch-one of the finest timepieces that Tal had ever seen. The natural movements of your body were enough to keep it going forever. It was waterproof and shockproof and magneticproof. The many dials indicated not only seconds, minutes, and hours but days, weeks, months, and years. Tal strapped it on his wrist and immediately began to set the dials. He was amused to learn that the correct time here was in advance of the hour the rocket had blasted off from New York. Pacific time was three hours behind Eastern time, and the rocket only took two hours to make the trip. So you arrived an hour before you left, which was interesting to think about. But his father was waiting expectantly, and Tal never forgot his manners for very long.
"Dad, it's a wonderful present. I've always wanted a watch like this."
Jarvis chuckled. "I did, too, when I was your age. Something to eat or drink?"
Tal shook his head and continued to set the dials from the master calendar-clock on the wall.
"Son, we haven't seen too much of each other, have we? I'd like to have you come up to the Cumchagwa and stay there with me until the Ark thrusts off for Venus. That will be a real experience, won't it?"
Tal felt at a disadvantage. With his father's expensive present on his wrist, he could hardly be so ungrateful as to say "I don't want to go there with you." On the other hand, it would mean weeks in the desolate arctic with nobody but a bunch of hick farmers to talk to. What a way to spend a summer!
He stalled for time to make up his mind.
"I don't see why this spaceship has to be built way up there. The government's paying most of the bills, isn't it? Then why do they build it miles beyond civilization?"
Jarvis had filled a pipe with tobacco-a habit of adult males that had persisted for over five centuries. He brought a small metal cylinder from his pocket and touched a stud. A tiny blue flame jetted out to lick at the tobacco in the bowl of the pipe.
"Good question, son. It's a cooperative project. True, the government is supplying the materials and a few engineers like me to see that things go together right. But most of the manpower comes from the Cumchagwa."
"What can a bunch of farmers know about spaceships?"
"You'd be surprised. A farmer has to be a good mechanic, especially when he lives north of the Arctic Circle, where there aren't many service shops."
"Why do these farmers want to go to Venus?"
"The old Malthusian law has caught up with them."
"The one about the population growing by geometrical progression while the food resources grow by arithmetical progression?"
"That's it. First propounded back in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century by the Reverend T. R. Malthus. For a long time-a very long time, over two centuries-it looked as if there were nothing to it. Technological advances came along so fast that Earth had no trouble in feeding everyone even though the birthrate continued along an exponential curve. Besides, the Atomic Wars killed off lots of people and that kept growth down-for a while. But now, after a hundred and fifty years of world peace, Earth is bursting at all her seams. We've watered the Sahara Desert and tamed the rain forests of the Amazon and drained the fever swamps of Africa and converted the jungles of Panasia and Pacifica into rice farms. Those places are now supporting all the people they can support.
"Here, in Nusa, we've got farms running as far north as anything will grow. The Cumchagwa is far beyond the general limit. It's a sheltered valley, and they were able to heat it. But there's no room to expand. Fifty years ago, when the valley was closed to settlement, the population was five hundred, and everybody had plenty. Now they've got over a thousand people, and they can't increase production because there's no more cultivable land. They can't emigrate because there's no place to go. Every other spot on Earth is in the same fix.
"But the people up in the Cumchagwa have still got the old pioneer spirit that seems to be lacking elsewhere in Nusa. When the government, five years ago, offered to help construct spaceships for emigration to Venus, the Cumchagwa was the only area that responded. That's why the ship is being built above the Arctic Circle."
"I see," Tal said, carried away in spite of himself. "Quite a heroic crew. But what happened to the other ten spaceships?"
Jarvis knocked the ashes from his pipe into the wall waste chute. "I don't know and nobody else does. But I can tell you this: unless Venus is colonized successfully, you can look for serious trouble on Earth within a few decades. War, even. When a kettle boils, the steam has either got to go up the spout or blow the kettle apart. Venus is the only spout there is."
"I don't understand," Tal commented. "How many passengers are going on the Ark of Venus? Three hundred? That would be like pulling one drop of water out of the ocean. Even if they got there safely-"
"If they got there and signaled us," Jarvis interrupted, "there would be a new frontier waiting to be conquered. That would restore hope. The Six Nations would no longer be sitting around like dogs in a circle waiting to snap at each other's throats. Venus would keep us all occupied. There'd be-"
He broke off as a knock sounded on the inner door. Tal, being closest, got up from his chair. When he opened the door, however, there was nobody in the circular corridor. A slip of paper was lying on the floor. Picking it up, Tal read in printed capitals:

"ROBERTS: YOU'RE NOT WANTED IN THE CUMCHAGWA. DON'T GO BACK IF YOU WANT TO KEEP ON LIVING."

Tal read it twice, then handed it to his father. While the elder Roberts scanned the brief message, Tal decided what he was going to do. The only possible thing a decent son could do.

AREN'T TEN LOST SHIPS ENOUGH?

South-central Alaska, as Tal was viewing it from the Seattle-Fairbanks jet liner, was a jumble of ice fields and snow-capped peaks. Fertile green farmlands occupied every possible valley. Alaska's wealth was in her soil. Two hundred years ago, almost no farms had existed here, and the total population of this huge northern territory - one-fifth the area of the entire old United States - had been no more than sixty thousand persons, including the almost legendary Indians and Eskimos. Today Alaska had over a hundred million acres under cultivation and supported a population of thirty million.
Tal's father had been reclining against the pneumatic cushion of the aisle seat, snatching a cat nap while his son studied the scenic panorama through the window. But now he opened his eyes, and Tal spoke to him.
"That note, dad. Who is it doesn't want you to come back to the Cumchagwa? You never did say."
"Several people would be glad to see the last of me up there." The older man leaned back to conform to the contour of the body-molded plastic cushion. "The most vocal, though, is a character named Asa Painter." Jarvis chuckled. "I can't quite take him seriously."
"Did he write that note?"
"Perhaps. He certainly didn't deliver it, at least not in person. As far as I know, he's still up in the Cumchagwa trying to stir up trouble."
"Who did deliver it, do you suppose?"
"One of his sympathizers, maybe. He has them scattered all over Nusa. They even staged a parade in New Chicago a week or so ago."
"I saw it on a newscast," Tal recalled. "Isn't there something you can do about it, dad? After all, when your life is in danger-"
"Threatened men live long," Jarvis interrupted with a smile. "Don't worry. I'll stick around to see your children, son."
"What's he like, dad?"
"Who? Asa Painter? Looks like Blackbeard the Pirate. All front. Inside he's just another little man trying to be a big one. He's been jealous of Miles Telford all his life. You know who Miles is?"
"Yes. The leader of the group who are building the spaceship. The ones who are going to Venus."
"And my good friend. Miles has been mayor of the Cumchagwa for twenty-four years, which means that he's won twelve elections. Asa ran against him in at least half of those elections and got licked every time. That's hard for a certain type of man to stomach."
"But why does he threaten you? You had nothing to do with the elections."
"True, of course. But Miles is backing the Ark of Venus, and I'm in charge of building it. That's enough to make me one of Asa's targets. Oh, well! Ever see so many mountains in your life?"
"No, I never did."
"It's the great Alaska Range. We fly over it nearly all the way to Fairbanks. Over 300 miles of peaks to cross. Fairbanks is an up and coming town. You'll like it."
Tal did like Fairbanks, where they spent the night between planes. Sprawling between the Chena and the Tanana rivers, this was a flourishing city of over two million. It had miles upon miles of office and apartment buildings, three levels of streets (with solar-powered rolling walks at each level), hotels as modern as those of Greater New York or Seattle, and shops where you could buy just about anything to be found elsewhere in Nusa.
The plane they had to take in the morning was an antiquated ramjet. She couldn't have done 700 in her best days-and those were far in the past, before the invention of the pneumatic seat cushions that automatically adjusted to the shape of your body. This old crate had stiff, uncomfortable spring seats upholstered with green fabric. Tal had never flown under such primitive conditions. Once in the air, however, he forgot his discomfort. Up where they were flying, the Yukon was at its northernmost part, and when you crossed it you also crossed the Arctic Circle. The Cumchagwa's latitude of nearly 69° put it well above the Arctic Circle, and its longitude of over 160° west put it in a tune zone an hour behind Fairbanks, six hours behind Greater New York. They had traveled a quarter of the way around the world, Tal mused, as his father pointed out their destination below.
* * *
The old ramjet glided in on her wings; she didn't come to a fast stop by means of rocket blast the way the big liners did. Consequently, Tal had plenty of time to look about while they were landing. The Cumchagwa was a broad, flat valley sandwiched between rows of jagged white peaks, and it looked like all the other farming country he had been glimpsing during the past two days. Beehive-shaped dwellings were scattered around the cultivated plots, and a small cluster of low buildings marked the site of the village at one end of the valley. They were landing at the opposite end, however, and there was-yes, it really was the Ark of Venus. You couldn't mistake that gigantic horizontal cylinder; it gleamed like ten thousand mirrors even under the dull arctic sun.
About twenty people were waiting to meet them at the edge of the tiny airport. Men and women, boys and girls-a typical group of farm families. The women wore black dresses and bonnets, and the men wore black suits and black hats.
Tal himself had on the conventional garb of civilized Nusa, the sort of combination that millions of young men his age were wearing: a white artosilk shirt open at the neck, peacock-blue slacks, a white sport jacket, and a scarlet cummerbund. Nothing wrong with these garments, but, there was no getting around it, up here they just weren't hi fashion. Even his father was wearing dark clothing. Tal began to feel rather conspicuous.
Tal's father had been cornered by one of the adult males. Tal listened to the conversation for a few seconds, and then he heard his own name called.
"Tal, I want you to meet Miles Telford. This is my boy, Miles."
The leader of the Venusian expedition had a much heartier handclasp than Tal was accustomed to receiving. He was a bit chunky, but looked like a man born to be a leader. His face didn't show much humor, but there was nothing weak or irresolute about it.
"And Mrs. Telford."
One of the black-gowned women, rather on the plump side, made the customary remarks that women make when they are being introduced to someone. Tal was polite and listened. He heard her say: "Your father tells me you are eighteen, Talman."
"Yes, Mrs. Telford."
"My son is nineteen. You boys should have some good times together. Ben, come over here, dear. I want you to meet Talman Roberts."
Ben was chunky, like his father. He had light hair, gray eyes, a ruddy complexion, and a big square chin. In addition to his black coat and trousers, he was wearing a wool plaid shirt.
"Pleased to meet you, Talman."
"Make it Tal, please. Nice to know you, Ben."
"You're staying with us, you know," said Mrs. Telford.
"And you'll bunk in with me," added Ben.
"Thanks, Ben, but I wouldn't want to put you to any trouble."
"No trouble at all for any of us," Mrs. Telford broke in.
Finally, the introductions completed, they all walked over to the Telford groundcar, an antediluvian vehicle that would have been retired on pension at least five years ago in any self-respecting city of Nusa. Ben took the driver's seat, and Tal climbed in beside him. As they rode along, Tal noticed a strange sight in the fields beside the road.
"What are all those pipes sticking out of the ground?" he asked.
"They heat the soil." Ben seemed pleased to be able to show off. "See how the vertical pipes are connected together by horizontal pipes about six inches from ground level? Each of the verticals is capped at the bottom-down underground-by a plug with little holes in it. We force water through those holes under pressure, and it percolates up through the soil. Keeps the ground moist and at a temperature above freezing."
Tal found himself interested in the pipe networks. "The water is delivered in those big headers, I suppose?"
"That's right. There's one to serve each field."
"Where does the water come from?"
"From the pumping station. Next to the power house. That's out of town, on a hill overlooking the valley." Ben gestured toward the mountain range at his left. "You can see it if you look closely."
"What kind of power do you have?"
"Atomic. The sun doesn't have enough force up here for a solar installation."
"Nothing wrong with atomic power," said Tal.
"Not a thing. Good, old reliable method. We couldn't live without it up here."
"How do you keep your soil pipes from freezing during the winter?"
"Run steam through them. We also use steam from the power plant to heat our houses."
"Does it get cold here in the winter?" Tal wanted to know.
"A hundred below!" Ben made a pretense of shivering. "Outside the valley, that is. We're pretty sheltered here, and besides the soil heat helps keep the temperature up. It rarely gets under fifty below."
"That's still cold."
"Oh, we're used to it. It's not too warm, even in the summer. That's why we all wear black. Maximum heat absorption. Nothing like black wool for warmth."
"The early polar explorers wore furs, I believe."
"Oh, furs!" Ben shrugged his shoulders. "There's hardly a fur-bearing mammal left in the world. You know that."
Tal didn't know it but kept quiet. Ben seemed well informed on a variety of topics. Probably had nothing to do during all the long, dark arctic winter but look at microfilm. A gay life! No wonder so many of these yokels were eager to go to Venus.
"Guess I'll have to buy some black duds then. And a shirt like yours, Ben. Do they have stores up here?"
Ben pointed toward the town at the far end of the valley. "You can get anything you want. Well, most anything. I'll run you in later if you like. We're almost home now." He turned off the road into a driveway. "Here we are, Tal. Welcome to the Telford igloo."
"Igloo?" Tal repeated, looking at the beehive-shaped house. It was a word he had never heard before.
"Igloos were huts that the old Eskimos used to make out of snow blocks. Ours have the same general shape." Ben opened the back door to help his mother down from the car. "Just one of our valley jokes."
Tal was inspecting the farm house. It was a dome of dull-finished plastic-black, naturally, to insure maximum heat absorption. Not very attractive from outside. The front door was an airlock, and the windows were sealed shut permanently. They must have an air purifier. A smaller black dome-the garage-stood next to the big one and was joined to it by a short corridor.
The airlock wasn't necessary in the summertime so they entered the igloo just as you would a dwelling back home. Inside, the rooms were lighted by fluorescent walls, a trick of modern illumination that Tal hadn't expected to find up here. It was a small house, but at that there was more space than most families had back in the cities of Nusa. Downstairs were the kitchen, bathroom, living room; upstairs three tiny bedrooms. The largest had a double bed for the Telfords. Tal's father had the guest room, also with a double bed, and the third room was Ben's. It had upper and lower bunks, and a table that held a large microfilm projector. As Tal had surmised, there was a very extensive library of film cans-enough cans to outlast even an arctic winter. There was also an automatic film selector.
Ben had carried upstairs both of the bags that Tal had brought with him from Seattle. "Your choice of bunks," he said. "Upper or lower."
"Upper," Tal said, beginning to feel part of the family.
* * *
A medley of voices drifted up from the living room, and the boys went downstairs again. Ben's parents were there with Tal's father and a man whom Tal had never seen before but recognized at once from the description his father had supplied. Blackboard the Pirate was the perfect name for him.
Asa Painter's bushy black beard was the largest Tal had ever seen. Beards weren't fashionable in the Nusa cities, and they didn't seem to be common up here. The Telford men and most of the fellows he had seen at the airport had been clean-shaven. Besides his beard, Painter had a booming bass voice, and he was engaged in exercising it.
"I warn you, Miles Telford," he was bellowing, "that what you're doing is wrong. Sinful wrong. To lead these lambs-" he broke off as he saw the boys entering the room.
" 'Lo, Ben. Who's your friend? Young Roberts, glad to know you. You look like you had a good head on your shoulders. We can use a few good heads in this space-struck valley."
When Tal took a dislike to someone, he turned formally polite. "I have been in this valley almost an hour, Mr. Painter. I know nothing about the mental condition of its inhabitants-any more than I know about yours."
Blackbeard glowered at him. "What are you trying to say?"
"I'm not trying. I'm saying it. In Seattle, my father's life was threatened if he returned here. Are you responsible for that threat being delivered?"
"Insolent cub!" Blackbeard roared.
"He's got a point, though," Tal's father contributed in a low-pitched drawl. "It's an interesting question, Asa."
"I couldn't deliver any message to you in Seattle, could I? I haven't been out of the Cumchagwa."
"You have friends in Seattle. Oh well. I don't intend to get into an argument about it. Naturally, I expect you to deny that you threatened my life." Tal's father had still not raised his voice. "I didn't consider that piece of childishness any great compliment to me. Whatever made you think I could be scared that easily?"
This was a father to be proud of. Tal walked across the room and laid his hand on his father's arm to show he was with him, no matter what.
"I don't make threats," Asa Painter said. "I'm not making any now. But there are a lot of people in this, valley don't like the thing you're building. They know what's going to happen to it, and they feel it ought to be stopped."
"It won't be stopped," asserted Tal's father. "The Ark will thrust off for Venus on the day scheduled."
"The three hundred brave souls who want to take their chances with Venus are going to go there," Ben's father added. "There's nothing your crowd can do to stop us, Asa."
"You're making a terrible mistake, Miles." Painter's deep voice swung into a preacher's measured cadences. "Leading three hundred lambs to the slaughter. Three hundred trusting lambs who follow you blindly. Your own son, your own wife!"
"It was a choice we all made of our own free will." In contrast to Painter's vehemence, Mrs. Telford's contralto was oddly soothing. "We agreed to trust ourselves to God's mercy."
"You silly fools! God doesn't want you to land. 'Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further.' Venus is out of bounds."
"You've never been there," Ben said.
"Young idiot! Aren't ten lost ships enough to convince you? I tell you there's a wall around Venus. You'll never see its surface."
"The Ark will take the risk, Asa," Miles Telford answered quietly.

CHEECHAKO

An uncomfortable silence lingered in the Telford living room after Asa Painter had taken his departure. Tal's father was the first to break it.
"Well, folks, I think I'll run on up to the construction site. Like to take a guided tour of a spaceship, Tal?"
"Who wouldn't?"
They walked through a door from the kitchen, which opened on the short corridor connecting with the adjacent dome. The ceiling lights of the garage came on automatically as they walked in. Inside were two groundcars: the Telfords' ancient vehicle and one only slightly more modern, which was owned by Tal's father.
"Garage is heated by the same central station steam that warms the house," Mr. Roberts explained, stepping into the driver's seat. "Radiant heat from pipes embedded in the floor slab. Cars have to be kept warm here in the wintertime, or the oil will freeze solid."
He pressed a button on the dashboard of the car which beamed a radio impulse toward the garage door-motor. The heavy double door lifted and rolled back against the ceiling of the dome. When they had backed out, Tal's father pressed the same button on the dash and the door came back down.
"Dad, I was certainly proud of the way you told off Asa Painter," Tal remarked as they swung into the highway.
"I was proud of you, too, son. For the same reason."
"He can't do anything, can he? How much influence does he have?"
"He heads a strong minority party, I'll have to admit. At least two hundred, perhaps more. A fanatic can always command a following."
"Suppose his gang tries to destroy the spaceship?"
"We keep it well guarded. But I don't think any such attempt is likely. The people up here are mostly a peaceful lot."
"Farmers!" Tal snorted. His father glanced toward him in surprise.
"What's wrong with being a farmer, Tal?"
"Nothing I guess." Tal shrugged. "I just wouldn't want to be like Ben Telford."
"If Ben ends up as a farmer, it will be on Venus. Ben's got a pretty important job assigned to him with the Ark. He's going to be a dove."
"A dove?" Tal echoed.
His father smiled. "Our little private joke. In the story of the original ark, Captain Noah sent forth a dove to see if there was any spot of land on which his people could live. The doves that the Ark of Venus sends forth will be rocket scouting planes. We've named them Dove I and Dove II. Ben's the pilot of Dove I."
"Ben fly a rocket!" Tal exclaimed incredulously.
"He can do practically anything with a rocket. Ben's one of the greatest natural fliers I ever saw. Get him to take you up sometime."
Jarvis Roberts turned his full attention back to the road, leaving Tal alone with his thoughts. They weren't very pleasant. He, Tal, would give his eye-teeth for a chance to pilot a rocket plane just once. So far he'd never been allowed to touch one. But this hick, this yokel, this rube, this-this farmer could take up a rocket whenever he felt like it. Ben must be a good flier, Tal conceded; his father could hardly be wrong on a question like that.
* * *
The ship was big. That was Tal's first impression of it. It was as long as a city block, as spacious as one of the old ocean-going cities they used to float during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though it tapered slightly fore and aft, it was by no means the streamlined cigar that cartoonists were fond of drawing to represent spaceships. Streamlining would be a mere waste of space; the Thrust took off so gradually that air resistance would be negligible. At the bottom of the vast horizontal cylinder, the row of L-shaped Thrust tubes ran the full length of the ship. There would be a similar row of tubes on the opposite side. Two rows of bent pipes-not overly big pipes at that-would suffice to lift this monster. It seemed like an utter impossibility, but Tal knew the tubes would do their job. The Thrust field had never been known to fail.
Five men and three women were grimly marching back and forth in front of the gangway leading to the ship's airlock. They carried hand-lettered signs. Mostly the same slogans borne by the paraders of New Chicago: "Venus is murder," "Halt the Ark," and so on. There was one new one, now: "Roberts beware."
"Same old clientele!" Tal's father surveyed the sullen faces surrounding them and grinned. "Have a good time, boys and girls."
"Murder ship!" they shouted in unison. "Death trap."
Their hatred of his father hovered in the air like a tangible force. Tal shivered, and it had nothing to do with the arctic chill or his own thin clothing. But he forgot about the picket line the instant they had passed through the airlock.
That ship was a marvel of engineering. All of its lines had the strong, clean beauty of function. To visualize it correctly, you had to think of a big cylinder sliced crosswise into four areas-no, you had to say volumes. Volume I was the bridge; Volume II passengers; Volume III storage; and Volume IV engines.
The bridge, of course, was in the ship's nose, where a vast plastic dome provided a full 180-degree view of the heavens. The transparent plastic was so clear it was almost invisible, and yet it was double-walled like the steel hull to guard against punctures by meteors. The plastic had the same Brinell hardness of the hull steel. The entire hull might have been made from that plastic except that it was so frightfully expensive.
A long, low wall, dwarfed completely by the enormous observation dome, displayed the dials of hundreds of control instruments. Behind the instrument panel there were three desks: left and right for pilots, center for the navigator. Both pilots were needed during thrust-off and landing, but in space piloting was necessary only in emergencies. If the stars showed they were off course, then the navigator would signal to one of the pilots to correct with the auxiliary stern rockets. (The Thrust would be almost useless in space.)
It was the responsibility of the navigator to compare the star maps with what he was actually seeing in the heavens. Since someone had to be on duty at the navigator's central desk all of the time, the two pilots would take turns in relieving the navigator. The star maps were being laboriously plotted by astronomers at observatories on both Earth and the Moon. There was a separate map for every hour of the journey-some 3,600 in all.
The most important man on board was the executive officer, who was responsible for everything but piloting and navigation. He and the radio officer occupied small cubicles behind the desks of the pilots and navigator. These five-plus three technicians to watch the engine room-were all the crew needed to bring the mammoth vessel the long way to Venus.
A steel bulkhead separated the bridge from Volume II, the space for the passengers. In this part of the ship, the construction was rather complicated. Rings of roomettes hugged the wall all the way around the big cylinder. If you thought of this portion of the ship as a doughnut, the roomettes were in the eatable part. Actually, it was a doughnut within a doughnut because there were two rings of roomettes with a corridor between them.
From the main deck in the middle of the ship, on which Tal and his father were now standing, the roomettes seemed to be running up the curved wall and across the ceiling. It wouldn't be ceiling, though, once the ship had reached free fall and turned on her artificial grav units. Or would it? Tal had to stop and think a while about that. All of the roomettes would be ceiling then because the gravitational force would be exerted toward the central deck, the one on which he was now standing.
Spaceships hadn't always been like this. To the pioneer designers, the only form of artificial gravity available had been centrifugal force, produced by spinning the entire ship. Centrifugal force acted outwardly, so that the attraction was always toward the wall of the ship and the center was "up." Now it wasn't necessary to spin the ship, and the direction of gravity could be reversed. When the Ark got underway, the roomettes would be "up" all the way around the cylindrical wall, and "bottom" would be in the center of the ship, on the deck on which Tal was now standing.
Each of the roomettes was for two passengers. It contained upper and lower berths and simple toilet facilities. To Tal, it looked as though some passengers were going to have a difficult job climbing up to their bunks and strapping themselves in prior to thrust-off. On the whole, he thought, space travel seemed more suited to spiders (who thought nothing of walking up vertical walls or traveling upside-down across ceilings) than to human beings.
The central deck on which they were now standing served as the floor of the ship's lounge, a large hall with a great many permanently attached easy chairs in which passengers could relax or read microfilm or watch third-dimensional picture recordings shaping in the transparent cubes or even TV programs as long as they could be satisfactorily relayed from Earthly channels. For the more actively inclined, there were games like table electrotennis, which at least had the merit of not taking up much room. Tal conceded that you couldn't have a full-scale electrotennis court on a spaceship. And amusements of some kind were certainly necessary on a journey expected to last five months.
Beneath the deck of the lounge was a second lounge hall for the cafeteria-style dining room and kitchen. Here things were really mixed up. To visualize it properly, you would have to imagine an upside-down room under the floor at your feet. The underneath part of the floor would not be the ceiling of the lower room. Rather, it would be the floor of the room underneath.
The dining room really did look weird since its tables, chairs, and serving counters seemed to be growing down from the ceiling like stalactites in a limestone cavern. In space flight, however, the present ceiling would be "floor" and things would straighten out. Except one thing. It certainly would be confusing, Tal mused, to descend from lounge to dining room (or vice versa) and suddenly find yourself upside-down. That sort of thing would take a lot of getting used to.
A thick concrete partition separated the passenger quarters from Volume III, where there was plenty of room for storage. The ship had to carry not only enough food to last three hundred people for a year or so but also enough air and water to last the same length of time. It had to carry agricultural implements, heavy machinery, structural steel, pipes and pipe fittings, a bounteous supply of basic chemicals, fertilizers, and explosives. It was impossible, Tal's father informed him, for any one man to name all the things that were being loaded onto the Ark. Twenty stores clerks, each armed with a long list, had been busy for months checking off various items as they were ordered, were reported shipped, were received at the spaceship airport, were placed in the storage sheds and, finally, were actually loaded in their places aboard ship.
Tal wanted to see the scout fliers, the two "doves". of this twenty-second century Ark. However, they were not aboard yet. The pilots, including Ben, kept them outside to practice with until just before thrust-off day, he was told.
The storage volume also held the animal pens-it was not for nothing that this ship had been named the Ark-and well-equipped laboratories where indispensable research work could be done on the atmosphere, soil, mineral, and plant specimens of Venus.
Volume IV contained the engine room. This aft section of the ship was separated from the storage volume by a thick concrete partition, in the middle of which a six-inch lead plate was embedded. The engine room, almost wholly automatic in operation, was to be entered only in conditions of emergency and, by any one man, for very brief periods only. Entrance was through a circular door, no bigger in diameter than a manhole cover but as massive as the door of a bank vault. At present no hard radiation was being generated, and so Tal was allowed to enter and look around. He found the strange vertical Thrust engines very bewildering. He simply couldn't understand how those tall cones were meant to function.
"Dad, what's the principle behind the Thrust? How do those engines operate?"
"Two really hard questions, son. I could answer them better if you had a couple of years of nucleonics engineering tucked away in your head. Those cones aren't really engines at all-not as you and most people understand the meaning of the word. More like transformers-that's not a good analogy either. The basic nature of the Thrust is not electromagnetic. Call them converters, and that's about as close as you can come."
He did his best to explain, but Tal lost most of it. He did grasp a few things. The basic energy was derived from compact atomic piles, fueled by specifically "cooked" radio-isotopes. The piles delivered hard gamma radiation, which was absorbed by the transformer-like "engines" and converted into a force field at the bottom part of the ship. This field, distributed and directed by the twin rows of Thrust tubes, acted in repulsion against a gravitational field, causing the ship to rise. And it would go straight up, in the same horizontal position in which it was now resting, instead of ascending vertically as a rocket ship would have to do. The principle of the Thrust was entirely different from that of a rocket.
The Thrust had to act against a gravitational field of planetary-or at least moon-strength at comparatively short distances. In interplanetary space, it was almost useless since the only thing to push against was the gravitational field of the sun-tremendous, surely, but far away. A rocket would work anywhere since it was propelled forward by the high-velocity jet ejected in the rearward direction. But a rocket had to burn up most of its mass in order to escape from a strong gravitational field.
"Rocket ships worked in principle," Tal's father explained, "but they were too cumbersome and expensive to get us off Earth. Only one manned rocket ever achieved escape velocity. It was a three-stage affair, built just before the Atomic Wars. It stood as high as a forty-story building, cost billions to build, and burned up millions of dollars worth of fuel. When the big rocket had used up its fuel, the empty shell dropped off and a second rocket took over, to boost up the velocity. The empty shell of that dropped off, too, leaving rocket number 3 to continue all alone. The third stage did reach escape velocity, but it was only big enough to carry one passenger. Poor Jim Whitney! He was supposed to circle the Moon and return, but he could only carry out the first part of the assignment. His rocket was still orbiting the Moon by the time the first Thrust ships got there sixty years later. Jim Whitney was a victim to the prevailing delusion of his time -that to build a successful rocket ship all you had to do was to pour enough money and man-hours into it."
"We use rocket engines on Earth, though."
"I should say we do, and we couldn't get along without them. For a short hop-say New York to Seattle- there's nothing like a rocket plane. Thrust engines require a vessel the size of the Ark because of their weight and the amount of heavy shielding. It wouldn't be economical to build spaceships to do the job of a rocket liner. Tal, there are a few things I simply have to see about. Do you want to take the car and drive yourself back to the Telfords'?"
"I think I'll go into town first. I need some different clothing."
"Thought you'd come around to that," his father observed. "Drop into Proctor's and pick out what you want. Charge it to me."
* * *
The picketers were still marching as Tal emerged from the spaceship. This tune he received their concentrated attention.
"Look at the Cheechako."
"Blue pants he wears."
"Red shoes."
"A red sash like a little girl."
"Cheechako!" they taunted in unison. Their mocking laughter followed him all the way to the parking lot.
Tal climbed in the groundcar boiling mad. He wondered what a Cheechako was. Something very nasty no doubt. The more he thought about that gang, the madder he got. He, Talman Roberts, wasn't used to being insulted, and he was even less accustomed to taking insults lying down. He wondered what had made him walk away from the picket line. The wisest thing to do, probably, but there were times when you didn't want to act wisely. This was one of them.
The town was at the far end of the valley, some twenty-five or thirty miles from the spaceship. Not much of a town. One street, one block long. The tallest building was a big grain elevator. Some warehouses. Two or three stores. Proctor's General Store was by far the largest. Tal parked the car and went into the shed-like structure.
It was the strangest store he had ever seen. The front part was devoted to farm implements of every description-there were even three or four big tractors. Back of these were shelves of canned goods and refrigerated cabinets for frozen foods. The clothing department was toward the rear, presided over by a genial old duffer with a potbelly and a drooping walrus mustache. Tal tried on a black wool suit-scratchy and uncomfortable, but a perfect fit-and picked out a dark-blue wool shirt. At the storekeeper's suggestion, he also replaced his russet lounge slippers with a pair of stout black plastic shoes-farmers' shoes. He winced at the combined effect of all these hideous garments when he saw himself in the full-length mirror.
The storekeeper beamed approval. "Now you don't look like a Cheechako."
"Don't call me that," Tal snapped.
The man looked first surprised, then apologetic. "Sorry, son."
Tal didn't enjoy being called "son" either-at least not by strangers-but he didn't see any point in jumping down the man's throat again. "Charge everything to Jarvis Roberts," he directed and left the store.
The gas pressure of the car seemed low, so he stopped at the local service station to have four refill cylinders installed. Like all ground vehicles, the car ran on compressed hydrocarbons, and its refill cylinders would last for quite a while.
He drove back toward the spaceship. "I've got a little unfinished business to attend to," he told himself. As he drew near to the Telford home, however, he decided to drop in and look up Ben. It wouldn't hurt to have more information first.
Ben was no longer in the north field. Tal found him in the garage. He had his coat off and his sleeves rolled up while he tinkered with the combusion chamber of the ancient Telford vehicle. There was grease all over his hands.
"Did you like the Ark?"
"Very much." Tal was in no mood for casual conversation. "Ben, what's a Cheechako?"
Ben finished tightening a nut with an open-end wrench before he answered. "Fellows picketing the ship call you that?"
Tal nodded, for some reason reluctant to admit it.
"Well, don't get excited." Ben carefully wiped his hands on a hunk of waste. "It's just an old Alaska word for tenderfoot."
"It was the way they said it."
"I know. Asa's crowd can get under your skin. But they're not worth bothering about."
"They can't call me names."
"Don't be a hothead." Ben slammed down the hood with a bang. "Won't get you anywhere."
"Would you take it from them?"
"Sure," Ben said. "I've taken worse than that. Names can't hurt me."
"I'm not yellow," Tal told him with deliberate intent. "Press the beam button, will you? I want to get out of here."
Ben complied silently. "Not even enough spirit to get mad," thought Tal with contempt. The garage door lifted, and he stalked through the opening. He got into the car without once looking behind him.
* * *
The same eight characters were there at the spaceship, still marching back and forth with their silly signs. Tal walked up to the man who carried the "Roberts beware" banner.
"Do I look like a Cheechako now?" he demanded.
"Dressing like a man," the fellow sneered, "doesn't make you one."
"Does this?" asked Tal and knocked him down. Then he peeled off his coat and waited.
The fellow got up spitting blood. "I'll cut your heart out for that."
"Come on and try," Tal taunted. The next few minutes were busy ones.
The fellow was slow and uncoordinated, while Tal wove in and out with the easy grace of a trained athlete. He had no trouble in placing his punches where he wanted them, but they didn't seem to be getting fast results. This clown was built like a rock. Tal's knuckles were sore from punching him, and the fellow was still on his feet. But both of his eyes were swollen, and blood was streaming down from his nostrils. Tal himself was unmarked. "Just a question of time," he was thinking when one of the others tripped him.
He fell flat on his face, and the man he was fighting kicked him in the side. They played it dirty all right. Tal tried to rise and was kicked again. Nice playmates! Four more kicks and then something happened. He was allowed to hoist himself painfully from the ground. Immediately he saw why the kicks had ceased. The man who had been doing the kicking was lying on the ground himself, knocked out cold! And-of all people-Ben Telford was standing over him with both fists raised.
"Dirty cowards!" Ben shouted. "Trip a man and then kick him when he's down. How low can you get? Tal, you all right?"
"Sure," Tal answered. His side was paining him, but he could stand that. "I've still got some unfinished business."
"Son," said one of the picketers, "you've come to the right shop if you're looking for a fight. That goes for you, too, Telford."
"Stand back to back," Ben advised.
"Okay," Tal agreed. "We'll take anything these clowns can deliver."
The three women kept out of it (except vocally), and the man Ben had knocked out had no further interest in the proceedings. That still left four. Four men against two boys. But Ben Telford wasn't built like a boy. He had the deep chest, brawny shoulders, and muscular development of a man. Tal felt as though he had a brick wall at his back. It was a comforting sensation.
It was the toughest fight Tal had ever been in. Having to keep back to back with Ben, he had no room for the footwork which was his greatest asset as a boxer. And these fellows were hard customers. He could hit them where he wanted to; he could mark up their faces, but he couldn't seem to do any real damage. There were always two of them coming at him, and he couldn't dodge forever, or roll with all the punches. Sooner or later, he'd have to take one that really hurt.
He heard a good, solid smack behind him. "One down," sang out Ben Telford. "Only three to go. Keep up the good work, Tal."
But Tal was having his troubles. He'd been rocked by a blow at the side of the head that had set his ears to ringing. He felt faint and dizzy and sick at the pit of his stomach. His arms were tiring, and there wasn't much power left in his punches. But he kept on slugging . . . there was only one man facing him now. Ben must have got another.
Good old Ben! He was certainly the strong member of this partnership. He, Tal, was letting the firm down badly. He saw a grimacing, malevolent face coming in for the kill, and he struck at it with all the strength he had. All right, you clown, want some more? Take that and see how you like it. Lift up your chin a bit; I can't seem to reach you. Oh you would! Why you-
Suddenly it was over. He was on the ground again and glad to be there except for a vague worry over being kicked. But there were no kicks this time. Men were streaming out of the spaceship brandishing wrenches, and the opposition seemed to have melted.
Strong hands scooped him up from the ground. "Tal, old son, you've taken a beating!" Ben's voice.
Tal tried to grin though it hurt to move his inflamed lips. "You don't look so good yourself. Who gave you that eye?"
"Same fellow who knocked out your tooth."
"Did we lick them?"
"What do you think? They didn't stand a chance against the two of us."
"Not against the two of us," Tal agreed.
He'd lost a tooth. He was bruised all over. From crown to toe, his body was one continuous ache. And he'd never been happier in his life. Except, of course, for one thing. But that had nothing at all to do with physical ailments.
"Ben, I've been acting like a first-class louse ever since I landed here. A regular stinkard."
"Forget it," Ben advised in a gruff voice.
Tal held out his hand. Ben grasped it and shook it as hands were never shaken in the civilized cities of Nusa.

GUNS IN THE VALLEY

Tal's father took a very dim view of the fight. "I don't care if they did start it, son. It was up to you not to finish it. So far Asa's crowd have been annoying but harmless. I've laid down just one rule for my men to follow: leave them alone."
"Yes, dad," Tal said with surprising meekness.
"No matter what they say to you, don't take them seriously. Violence begets violence - always."
No further violence, however, materialized during the next few days. Quite the contrary; the agitation died down. The picketers who had been in the fight did not return, and no replacements were sent. The workmen on the Ark could report for duty without being subjected to a torrent of jeers and catcalls. They found it quite a relief.
But something else happened that caused both Mr. Roberts and Mr. Telford grave concern. The Ark's stock of chemically powered hand weapons was found shy a dozen rifles and an equal number of pistols. After discovery of the theft, an armed patrol was posted at the entrance of the big spaceship for twenty-four hours a day. Tal volunteered for guard duty but was not accepted. He didn't mind; his days were rather full just then. A new and exciting life had opened: Ben had introduced him to the Dove I.
As long as he lived, Tal would never forget his first sight of the little rocket flier. She was standing vertically upright, supported on her base ring. The broad, flat ring, attached by struts to the body, would hold the rocket in the proper vertical position for launching. The ring was of a cobalt-chromium-tungsten alloy to resist the heat generated by the rocket flame.
The long, streamlined body was vermilion for ready visibility; the name, Dove I, was in white letters. A little beauty! Tal's whole being thrilled to her. A ladder led up her side to the two seats, located far in the air.
"Like to take a ride?" Ben asked.
There was nothing in the world that Talman Roberts would like more. As in a dream, he followed his new friend up the ladder. The cockpit was in the nose; the fuel tanks, pumps, and combustion chamber took up the lower part of the rocket. Both tanks were porcelain-lined in order to hold the highly corrosive liquid fuel and the almost equally corrosive oxidizer.
The nose of the scout was of transparent plastic, as were the lockable flaps over the pilots' seats. The boys seated themselves with their backs parallel to the ground, closed down the transparent flaps, and dogged them down into an airtight seal. The little flier carried her own oxygen and could be flown in any non-combustible atmosphere. She would also fly beautifully in no atmosphere at all. Tal strapped himself in place and then followed Ben's example in clamping on the headset of the intercom. Ben's voice sounded in his ears.
"As soon as you are ready for blast, touch the stud on the back of my seat."
Tal touched the stud. A green light showed up on Ben's control panel. He pressed a button. The automatic cycle took over. Tal knew what was happening then; he had read about it hundreds of times. In exactly metered amounts, the fuel and oxidizer were being pumped into the combustion chamber, where an electric spark would flash to ignite the highly explosive mixture.
Suddenly the rocket set up a high-pitched scream, so high it seemed to verge into the ultrasonic range. Slowly she began to wobble . . . she stood on the flame. Whoosh! They were up in a nearly instantaneous transition from ground to sky.
Ben's fingers and feet moved among hand levers and foot pedals like an organist playing a virtuoso solo. The wings, folded close against the body of the rocket during the moment of ascent, slowly unfolded like the wings of some monstrous insect. The retractable steering fins protruded out beyond the standing ring. Ben continued to manipulate his levers and pedals, and the little scout leveled off. Soon they were flying in the more natural horizontal position.
Ben's voice came over the headset. "Duplicate controls in front of you. Like to fly this crate?"
Would he? Tal would give anything he had for the chance at it. Ben's calm voice gave unhurried instructions.
"Stick in front of you makes her dip up or down. Hold it steady and you'll stay level. Left pedal to bank left. Right pedal to bank right. Take the stick, and I'll let go. Steady! Good boy! Tal, you're flying her."
And it was true. He, Talman Roberts, was doing something he had dreamed of all his life. He was actually flying a rocket. The little scout responded like an angel to his slightest whim. He could make her go up or down. He could make her turn left or right. He could guide her straight ahead and keep her on the level. He, Tal, was doing all of this. It was a moment such as comes to a man just once.
Time ceased to exist. It seemed to him that he had been flying all his life when he heard Ben's voice again.
"I'll take over now. Landing's the tricky part of this business."
It was tricky, Tal had to admit. To land, Ben had to put the Dove back in the vertical position and retract her wings and steering fins. Immediately, she plunged into free fall. Ben let her fall until the last possible moment before he switched on the flame to brake. Their breathless descent suddenly slowed as though Earth had put up a giant hand to hold them. And then they were standing not on the flame but on the ring. Tal saw they were not very far away from the spot on the field from which they had started. "You put her down on a dime," he marveled.
Ben laughed and undamped his headset.
Three fellows of about their own age rushed forward to greet them as they came down the ladder. "The three Zimmers-Jack, Joe, and Jim," Ben introduced them. "All rocket men. Boys, this is Tal Roberts."
Tal shook hands. "Are you brothers?" he asked.
"Jack and I are twins," said one.
"Which explains the dumb look they share in common," laughed another. "I'm Jim Zimmer, and only a cousin."
"Jim's my partner on the Dove I," Ben explained. "Joe and Jack have the Dove II, poor rocket!"
Tal liked all three; he was coming to like very nearly everybody in the Cumchagwa. And yet he felt a twinge of jealousy with regard to Jim Zimmer. He, Tal, could never be Ben's partner. He wasn't going to Venus, didn't want to go there, and certainly wouldn't be allowed to go if he did want to. Nevertheless, he envied Jim Zimmer.
* * *
As the days rushed by before thrust-off time, Tal wondered why he had ever thought he would be bored here. Even though he didn't see much of his father, who was up at the Ark most of the time, he did see a lot of Ben. They roomed together, ate together, worked in the fields together . . . Tal found that being a farmer wasn't so bad after all. It was good exercise and kept you out-of-doors. If you kept it up long enough you might even build up a physique like Ben's.
He was beginning to like Ben's parents, too, though their ways were a bit strange to him. They were very religious, like most of the inhabitants of the Cum-chagwa. Tal began to understand that religion was a living, vital thing to these people. Faith was a living, vital thing. He suddenly realized why three hundred of the valley's inhabitants were willing to embark upon a venture that, according to the statistical records, looked hopeless. And also why no other group outside the Cumchagwa had displayed any interest in building a spaceship. You had to trust in something bigger than yourself to get the kind of courage it took to go to Venus. Tal began to wish that he had that kind of courage.
Ben and he took the Dove I out for a few minutes nearly every day. Jim Zimmer, whose place he had usurped, didn't seem to mind. Tal learned a lot about flying. He learned how to take the rocket up and level off, and once Ben even patiently guided him through the intricacies of a landing. He didn't put her down on a dime as Ben did but at least, with Ben's hand on the controls during a few critical minutes, he succeeded in bringing her down in one piece.
After a week of flying practice, they planned a camping trip. Only an overnight one; Ben was too busy with his work in the fields and in making preparations for thrust-off day, to be away for very long. They would fly the Dove I to a valley Ben knew of that was within her fuel range, spend the night in their sleeping bags and fly back early the next morning. That was all there was to it, but it promised to be a real adventure.
As it turned out, the camping trip could not compare, pleasant and exciting as it was for both boys, with what they found waiting for them upon their return. No sooner had they landed in the field back of the Ark than they became aware that something out of the ordinary was taking place. An angry crowd was gathering, they saw, as they climbed down to the ground. It looked very much as if the Ark were about to be attacked.
* * *
Racing around the end of the big spaceship, Tal saw that he had interpreted the situation correctly. Painter's men were out in full force, and they were not picketing. The time for picketing had passed. They were no longer bearing banners but guns-the rifles and pistols looted from the Ark's store.
Ben tugged at his sleeve just before they reached the edge of the crowd. "My dad ought to be warned about this. I'm going after him."
Tal scarcely heard him, scarcely knew that Ben had moved away. All of Tal's attention was centered on the Ark's grim row of defenders. They were lined up before the airlock door, barring passage with their bodies. All of them had rifles, but there were pitifully few men in that line. Not more than a dozen. Just the regular guard patrol, and they were outnumbered ten to one. The Ark had been caught by surprise.
Tal's father was in the middle of the defense line, directly in front of the door. He alone was unarmed, but he was standing tall and unafraid.
Tal shoved and pushed his way into the crowd. It was slow going; he had a hard tune working through. But he was not molested. Nobody paid any attention to him; all eyes were focused ahead. Everyone was tense and expectant; a feeling of crisis pervaded the air. Tal continued to worm his way forward.
His father was speaking, and for a minute the voice stopped the angry roar of the crowd. "Men of the Cumchagwa! What are you planning to do?"
The crowd was of one mind about that. "Stop the Ark," they yelled in a ragged chant. "Halt the slaughter. Save our friends and neighbors from dying on Venus."
Presently they ran out of slogans, and Tal's father held up his hand. Again they calmed down to hear what he had to say.
"You say you want to save your friends and neighbors, but they're standing right here beside me. Look at these fellows. Do you recognize them? Of course you do. They are men you have grown up with and worked with and known all your lives. Do you want to kill them?"
"No!" one man shouted.
Tal, well advanced toward the front by now, thought for an instant that his father was going to win. The crowd was puzzled; it was beginning to hesitate. But Asa Painter stepped forward. He was flourishing a pistol, which made him look more like a pirate than ever.
"Don't let him pull the wool over your eyes!" he told his adherents.
"No! No! No!"
"Tell him why we're here, Asa," someone yelled. The mob took it up. "Tell him, Asa, tell him why we're here."
"To save three hundred lives," Painter declaimed, like an actor speaking his biggest and most important line.
"By wrecking the Ark?"
"Roberts, step aside!"
"I don't think so," Tal's father said quietly.
"Out of the way!" Painter roared.
"Planning to shoot me, Asa?" Tal's father sounded almost amused.
"I'll do it if I have to." But Painter was plainly discomfited. Tal saw an opening and squirmed forward a few more precious feet. Almost there now.
"An unarmed man?" Young Jim Zimmer, who was standing next to Tal's father, raised his rifle threateningly. "It will be the last shot you ever fire."
Painter made up his mind in a split second. He fired -not at Tal's father, but at Jim Zimmer. The young man crumpled forward, his unfired rifle still in his hands. Then Painter wheeled and sent his second shot straight into the body of Tal's father. He didn't get a chance to fire a third shot. Tal sprang at him like a tiger.
Tal seized the pistol by the barrel. He snatched it out of Painter's hand. He hit the black-bearded man on the head with the butt. He hit him again. Painter went down, but Tal was still trying to hit him when they closed around him and took the pistol away. Someone from behind was squeezing him in a bearlike hug. His arms were pinioned tightly to his side, and he couldn't move. But he could see.
His father and brave Jim Zimmer were still lying there on the ground.
The defenders had their rifles to their shoulders. They were set to fire if the crowd surged forward. But nobody moved. These weren't trained soldiers. They were naturally peaceful farmers. They could see death staring at them and didn't like it.
There was a screaming flame, and a rocket landed at the edge of the crowd, planted as expertly as only Ben could plant it. Mr. Telford climbed down the ladder.
"Drop those guns! All of them." Miles Telford knew that he was going to be obeyed, and he was. The attackers sheepishly lowered their weapons and waited. The next command came crisply and sharply. "Arrest Asa Painter. He is going to stand trial if anyone has been killed."
If anyone has been killed-
Tal broke loose from the man holding him and ran toward his father. He knelt on the ground. His father saw him, recognized him. His father was still alive.
"Hello, son."
Tal couldn't say a word; just knelt there holding his father's hand. The tears were streaming down his cheeks, and he didn't even know it. His father was trying to speak again.
"Asa was right . . . wall around Venus. Think I know-"
Tal waited, but the rest of the sentence never came. Instead:
"Bury me in the Cumchagwa" was the last thing Jarvis Roberts said.

AN OCEAN OR A DESERT?

They buried Tal's father in the Cumchagwa as had been his last wish. The services were held in the little stone church, which was one of the first buildings to be erected in this remote arctic community. The minister spoke for a long time, and he was very eloquent.
It was a wonderful sermon, but Tal scarcely heard it. He was remembering how worried his father had been after he and Ben had had their fight with the pick-eters. He remembered his father's words, the assurance with which he had spoken them:
"Violence begets violence - always."
If that were true, then the fight, which he had started so irresponsibly, had resulted in the murderous attack upon the Ark. And Talman Roberts was responsible for the death of his father. There was no escape from that clear logic.
A lawyer flew up from Seattle to tell him about his father's will. The lawyer mentioned a sum of money that was being held in trust, and Tal scarcely listened.
There was enough to see him through engineering school. There was even enough to keep him comfortably all the rest of his life, without doing a stroke of work, but he was not interested. Money wasn't what he wanted. He wanted his father back. He wanted to be free from this terrible guilt feeling. No amount of money could do either of those two things.
The lawyer tried to persuade him to fly back to Seattle, but Tal wanted to stay with the Telfords until the Ark thrust off. He wanted to be with them for as long as he could.
It was the night after the lawyer had gone, and they were all gathered together in the living room of the Telford "igloo," that Tal knew he could tell them about the fear that was poisoning his life. The fear he had kept bottled up inside him. He confessed everything. And they didn't act as though he were a horrible monster as he had half expected they might. None of them acted that way.
"Oh, you poor boy!" Mrs. Telford cried.
Mr. Telford puffed lazily on his pipe, not much disturbed. "The attack on the Ark was planned months ago, Tal. I had that from one of Asa's crowd, one who came around, heartily ashamed, to get it off his shoulders."
Tal felt as if an enormous weight had been lifted from his chest.
"The attack would have taken place if you had never come up here. Only in that case . . ." Mr. Telford puffed again. "In that case, the outcome would certainly have been different." Mr. Telford paused for a moment. "You saved the Ark, Tal."
"I saved it?" Tal exclaimed.
"Everybody in the Cumchagwa admits it," Ben confirmed.
"You knocked out Asa Painter," Mr. Telford explained.
"I was too late," Tal almost sobbed. "I couldn't break through the crowd until after he'd fired."
"You saved the Ark, though," said Mr. Telford. "In another second, the mob would have followed Asa, and the handful of guards would have been swept down. But when you laid out Asa, the mob was like a big animal with a paralyzed brain. It waited around for orders. I got there and gave it the orders, but it was you who really stopped them."
Tal didn't believe it, of course. They were just being kind, trying to make him feel good! But he was very grateful to them for trying. They were such good friends! The best he ever had, ever would have. In that instant he reached a decision.
"Well, then, if I saved the Ark, the Ark owes me a free ride. I want to go to Venus with you."
That did surprise them! Not one of the three said anything for a minute; just looked at him in astonishment.
"I can take Jim Zimmer's place," Tal went on. "Ben's been teaching me to fly."
"He can fly as well as Jim," Ben put in loyally.
They waited for Mr. Telford to answer. It was his word that counted.
"As leader of the expedition," he began, speaking rather slowly, as though trying to collect his thoughts, "I don't have anything against it. We'd all be delighted to have you, Tal, both for your father's sake and your own. I'm sure you would fit into Jim's place very well. But there's another side to it."
"What side?" Tal questioned.
"Yours. I'm going to have to plead your case since your father's lawyer isn't here now to do it. To begin with, a young man often fails to see a situation in its true perspective."
"I'm old enough to vote," Tal broke in.
"True, you are legally of age, but that's the least important consideration. Your education has just begun. You have it in you to make a big name in the engineering world, Tal. Perhaps as big a name as your father made. Do you want to toss away that chance?"
Because Mr. Telford was so serious about it, Tal thought it over carefully. He searched deep in his heart and did his best to give an honest answer.
"I don't seem to be much interested in engineering any more. I want to stay with you folks. I feel that you're my family."
"We feel the same about you," Mrs. Telford said.
Mr. Telford blew out a smoke ring. "Tal, do you know anything about Venus?"
Tal knew a few facts from the almanac, not very much. He said: "It's the closest planet to us. Minimum distance from Earth, about 25,000,000 miles; maximum, 162,000,000 miles. Mean distance from the Sun, 67,195,000 miles."
"What else?" queried Miles Telford.
"It has a year of 225 days. Our days-I don't know how long a Venusian day is. Its diameter is 7,700 miles-just a bit under Earth's diameter of 7,900 miles. Its mass is close to Earth's, and its surface gravity is 90% of Earth's. You could walk around Venus and not feel any different from here at home. The probable temperature is given at 68° Fahrenheit-just right to be comfortable."
"You certainly do have a real memory for figures, Tal. What else do you know?"
"That's about all-no, wait! Venus is surrounded by clouds and so must have an atmosphere-of some kind."
"You don't know anything about the surface?"
"No."
"Nobody knows really, Tal. No astronomer, either on Earth or on the Moon, has ever peeked beneath those clouds. That's why they are not even sure of the length of the Venusian day. It hasn't been measured, and it can't be because the cloud markings change too rapidly to serve as guideposts. It is believed-on theoretical considerations-that Venus rotates in about four or five weeks. If this is correct, then a day on Venus is about as long as a month on Earth. A Venusian night would last for, say, two weeks, and another two weeks would intervene between sunrise and sunset.
"That wouldn't be too hard on us," Mr. Telford continued. "Up here in the arctic, we are used to long days and long nights. But there are other things you ought to be warned about. Those clouds, for instance. They are very rich in carbon dioxide. Perhaps there is ten thousand times as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of Venus as there is in our own. And the spec-trograph-a pretty sensitive instrument-indicates no trace of either free oxygen or of water vapor."
"No air or water, then?"
"Not in the clouds. And that brings us to a division of opinion among astronomers that has persisted ever since the middle twentieth century. Those prewar astronomers didn't have any observatories on the Moon, as we do now, and so their vision got fogged up by Earth's atmosphere sometimes. But they had the same basic instruments we use today, and they knew how to use their heads as well as, if not better than, our own astronomers. Observations made long before the Atomic Wars began showed the same as ours of today: lots of carbon dioxide in the clouds, but no oxygen or water vapor. They couldn't see the surface of Venus, any more than we can today, but they could reason about it. What would you say about the surface of Venus if you had the same facts they did about the Venusian clouds?"
Tal thought for a minute. "You could work it out backwards," he said finally. "If there were lots of water on the surface, it would have to be evaporating continually. So you ought to find water vapor in the clouds."
"But since it is not found there-"
"Then Venus would have to be a dry world. Like the Moon."
"Good for you, Tal! They pictured the entire surface of Venus as one vast desert, and they made up stories about the terrible dust storms that would occur when any part of the planet, in its slow rotation, would pass from cold night to warm daylight."
"Something would have to be blowing the dust," Tal said.
"Yes, of course. They never denied that Venus had an atmosphere. What they did say was that the Venu-sian atmosphere could have no free oxygen, even under the cloudbanks. Do you know why?"
That one was easy.
"No water, no plants. No plants, no photosynthesis. That's what gave us our own oxygen atmosphere."
"Correct. The chloroplasts of a plant cell-small green particles containing chlorophyll-absorb the energy of sunlight to split water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen atoms. The hydrogen is then combined chemically with carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The carbon is taken out and utilized by the growing plant, but the oxygen, since the plant has no use for it, is released. And if you have plants growing over a large portion of the surface of a planet, there is bound to be a considerable amount of oxygen released constantly. It is believed that Earth once had a carbon-dioxide atmosphere like Venus, but that our plants changed it into the oxygen atmosphere that animals and human beings need in order to live.
"But you can work it out backwards, too, Tal, as you did about the water vapor. Suppose you do have an atmosphere without oxygen-as the spectrograph indicates the atmosphere of Venus to be. Can you have any extensive plant life?"
"No," Tal answered. "You can't. If you did have vegetation, there would have to be oxygen."
"And no oxygen means no animals, either?"
"Right."
"So there you have the surface of Venus as the twentieth century astronomers first pictured it. No water, no oxygen, and no life, neither plant nor animal.
A rather depressing picture, but it all hangs together." "Is that what they believe now?" Tal inquired. "Some authorities do, but not all. Sometime in the twentieth century-I'm sorry I have to keep harping on that period, but that's when so many of the big discoveries of modern astronomy were made-a French astronomer named Bernard Lyot hit upon the idea of making a detailed comparison of the Venusian clouds with the clouds here on Earth. He found that both sets of clouds had the same optical properties. We know that our clouds are water vapor and so, Lyot reasoned, the clouds of Venus must be the same."
"That didn't check with the spectrograph, though." "No, it did not. But a way was found around that difficulty. In the year 1954, Dr. William Sinton, of Johns Hopkins University, made the most accurate temperature measurements of the Venus cloud layer that had been made up to that date. He found that the day-night temperature of the visible clouds was 38 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. We are used to winter temperatures like that up here in the Cumchagwa, but people farther south would find 38 below very cold. At that very low temperature, you could hardly expect water vapor in the clouds; any water would be in the form of frozen particles. And these wouldn't show up in the spectra because the spectrograph can only detect the presence of gases or incandescent solids." "So there might be water on Venus?" "There might be. At least you can't use the negative evidence of the spectrograph as an argument against it. But to get back to history. Another of those brilliant twentieth-century minds attacked the problem from an entirely different angle. His name was Harold C. Urey, and he was a chemist. Urey also followed the method of reasoning it out backwards. He supposed Venus to be a planet like Earth, having both continents and oceans. Being a chemist, he thought he knew what would happen in that case. The presence of water would cause the carbon dioxide to disappear from the air and be fixed in the rocks in the form of carbonates. This process would keep up until most of the free carbon dioxide was gone from the air. But nothing like this has happened. Venus still has a large carbon-dioxide atmosphere. So, obviously, the primary assumption is wrong. Venus cannot have both continents and oceans like Earth. Either her surface must be a desert, as previously supposed, or-and this really will surprise you, Tal-it must be all ocean."
"Why all ocean?" Tal asked. "I don't get that at all." "Because the fixation of atmospheric carbon dioxide would stop if the rocks of the planet were completely under water. A thin buffer layer of carbonate would be formed, and that's all. Do you know how aluminum resists oxidation? It forms a tough skin of aluminum oxide, which doesn't oxidize any more. Same idea.
"And now let's go on to the temperature. A while back, you mentioned that the probable temperature of Venus was 68° Fahrenheit. That little phrase 'probable temperature' allows a lot of leeway. Actually, it's only an opinion since no one has ever measured the surface temperature of Venus-naturally not, since no one has even seen the surface. There are other opinions on the surface temperature that are not so comforting. The clouds of carbon dioxide may exert what is known as a 'greenhouse effect,' letting through short-wave radiation from the Sun but hindering the escape of long-wave radiation from the planet's surface."
"Then Venus is either all ocean, or it's all desert," Tal said thoughtfully.
"One or the other. There would seem to be no middle ground."
"And the temperature. It could be hot, couldn't it?"
"It could be very hot. It is even conceivable that during the hottest part of the Venusian 'day'-which may be two weeks long, remember-the temperature could reach that of boiling water . . . Still want to go to Venus, Tal?"
Tal did. He would go wherever the Telfords went. He would take his chances along with the rest of the three hundred colonists. But he could not help wondering. Was an ocean of boiling water the fate that had awaited the ten previous spaceships? Was that the explanation of why no ship had ever reported a landing?

WALL AROUND VENVS

At last the Ark was loaded! In company with most of the inhabitants of the Cumchagwa, Tal and Ben had toiled like beavers to help get in the last of the supplies, equipment, and livestock before the critical minute of thrust-off. It was amazing what a large variety of items and equipment the big ship had to carry. But she was loaded now, all right, and it was time for the human cargo to go on board.
The three hundred colonists were assigned in advance to various groups, and each group was called a unit. The tearful farewells of friends and relatives complicated but did not upset the orderly procedure for going aboard. Some such system was necessary for the quick sorting out of those who were going from those who were not. The latter were much more numerous; in addition to every inhabitant of the Cumchagwa there were on hand visiting dignitaries from all over Nusa, and even from other nations, to witness the Ark thrust-off.
Tal and Ben, both in the same group since they shared a roomette, were among the last to be called and so had ample time to observe how their fellow passengers were taking it. Most of them looked pretty glum, and you couldn't exactly blame them. Going off to a wholly unknown future, on an unknown planet, was enough to make anyone feel gloomy.
Their group number called at last, Tal and Ben joined the line waiting to get on board. Finally they were in the Ark and on their way up to the little room in which they would spend a good share of their time for the next five months. It was fortunate that the small amount of luggage they were allowed had been hoisted up in advance, for their roomette was in the "ceiling" part of the gigantic cylinder. To get there, they had to climb up a rope ladder and through a manhole to the corridor curving around between the two rings of roomettes.
Their two bags-they were each allowed one rectangular case of exactly specified dimensions-were lifted in the special storage rack provided for them and locked into place. The boys then climbed into their separate bunks and strapped themselves in to await for thrust-off time to be announced over the Ark's loudspeaker system.
The actual moment of thrust-off was tame-only a slight sensation of upward movement told them they were leaving the surface of Earth. The Thrust was applied gradually, avoiding both atmospheric friction and the cruel acceleration of many gravities that were once believed indispensable to space travel. Though a human being, lying on his back on a properly shaped mattress, is able to take 9 g or even more, the sensation is not pleasant, and Tal was just as happy not to have to experience it.
The acceleration, at first mild, was gradually increased as the air thinned out. When they had gone fifty miles from the surface, the atmosphere was negligible, and the Thrust was applied full force. The ship had to reach its escape velocity of 7 miles a second, 25,200 miles an hour, before the effect of the Thrust died. The Thrust had to act against a gravitational field at fairly short distance. If escape velocity were not attained in a certain minimal distance, the ship would have only the enormous but far away Sun to push against. That could cause difficulties. Thrust pilots knew their business, however, and it was very rare for a thrust-off to be fluffed.
Lying there in the upper bunk, strapped flat on his back, Tal tried to figure out what else was going on. Thrust-off had been scheduled for sunset (or what would have been sunset in a latitude farther south). This time was set for an important reason: so the Ark would be traveling in the opposite direction from Earth when she pulled away.*

* The sunset side of Earth is the "back side" of her orbital motion. The dawn side is the front side. Had the Ark left at dawn, she would have added her intrinsic velocity to the orbital velocity of Earth and might conceivably have gone to Mars instead of Venus. See 'The Conquest of Space" (pages 93-94) by Willy Ley; The Viking Press, 1949.
This would subtract the escape velocity attained by the spaceship from the Earth's orbital velocity of 18.5 miles per second. The Ark, traveling at only 11.5 miles a second, could not move in the same circle as the planet she had just quitted. She would start to fall toward the sun, which is also the direction of Venus. In the parlance of space, the Ark would "go downhill" until she reached the orbit of Venus.
To hit the orbit of Venus is not the same as hitting Venus herself, but that didn't worry Tal. If everything had been calculated right and if the ship stayed on the exact trajectory plotted for her, the Ark would reach the orbit of Venus at the right time, the right place, and the right velocity.
Of course if the Ark failed to keep her appointment with Earth's cloud-veiled sister, various unpleasant things could happen. Tal didn't like to think of them.
* * *
After a few days on the Ark of Venus, it seemed to Tal that he had been there always. After a few more days, it seemed as if he never would be anywhere else. Few human experiences could be duller than that long five-month voyage, thrilling as space travel may sound to people who have never been in space.
They kept Earth time aboard the Ark, specifically that of the time zone of the Cumchagwa. This was not very logical, but it was convenient. And days, weeks, and months were observed exactly as if they had been on Earth. Tal's calendar watch came in very handy. Because their days were so monotonous, it was easy to lose track of them.
All the days began with the sounding of a loud gong. Waked up by this din, Tal and Ben stumbled out of their bunks. One of them would try to do setting up exercises, while the other used the stainless-steel wash basin. The amount of water that could be utilized for such purposes as washing, shaving, bathing, and laundering was strictly limited. Tal learned to look back upon the "primitive" shower he had found in the Tel-ford bathroom as the height of luxury. There wasn't a single shower compartment on the whole Ark, and you were lucky if you could get water enough for an abbreviated sponge bath. There were, however, a few vibro-shave cabinets.
When they had finished dressing, they left their compartment and walked along the circular corridor between the two rings of roomettes. You could walk entirely around the ship this way; the curvature offered no difficulties under the slight ship gravity. To get to the central part of the ship, though, you had to go down through the manhole, either by the rope ladder they had used on their first day or by a polished brass pole. Sliding down the pole was quicker and more fun. You fell rather slowly, though, because the ship's artificial gravity couldn't compare in strength with that of the Earth or even of the Moon. It was just enough to give you the feeling of orientation that is so necessary to a human being.
The very earliest spaceships had no gravity, and the men who traveled in them went mad. The weightlessness of a free fall simply could not be endured mentally by human beings. Everything that a man does on Earth, even the simplest action such as taking a walk, is conditioned by the gravity-sensitive receptors that report to his nervous system. Remove gravity, and no such reports can get through. Then the man is lost- completely, utterly lost. It is even worse than if he were suddenly to go blind and deaf because then, at least, he would know the Earth was supporting him. But at zero gravity, nothing is supporting him, and the terrible fear of falling takes possession of and swamps the reasoning part of his mind. In most cases, he only recovers when gravity is again restored.
The manhole that Tal and Ben ordinarily used brought them to the ship's lounge. Since their destination was the dining room, they had to go through another floor opening. They plunged through this head first, so they wouldn't be upside-down when they came out on the dining-room side. Then each grabbed a tray, and they stood in line like the patrons of any Earthly cafeteria. Sometimes they ate with Ben's parents, sometimes with other passengers; it didn't much matter, everybody was friendly and sociable.
When breakfast was over, you reported to your work party and learned what duties had been allotted to you that day. The various jobs that needed to be done were rotated as much as possible to avoid monotony. If today you were cleaning up after meals (a job that Tal hated), tomorrow you might be feeding the animals. Nobody could complain that he was getting the short end of the straw all the time.
When you had finished your work, you were free to amuse yourself as you wanted to, and that was definitely the hardest job of all. The ship's library had a varied assortment of period microfilm thrillers, which Tal, with his keen interest in history, found highly enjoyable. But you couldn't read all the time, even if there hadn't been a waiting line for the projectors, which there usually was. Three-dimensional TV faded a day or so after leaving Earth, and there were left only the canned video recordings. Some of them must have been donated from dentists' waiting rooms, for they were at least fifty years old. When ancient videocasts palled on you, there were only the games.
Tal played table electrotennis until he felt he'd scream if he ever had to touch another one of the midget rackets. However, he was good at it. He was on his way to becoming the ship's champion, and they clapped him on the back and cheered him when he made a tricky serve or a fast return. It was comforting to be surrounded by people who liked you. It did more than anything else to make up for the monotony, the downright boredom of this interminable voyage.
When he had nothing else to do and Ben was on work duty, Tal would lie down on his bunk alone and try to think. He thought of Venus a lot, naturally, but it didn't do much good to wonder about it. Venus was what it was, and they'd have to accept it. So he would let his thoughts drift back to the past, and most often upon the dying words of his father:
"Asa was right . . . wall around Venus. Think I know-"
What had Jarvis Roberts intended to comunicate? Nobody knew, not even the ship's officers to whom Tal talked. Nobody would even hazard a guess. It was Tal's great enigma.
He tried to attack it from different angles. In Seattle, his father had not known what had caused the loss of the ten earlier spaceships. "I don't know and nobody else does," he had answered bluntly. (Tal could still see him, knocking the ashes from his pipe into the wall waste chute.) Therefore, his father had learned something important since they had arrived at the Cum-chagwa. From Asa Painter?
"Ben," he said, while they were undressing for bed that night, "what sort of fellow was Asa Painter? An educated man?"
"Educated about as much as the rest of us."
"Was he a scientist?"
"Good heavens no! A crackpot! Claimed to have direct revelations from on high like the prophets in the Bible."
"You remember his telling us that there is a wall around Venus?"
"First day you came, wasn't it?"
"That's right. What do you suppose he meant?"
"Couldn't have meant anything. Not Asa. Just talking to hear the sound of his voice."
"All right, then, Painter didn't know anything. But what he said to my father started his mind to working, and he came up with something. Only he didn't have time to tell us about it," Tal ended wistfully.
That very night he had his first dream of the brick wall. Venus, he realized with strange knowledge given to you in dreams, was on the other side of the wall, which seemed to be as high as the sky. Spaceships- they looked like mere toys-kept dashing themselves against it and falling crumpled to the ground. That repeated over and over until Tal woke up.
Now and then, not very often, a little something out of the ordinary happened. For instance, the time Tal and Ben were allowed to visit the bridge, from which most of the passengers were rigidly excluded. The visit was a special mark of favor from the ship's executive officer, who was a red-haired youngish man named Mark Cook.
The Exec gave them each a pair of dark-green glasses to wear before they went in to look through the dome. Out here in space, even a brief glimpse of the Sun could blind unprotected eyes. But brilliantly as the Sun was shining, all the sky around it was jet black as at night, and there were so many stars it was next to impossible to pick out the familiar constellations. Venus, which they really wanted to see, wasn't visible; she was on the other side of the Sun but moving around to keep her date with the Ark.
The navigator was looking over the current star map, which was projected on a ground glass and looked just like a miniature edition of the stars visible in the dome. He shook hands, said he was glad to see them, that the ship was right on course, and went back to his map. The two pilots were more friendly. One of them took the time to show them the ship's electronic calculator. And, of course, they inspected the radio room and met the radio officer.
Everything was fine there, too. Messages were traveling back and forth from Earth without any trouble. Nobody on the ship had the slightest cause for worry, the radio officer said, and added that he would appreciate it if they would pass the word along.
Only a few days after that a meteor punctured the hull.
Luckily, it wasn't a big meteor. A big meteor could have wrecked the ship, but the chances were very much against anything big hitting them, meteors being rather rare except in certain known locations. This meteor, they were told afterwards, could have been no bigger than a grain of sand. Traveling at around 25 miles per second, however, it had kinetic energy enough to puncture both steel walls of the hull. There wasn't anything left of it-just a spurt of flame in one of the outer roomettes with a noise like a pistol shot.
Fellow who was in that little room probably thought he had been shot. Anyway, he had sense enough to turn in the alarm right away. They didn't want to lose air, so they welded up the inner hole right away-it was so small they had to use a magnetic-flux leak detector to find it. After it was welded, they clamped on a midget-size radar transmitter to beam a signal so that the hole in the outer wall could be easily found from outside.
The weldor went out through the airlock in the "Bug," which was the only possible spacesuit for the vacuum of interplanetary space. The Bug was a steel carriage with a dome and a flat bottom. You could think of it, if you wanted to, as the shell of a big turtle. It traveled on magnetic rollers that prevented it from being accidentally dislodged from the ship. The operator sat inside, with regular air pressure around him, and looked out through a window. He could put a green-glass shade over the windows while he was arc welding. All of the controls for current, voltage, and wire feed speed were inside the Bug, but the reel of welding wire and the feed mechanism were outside. Welding was very simple in a vacuum because you didn't need to protect the molten metal from the oxygen found in Earth's atmosphere.
The Bug carried other tools for metalworking, too. These were manipulated by mechanical hands called "waldos." A science-fiction writer named Robert Heinlein first described them years before they were actually invented to handle hot radioactives from the other side of a thick concrete wall. Working the waldos from inside the Bug, the operator could do practically anything his own hands could do. It didn't take very long for him to find and fix up the little hole that the meteor had punctured.
* * *
Quite a while after the meteor, when they were almost due to meet Venus, Tal had another dream about the toy spaceships smashing themselves on the brick wall that blocked off Venus. When the gong woke him up, the dream was still vivid in his mind. Half awake and half asleep, he lay there for a few seconds, and in a flash it came to him what his father had been trying to say. He saw clearly what the wall around Venus was. Had to be. Couldn't be anything else.
He told Ben, who told his father, who arranged for a conference with the executive officer. All three of them went to the Exec's office, but Mr. Telford left it up to Tal to do the talking.
"There's a wall around Venus," Tal began. "But it's an electrical wall."
"Go on," said the Exec.
"Let's suppose that the clouds, carbon dioxide or whatever they are, are loaded with free electrons and ionized particles. Let a spaceship poke into the cloud layer, and what would happen to it? It would get loaded with free electrons; build up a heavy negative charge. If the charge was heavy enough, it would go off like a bolt of lightning when the ship got close to the ground. Wouldn't it?"
"It might," said the Exec.
"And while the ship is being chaiged from the clouds, where would the charge distribute itself? The ship is like a hollow conductor, so all the charge would be outside. At least that's what I learned in first-year physics."
"Right," said the Exec.
"If the ship were a hollow sphere, the charge would be uniform all over its surface. But it isn't a sphere, so the charge wouldn't be uniform. The ship has projections from it, and that's where the density of the charge would be greatest. When the ship gets close to the ground, there would be arcing from those points-arcing like lightning bolts from those projections. That would be pretty rough on them, wouldn't it? Rough on the Thrust tubes?"
"It would," said the Exec.
"They'd burn up and fail; then the ship would drop. Smash herself to pieces when she hit the ground. And even if the radio officer were left alive, and the radio was still working, he'd never be able to get a message through all that electric stuff in the clouds. It hangs together."
"It does hang together, Tal. It's an ingenious theory. But experience is against it. Earth has an ionized atmosphere, too, and the ships coming back from Mars or the Moon pick up quite a potential. But nothing like the charge needed to burn out the Thrust tubes. Maybe that's why nobody else has dreamed up that particular solution of yours."
"I'm just a kid," Tal said. "One year in general engineering. No particular brains. Is that what you're trying to tell me?"
"Now wait," the Exec said. "Don't rush off the deep end."
"I'm not," Tal answered. "That was just build-up. I don't expect you to take my word for it. But my father had a reputation for knowing what he was talking about. He knew there was a wall around Venus. He tried to tell me about it. And what other kind of wall than an electrical wall could there be?"
The Exec said thoughtfully: "Tal, you may be right or wrong, but it's a possibility, and something ought to be done about it. If we can do anything this late."
"Weld on lightning-rods," Ben suggested. "Or maybe you'd have to call them lightning-rods-in-reverse. There ought to be a way to drain off the charge so the arcing wouldn't be from the Thrust tubes."
"I think I see how to rig up something," the Exec said cheerfully. "We'll send the Bug out with a supply of heavy cable and weld lengths to dangle all along the bottom of the ship-or what will be bottom when we land her. That ought to take the curse off the Thrust tubes. And I'll have a full report radioed back to Earth of what we are planning to do and why. But don't tell any of the other passengers, will you? I don't want a panic to get started."
* * *
So it turned out that the Telford men and Tal were the only ones besides the ship's officers who had any idea of what to expect when they began their drop through the Venusian cloud deck. The first warning that the rest of the passengers received came through the ship's loudspeaker system:
"Attention everybody! We are about to attempt a landing on Venus! I repeat, a landing on Venus. Here are your instructions:
"First: remove every metallic article from your person. I repeat, every metallic article: coins, knives, keys, pens, pencils-everything that has metal on it. Leave all these articles in your rooms. Then go quietly to the lounge and stand well away from anything that is made of metal. We are expecting a severe electrical disturbance."
That turned out to be the understatement of the twenty-second century.
The first symptom showed up when people's hair began to stand on end. That caused considerable laughter. It wasn't so funny when long sparks crackled from people's fingers. Still, these manifestations of static electricity did not seem particularly dangerous. But in just a little while, the Venusian clouds showed Earth's unwanted tourists what they really could do when they set about it.
Fortunately for the passengers, the deck surface on which they were standing was of a non-conducting plastic. The enormous potential that was accumulating outside the ship induced charges that affected every metal object.
Tables with steel frames became shrouded at the corners with blue flames. Aluminum chairs were silhouetted with the same ghostly jets of light. It was St. Elmo's fire, that strange electrical phenomenon often seen during a severe thunderstorm on high places such as church spires or distant mountain tops. Here, however, it was right in the room. Tongues of hissing flame several inches long leaped from metal tips and protrusions.
Frightening and dangerous as this all was, there was something worse to come. A ball of fire suddenly appeared out of nowhere. It was about ten inches in diameter and blood-red in color, and it floated above their heads as though it were rolling along on an invisible floor. Several women screamed. The fireball exploded with a loud report. More women screamed. Suddenly, every light in the ship went out. The screaming became general.
Like milling sheep, the frightened passengers might have trampled each other to death in blind panic. It did not happen. The strong voice of Miles Telford soared above the screaming women, above the crackling electric flames.
"Quiet, everybody! Let us sing a hymn. 'Rock of ages, cleft for me . . .' "
Down, down, plunged the Ark toward the surface of Venus. Would her Thrust tubes hold out? Tal didn't know.

LOST IN THE DARK

They landed with a jolt that nearly drove Tal's teeth through his tongue. Immediately afterwards he became aware that his weight had greatly increased. A near-Earthly weight felt oddly heavy and oppressive after the light ship's gravity to which he had grown accustomed.
The worst part, though, was the yelling and screaming. It was black as the Coal Sack in the Southern Cross, and three hundred frightened souls lost in the dark can make a lot of noise!
"Quiet everybody!" Mr. Telford waited for the clamor to subside a bit. "I am going to call the roll in alphabetical order," he announced when he could make himself heard without straining his voice. "I'll try to call it from memory. Sing out if I skip any name known to you."
It takes a long time to get through a list of three hundred names, and Tal's attention soon wandered. Had they landed on earth or water? Was the Ark floating or was it at rest? He couldn't be sure, shut up within a windowless, soundproof cylinder. His senses had no contact with the outside. He couldn't even make a guess from the impact he had felt upon landing. They had landed hard, sure, but water can hit you pretty hard when you dive into it from a height, he remembered from sad experience.
"Attention, please!" The Exec's voice sounded much weaker than usual, not being amplified through the ship's P.A. system. "We have landed on Venus."
He was interrupted by a confused roar. A few cheered, but most people wanted to ask questions, many different questions at once. A shout from Mr. Telford cut across the resulting bedlam.
"Silence! Listen to him!"
"We are on the planet's dark side. There is nothing to be seen outside. But we are reasonably certain we are on land."
"Glory be to God, land!" shrieked a woman.
The Exec waited for the tumult of thanksgiving to die down. Then he said crisply: "No further information is available. Nothing can be accomplished until we restore the electrical system. All passengers who have been assigned duties as electricians come forward and group yourselves around me."
Coming forward in the dark was not an easy thing to do. There was considerable milling around before the electricians had made their way in the direction indicated by voice alone.
"Our most urgent need is light," the Exec continued. "There are some fuel-burning lanterns in storage, but we need light to find them. Are there any suggestions?"
"I have an old-fashioned flint lighter," Ben said.
"The very thing. Hand it over."
"It's in my room. You told us to leave all metallic articles in our rooms."
A moment of enormous silence followed. "Does anybody else have a flint lighter?" the Exec asked weakly. A number of people did-in their rooms. Finally Ben spoke up again.
"I can find my room if I can get to the pole. Does anybody know where the pole is?"
"Here," a voice said in the darkness.
"Keep talking," Ben directed. "I'll make my way toward you."
Tal grabbed Ben's arm. He had an idea he could help in the search.
"I'm talking," the unknown voice informed them all. "The pole's here. I'm talking. I'm talking. The pole's here. I'm talking. Do you hear me?"
"Yes," Ben answered.
"I'm right here."
"I think I've got you spotted."
"Somebody just touched me. Was that you?"
Ben replied: "I'm touching somebody, but I don't know whether it's you. If it is, take my hand and guide it to the pole."
It was Tal's hand that was seized, but that made no difference as he was still holding onto Ben. His fingers closed gratefully around the pole's familiar surface. Because of the near-Earth gravity, however, they did not try to climb it. Instead they made use of the rope ladder they had disdained for so many months.
When they stepped from the ladder onto the floor of the corridor, Tal had to grab frantically at the pole to keep from falling. The slope seemed far steeper than it had been before. Gravity again.
Their roomette was on the right-hand side of the corridor, and they had to practically crawl uphill. After five months in space, Tal had forgotten how hard it had been to climb up there on thrust-off day. He counted the doors as they passed them. Both he and Ben knew that their roomette was just seven doors beyond the manhole.
Of course, all these little rooms were identical, but as nearly as Tal could tell from the sense of touch they had found the right room. He felt along the shelf above the washbasin where he and Ben had put the metallic articles removed from their clothing. Nothing there- only a few coins. Then he spied something glowing in a corner of the floor; it was the luminous dial of his calendar-watch.
Tal strapped it on, grateful for the shockproof construction that had enabled the watch to withstand not only the impact of landing but the gravity fall from the shelf to the floor. They found other articles on the floor: Tal's pocketknife, Ben's knife, a few more of the coins that for no explicable reason they had brought along to Venus. However, they did not find the lighter. It simply was not on the floor, they decided.
The lighter had done the impossible and landed in the upper bunk. It took them some little tune to discover it there. It was an old-fashioned lighter, operating on the flint-and-steel principle that was discovered in the twentieth century. However, it worked. Ben flicked a little wheel, which scratched against the flint and caused a tiny yellow flame to spring up from the wick. He snuffed it out almost immediately.
They groped and fumbled their way back through the corridor, saving the lighter flame for more valuable duty later. Fortunately, there was a guard railing around the manhole, or they would have stepped right through and fallen all the way to the lounge. The rail stopped them just in time. They stepped over it and slid down the pole as they had done hundreds of times before during their long journey. This time it was different; they fell with unexpected speed and hit a great deal harder than they had ever done. But they were in the lounge again, and the executive officer was still talking to the passengers.
"Here's the lighter," Ben said.
"Thanks," answered the Exec. "Stores party come with me."
Not being members of the stores party, Tal and Ben waited in the lounge with most of the other passengers. Tal kept his eyes on the luminous dial of his watch, which was still running beautifully. Seconds lengthened into minutes. Odd how long a time a minute was when you were watching a hand move around a dial. One minute, two minutes, three, four, five, six, seven . . . A sudden light flared into the room as several men came in through the stores door with lanterns. To see light again was wonderful.
"I must ask you all to be patient a little while longer," the Exec said. "There are not many lanterns, and they are all needed by the electricians. The rest of you must wait in the dark."
The lights went away again, and the passengers grumbled.
"What a raw deal!"
"There are women and children here."
"We've been standing all this time."
"There's no place to sit down."
The complaints were justified; the lounge had not been planned to seat even half of the passengers. Some of those who had grown tired of standing drifted off to try and find their rooms as Tal and Ben had done. The rope ladder became heavy with traffic. As the crowd gradually thinned out, conditions got more comfortable in the lounge. It even became possible to sit down without being trampled. Tal and Ben settled themselves side by side on the floor and relaxed for a long wait.
When it flashed on again, the light was so unexpected that Tal had to blink his eyes. The ship's P.A. system was also restored to service, and the familiar voice of the Exec came from the loudspeaker.
"We are now able to report on the extent of the damage sustained during the electrical storm. The Thrust-engines themselves were not harmed, being basically non-electromagnetic, but all electrical equipment suffered heavy damage. Instruments took the worst beating because their coils of fine wire were burned out and overloaded by induced currents that they were never meant to take. Our radio is gone; even so, it would not be possible for radio waves to pass through the heavily ionized layer of this planet. I am afraid that all hope of communication with Earth must be abandoned.
"The ship's electronic calculator has been damaged beyond any hope of repair," the dismal tidings continued. "The Thrust is still possible; we can lift the ship and use it for travel on this world. But without the calculator and control instruments, we simply cannot perform the maneuvering needed to assure a successful uphill journey back to Earth.
"It looks very much, folks," the loudspeaker concluded, "as though we are all on Venus to stay. Forever."

SUNRISE ON VENUS

Naturally most of the colonists wanted to rush outside immediately to see the kind of world upon which they were marooned. However, the tyrannous loudspeaker informed them that this would not be allowed. Samples of the Venusian atmosphere needed to be taken for chemical analysis. Since this might take a while, the Ark's passengers were advised to retire quietly to their bunks and sleep for the usual number of hours.
That seemed a very tame thing to do. As Tal said to Ben: "We traveled millions of miles across space to see the most mysterious planet in the solar system, and now we're told to go to bed before we've even had a glimpse of it. Could anything be worse?"
Ben told him to be patient; Venus had been there for a long tune and could well wait another day-Earthly day, that is. Ben didn't know for sure how long a Venusian day might be. None of them did.
It was longer than a day on Earth, that they knew. When the gong woke them up at the usual hour by the time zone of the Cumchagwa, it was still night outside. Dawn was not yet in sight, the loudspeaker chattily informed them when they had slid down the pole into the lounge.
There was a difficulty in serving breakfast. Because of Venusian gravity, their dining room was now upside-down. The tables, the chairs, the serving counters, the cupboards, and electric ranges were now fastened to the ceiling. The arc of roomettes that had been "ceiling" while they were in space was now at the bottom of the ship, and a flooring would have to be laid across the curve. Then all the equipment of the dining room and kitchen would have to be unscrewed from the ceiling and affixed to the new floor.
Since this would take a good deal of tune and labor, small cans of food were brought out of the storeroom and distributed among the passengers. Labels on the cans were entirely ignored. The rule was one can per person, and the recipient had to take what he got without any argument. Tal drew a can of beans and Ben a can of sliced pineapple. Each ate half of the other's can, as well as half of his own, and the combination of cold beans and pineapple made a very queer breakfast. Not up to the Ark's usual standard at all.
While the colonists were struggling with meals of this peculiar nature, the loudspeaker brought them some real news. The analysis of the atmosphere had been completed. A large number of samples had been taken, and after careful checks and rechecks, summarized in some detail, the chemists were able to say what the Venusian atmosphere appeared to be. They hedged a great deal about it, as scientists nearly always do when they have to make a public statement.
First, to serve as a comparison, the composition of Earth's atmosphere was recited: about 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 1% argon; carbon dioxide, hydrogen, neon, helium, xenon, and krypton each amounting to less than one-tenth of one per cent.
The atmosphere of Venus seemed to contain (the chemists had carefully avoided any semblance of assurance) about 65% carbon dioxide, 34% nitrogen and very small percentages of hydrogen, oxygen, and several inert gases. The amount of oxygen was about the same as that of the rare gas krypton on Earth-less than a tenth of one per cent. By way of compensation, however, the spectroscope did indicate an unmistakable trace of water vapor.
The amount of water vapor found in a given sample of Earthly air is rather small percentage-wise-never more than 4% by volume even under "saturation" conditions. And water is continually evaporating from the many, many rivers and lakes, to say nothing of the oceans, which cover a full 60% of Earth's surface. Decidedly, there was hope for water on Venus if even a slight trace of water vapor was indicated by the spectroscope.
Other cheerful news followed: the atmospheric pressure on Venus was about 13 pounds per square inch.
"To understand this fully," the longwinded loudspeaker explained, "we must consider that when we were living on Earth each of us carried on his shoulders a weight of air equivalent to the weight of several large iron boxes. But none of us felt this weight because the blood and tissues of our bodies were exerting an outward pressure sufficient to counteract it.
"On Earth, at sea level, every square inch of a human body must resist an atmospheric pressure of 14.7 pounds per square inch. We are so accustomed to this heavy load that if it were entirely removed, our bodies would blow up from inside. To prevent such an internal explosion, a human body demands a minimum pressure of at least eight pounds per square inch. The atmospheric pressure of Venus is comfortably above that minimum. It is about what you find on a moderately high mountain of earth."
That meant that the colonists could wear their ordinary clothing. They would not have to go about in pressurized suits of armor as the poor Moon dwellers had to do. But how heavy or how light would their Venus clothing have to be?
"The temperature," the loudspeaker continued, "has been taken at hourly intervals and found to range between 50 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit. That is a very comfortable temperature, but I must warn you that we are now on the night side. We must expect it to warm up considerably as this part of Venus rotates under the Sun."
The real punch of their "morning" newscast was saved for the last. "It has been ascertained that the carbon-dioxide respirators we have brought with us will function very well. Line up for respirators in stores, those of you who wish to go outside."
Of 300 passengers on board the Ark, 293 applied for respirators. Those who didn't were babies and nursing mothers.
Tal and Ben were lucky enough to get far forward in the long line. "Keep close to the ship," they were cautioned as they were handed their respirators. They promised, and walked over to the door to the airlock, where a guard had been stationed to see that everyone had a respirator.
"Don't put your respirators on," the guard was continually saying. "You will be breathing normal air in the airlock. Don't put them on. Wait for the green light."
They waited in the airlock until ten people had been admitted-all that the little chamber would comfortably hold. Finally, the inside door closed, and the green light came on. They put on their respirators. The outer door opened; they rushed outside. They were standing on the soil of Venus. Actually standing on Venus!
It was a tremendous moment, but they couldn't talk about it because of the respirators, which fitted snugly around the nostrils and mouth. They were cut off from all communication with each other and with the other colonists emerging through the Ark's airlock.
Tal took a few short steps and then shuffled back again. He seemed to be walking through sand. He stooped, brought up a handful and allowed it to trickle through his fingers. Sand all right. There wasn't much else he could learn about the planet then.
Nights on Venus were good and dark. No moonlight; Venus didn't possess even one small satellite. However, you could see stars; they looked about as bright as stars seen from Earth. Tal remembered that some theorists had speculated the clouds of Venus would be so thick that not even the Sun would be able to break through and dwellers on this planet would be condemned to perpetual darkness. That simply wasn't so; the stars were glorious.
Tal was startled to recognize familiar constellations. For an instant he wondered if their trip had been a costly hoax, and they were back on Earth again. Then he recognized the answer. The stars are so enormously far away in comparison with insignificant planetary distances that the grouping of the constellations would not be altered in the least. So they would still enjoy the same beloved groups that they had on Earth: the Bear, the Dipper, the Swan, the Bull, the Scorpion, Orion, the Great Square of Pegasus, and all the rest. The familiar stars would prove a great comfort when they grew homesick for Earth, as they inevitably must.
One of the stars shone so brilliantly that Tal was sure it was a planet. It took him several minutes to recognize it. Earth! Only Earth could be as bright from Venus as Venus appeared from Earth. Mars and Jupiter would be less conspicuous than they were from Earth. Mercury would be brighter than back home, but little Mercury was always close to the Sun and hard to see.
As their eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, they could see other things. Not very much, but they could make out the outlines of fellow passengers and sense the huge shape of the Ark itself as a blackness even blacker than the night around them. Venus was a wholly silent world. The only sounds to be heard were the scrunchings and swishings of people walking through the loose sand.
And Venus seemed to be a very tame world. Nothing whatsoever had happened since they left their spaceship except that a little wind had sprung up and was blowing gently against their cheeks. It was as balmy as a tropical night back home. Tal and Ben didn't walk around very much; just stood close to the spaceship as they had promised, looking up at the stars and drinking it all in. Venus seemed wonderful to them during those first few minutes. And then it happened.
The sky seemed to be growing light. Tal was sure it was the beginning of sunrise. He carefully noted the exact hour, minute, and second on the luminous dials of his watch and filed the data in his mind for future reference.
This sunrise began, like the sunrises he had seen on Earth, with a glow in the sky. For a long time nothing much happened except that the glow got bigger. Then he saw that there were clouds within it and that they were tinged with rosy light. Carbon-dioxide clouds, maybe, but they looked just like the fleecy clouds of home. The lighted area spread, and finally the enormous head of the Sun poked up. Tal caught his breath at that sight!
Even when very little of the Sun's disc was visible, he could sense the size of it. It would be bigger by far than the Sun had ever appeared on Earth-half again as large in diameter, he estimated from the relative distances of the two planets. And from her huge Sun, Venus would receive about twice the radiation that distant Earth received. Yes, it could very well grow hot here.
The Sun rose in the heavens with a pace that made a snail's gait seem like a racing jet. The planet's slow rotation! If a Venusian day was around a month long, as Earthly astronomers had conjectured, the Sun would be two weeks in traveling from one side of the sky to the other. But even at this snail's pace, the light gradually increased until they could make out their surroundings.
It came as a shock of disappointment to Tal that there was nothing to see but sand. Mustard-yellow sand, not too fine, not too coarse, spread out in a flat plain as far as the eye could follow it. Along the horizon, just barely visible faint orange splotches that might possibly be mountains. Nothing else. No lakes or rivers. No trees or shrubs, not even a tuft of grass. A clear, dry atmosphere; not the faintest indication of water. Venus was a desert all right.
The wind, so soft and balmy during the darkness, was increasing in strength. The yellow sand eddied and swirled in small gusts, which grew larger and larger. Soon they were as tall as a man and spinning like whirling dervishes.
Without warning, the wind increased to a gale. The gritty sand scrubbed their faces as they raced for the shelter of the Ark. They had to wait in line; a bottleneck had developed in the airlock. Women and children were admitted first, while the men stood back to wait their turn, exposed to the entire fury of the Venusian tornado.
The wind howled. It shrieked. The sound fell to a low moan, then rose in pitch to a tormented screech. The whirling sand demons shot up into unbelievable columns fifty and a hundred feet high.
Just the fringe of the whirlwind caught the two boys. Dashed against the metal wall of the Ark, they were pinned there as helplessly as insects. The pressure was so great they could scarcely breathe. But they were lucky.
Tal happened to glimpse one man who was lifted right off his feet and through the air. He was sucked up into one of the gigantic sand funnels. Tal shuddered as he thought of what would happen to the poor fellow in that thing.
A few women at a time were being admitted into the airlock. Somehow the door managed to get closed after each quota. Somehow it managed to open again to admit ten more. But the Ark was quivering throughout its vast length as the wind continued its terrible keening.
Decidedly, there was nothing gentle about a Venusian sunrise.

EXPLORING A NEW WORLD

Tal never remembered how they had managed to get back inside. He and Ben had become involved with a man whose leg had been broken. He was suffering quite a bit of pain, and they tried to be gentle when they lifted him. Why all three of them weren't blown away, why everybody wasn't blown away or sucked up into the sand funnels, was something impossible to understand.
Actually, they came out of it rather well. Only two men and a woman were missing. Their bodies were never found although an extensive search was made for them immediately after the wind had died down. Nobody ever expressed hope that they would still be alive.
After blowing hard for about two Earthly hours, the storm swept on and left them in a marvelous calm. The ship's "weatherologists," amateur and professional, had a wonderful time inventing theories about what had caused the tornado. The most generally accepted theory was that it had started "east" in a zone of the planet previously warmed by the sun. When the convection currents set up by the warm air met the cooler air of the night side, a battle royal resulted.
It was also believed that such storms would be a regular morning feature of this planet's weather and that the terrible turbulence might well account for the electrical conditions they had encountered in the outer layer of atmosphere. The restless gases of the atmosphere must be continually brushing electrons away from their atoms and molecules.
Whether or not the wind and electrical storms were related, between them they had given the Ark a beating. Until her Thrust-tubes had been thoroughly cleaned and rejuvenated, it would not be safe to try to lift her. For the time being they were stuck in the middle of the desert, assuming that there was anything but desert on this not-too-pleasant planet.
Tal and Ben, Jack and Joe Zimmer, volunteered for scout duty with the two Doves. Their offers were not accepted. The colony's governing council was of the opinion that the scout fliers should not be risked until more had been learned about conditions on the outside.
How hot was it going to get, for instance. The four pilots fretted; even Ben was in a fever of impatience to get out of the "chicken coop," as they had taken to calling their spaceship. They wanted to learn about Venus, and they weren't allowed to step outside. A whole Earthly day went by, two, three, and even four. Nothing happened. Their biggest event was the time when the Sun crossed the meridian.
Tal carefully clocked the minute of noon and subtracted from it the time of sunrise. The interval between dawn and noon was equivalent to 7 days, 1 hour, and 12 minutes of Earth time. However, you couldn't figure from that what the length of the whole day would be. On Earth, the Sun rises at different times throughout the year.
It grew steadily hotter outside, but by no means as hot as had been anticipated. When the Sun was on the meridian, the temperature was only 110° Fahrenheit.
Not unbearable? Just wait, argued the ship's pessimists. If the carbon-dioxide blanket above their heads was functioning as a heat trap, as had been expected on Earth, no telling to what the thermometer could rise before the long day ended.
Anyway, the Ark stayed comfortable; she had been designed and built to take the roasting of interplanetary space.
The two large telescopes of the ship were lowered toward the horizon to focus upon the orange splotches that Tal had noted during the early moments of sunrise. They were mountains, as he had surmised. But little comfort could be found in that fact; the telescopes showed the orange-red rocks to be as arid and barren as the wind-swept sands. There was no trace of animal or vegetable life, no sign of water.
Despite the optimism of the spectroscope, most colonists were of the opinion that water would never be found here in its natural state. However, they had come prepared to get water the hard way; that is, by heating crushed gypsum and distilling the water vapor given off. But would there be any gypsum?
The four pilots of the two Doves made their common viewpoint known to the governing council. The way to find gypsum was to go look for it, they said. After some hesitation, and only when it was ascertained that the temperature was no more than 130 in the shade by "two o'clock" Venus time, the Dove II was allowed to fly. Her objective was the exact opposite of the bird that Noah had sent forth, since she was to find water, not land. They had all the land they wanted at present.
Tal and Ben fumed over their unemployment, but it did them no good. The governing council stood firm. One rocket flier was enough to risk at a time. Wait and see what the other dove would bring back in her beak.
The dove brought back, not an olive branch, but various mineral specimens, mostly red or orange, from the distant mountains. A clamor set up when these specimens were unbagged. Didn't the Zimmer twins have sense enough to know that gypsum was usually white? Why didn't they bring back white rocks? The twins retorted that they would have been only too happy to have done so-if they had found any. Their unlikely specimens were analyzed in the chemical laboratory and reported to be silicates of various kinds, much the same as the mustard sands. The orange-red color of the mountain rocks was due, obviously, to the presence of iron oxide. Apparently a whole mountain range of iron was available on Venus for the taking. But iron wasn't wanted just then.
After another Earth day, and when the temperature instead of mounting to that of boiling water, as the pessimists had predicted, had actually slid down to a cool 125, Tal and Ben were given permission to take out the Dove I and fly beyond the orange mountains. They honored the thermometer by donning only bathing trunks, shoes, and dark-green goggles. They greased their bodies thoroughly for protection against the fierce sun in case they should be forced to spend any time in the open. Then they wheeled the rocket ship outside on her special dolly, lifted her from her horizontal storage position to the vertical, fueled her, and were off.
It was wonderful to be in the air again, even if this air was mostly carbon dioxide. Having brought their own atmosphere in the sealed cockpit, they didn't need to wear the uncomfortable respirators and could talk to each other over the intercom.
The orange mountains weren't their assignment, but they cruised up and down them for a few minutes in search of a tell-tale gleam of white. The bright-orange spires and minarets reminded Tal of Bryce Canyon, one of Nusa's most famous national parks. It was thrilling scenery, but not what they were looking for.
Beyond the range was more sand. Whoever had designed the surface of Venus had been rather unimaginative. Ben kept a watchful eye on the fuel gauges, as they continued across the sandy plain in the direction that the slowly lowering Sun said was "west." (Their compass didn't confirm it.)
Tal spotted a white line at the edge of the horizon. "Ben!" he called excitedly into the transmitter. "Slow down. Something interesting ahead."
Ben had seen it, too, and was already slowing down. At their speed, it was only seconds until they reached the spot and were flying over what appeared to be another bank of clouds. But clouds below them-on the ground-instead of in the sky.
Decidedly, Tal thought, this should be investigated. "How's the fuel?" he asked. "Can we risk a landing?"
Ben thought so. "Not on that fog, though."
Abruptly the Dove went from horizontal to vertical -Ben never wasted time when he had decided upon a landing-and began to fall Venusward. Ben let her drop until almost the last minute, then shot out the flame. It licked out at the ground and braked them with the beautiful precision of all of Ben's landings. The Dove stood on her ring, not more than ten feet from the edge of the cloudbank. They practically fell down the ladder in their haste to get out.
The clouds were perhaps a hundred or two hundred feet below them. They were hiding the lower part of an enormous canyon, with almost perpendicular walls. "Wall," Tal corrected himself, realizing that he couldn't see across the canyon. The clouds-if they were clouds -extended as far as he could see. And in the lengthwise directions, the canyon also continued indefinitely. There was no visible end to it.
Tal quickly revised his previous thought about the design of Venus. This canyon was a tremendous idea of creation! For all he could tell, it might well be ten times the size of the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. And if it were ten times the Grand Canyon, in all dimensions, it would be two thousand miles long, say a hundred and fifty miles wide and-the sheer wonder of the thought made him catch his breath-ten miles deep.
Could the canyon be anywhere near that big? He had no way, of course, of judging the cloud-veiled depth, but he had been able to see quite an extent of the surface area while they were in the air. As far as width and length were concerned, this canyon might very well be as big as ten times the Grand Canyon. And somehow he felt that it would prove to be proportionately deep, too.
It was then that in his mind he christened it "the Gash." What did the dictionary say a gash was? A deep and long cut. That's just what this was: a deep and long wound in the barren surface of Venus.
When Tal leaned over to get a better look at the clouds, his goggles misted. His bare skin felt the touch of moisture. "Water!" he tried to cry but couldn't because of the respirator. Ben suddenly slapped his shoulder. Ben knew! There was water in those far-down clouds. Ben had made the same tremendous discovery.
They had to talk about it, and there was only one way. They climbed back up to the sealed cockpit of their rocket and tore off their respirators. "Water!" they both shouted at the same instant.
"Think what this means!"
"Better than any amount of gypsum."
"Let's fly down and see what it's like under the clouds."
"Not enough fuel," objected the more cautious Ben. "Too close to the no-return point. The Ark ought to be moved up here to give us a base on the rim."
Tal conceded the wisdom of that. He revealed his wild guess about the size of the Gash. Ben advised him to scale it down a bit.
"Say only a hundred miles wide and a thousand miles long. It's still a pretty big ditch. Do you know, Tal, those clouds puzzle me. How did they escape being sucked up by the morning tornado?"
"Can't imagine," said Tal.
"Only one way to account for it: they weren't here then. My guess is they are drawn up during the day and condense at night. Rain! It must rain for nearly two weeks solid down there at the bottom."
"Then when the sun gets up, it starts to evaporate the water?"
"Right. The clouds boil up, but they never make it to the top. Oh, maybe just enough to account for the trace of water vapor the spectroscope showed. The sun sets; the temperature drops, and the cycle starts all over again. That's how I figure it."
"What do you suppose is down there underneath the clouds?" Tal asked in wonderment.
"You name it," Ben told him. "Might be anything."

DOWN IN THE GASH

Noah's dove with the olive branch probably did not receive anything like the jubilant welcome that Tal and Ben got upon their return to the Ark. They were thumped upon the shoulders so many times that Tal's back was sore. They were lifted up bodily and carried around the lounge room at the head of a triumphal procession. They were stood on a table and asked to make speeches.
As a climax to all the hullabaloo, they were invited into the control room for a private session with the governing council. Here their admirers could not follow them since passengers were still barred from the ship's nose except on special invitation. The nine members of the council sat at a long table that had been put up between the instrument wall and the transparent dome. They could look out on the surface of Venus while they governed, which was more than anybody else on the ship could do.
As chairman of the council, Mr. Telford sat at the end of the table and presided over the session with the traditional gavel. Four of the ship's officers sat on one side of the table; four colonists from the Cumchagwa on the other. The officers represented were the Exec, the navigator, one of the two pilots, and the radio officer.
The four colonists, all elderly men, had been Mr. Tel-ford's closest associates in the building of the Ark. Their names were Zimmer, Nisaki, Levi, and O'Hara. Like the Telfords, they were all descendants of the FFC- first families of the Cumchagwa.
Julius Zimmer was the father of Tal's fellow pilots Joe and Jack. Mr. Nisaki, Mr. Levi and Mr. O'Hara had won Tal's regard for their capable leadership during the long space journey.
Mr. Telford pounded the table with the gavel and spoke the traditional opening ritual. "Gentlemen, be seated. The meeting will come to order."
Tal was invited to tell them about the discovery he and Ben had made. Tal did so, feeling a little foolish because he was sure that by this time everybody knew about it. Then Mr. Telford called upon Ben, addressing him formally as if he didn't know that Ben was his son. Ben added a few details that Tal had forgotten.
"Any questions, gentlemen?" The hands leaped into the air. "The chair recognizes Mr. Cook. Please state whether you wish to question Mr. Roberts or Mr. Telford."
"Mr. Roberts, I would like to know how you estimated the size of this canyon you call the Gash."
"I guessed it," Tal answered. "We couldn't see across it or any end to it, so I got to wondering if it wasn't maybe ten times as big as the Grand Canyon."
"I see," the Exec answered, giving Tal a rather sour look.
Mr. Levi, a broad-shouldered farmer with a ruddy face, addressed the next question. "Mr. Roberts, what made you think that the clouds you saw down there were water and not carbon dioxide?"
"I felt water on my face. And my sun goggles misted up."
"How far below you were the clouds?" inquired Mr. Nisaki, another six-footer with proportionately brawny shoulders.
"Somewhere between a hundred and two hundred feet."
"Did you fly down there to investigate?" inquired the navigator. His high-and-mighty tone said that he would have gone down regardless of fuel gauges, and would not have appeared before the council without detailed, accurate information. Tal had to confess that they had not investigated, and it was Ben's turn to answer questions. Tal sat down, a bit hot under the collar.
"Do you believe that a considerable amount of water exists at the bottom of that gorge?" the Zimmer boys' father asked Ben.
"Of course. Just the clouds that we could see represented a lot of water vapor."
"What else do you think is below the clouds?"
Ben shrugged. "Send us down there, and we'll tell you."
"Do you think that any plants could be growing down there?" questioned Mr. Nisaki.
"Why not?" Ben retorted. "There'd be water, sunlight, and carbon dioxide. What more would a plant need?"
They wanted to thresh the possibility out at length, but Mr. Telford rapped with the gavel. "The chair will entertain a motion that a vote of thanks be given to the two scout pilots."
Someone so moved. It was seconded and passed. Hands were clapped.
"May I say something?" asked Ben when the applause had died down. The chair assented. "Votes of thanks are very nice, and Tal and I appreciate it. But we'd like something else from you. We want to given the job of exploring the Gash."
"It's the turn of the Dove II," objected Councilman Zimmer.
The chair rapped. "The gentleman is out of order. Does anyone wish to move that the assignment of exploring the bottom of the canyon be given to scout pilots Roberts and Telford?"
"I so move," said the Exec, which Tal hadn't expected of him.
"I second the motion," said the navigator, an even bigger surprise.
"Is there any discussion?" inquired the chair. There was.
"It's the turn of the Dove II," repeated Mr. Zimmer, now perfectly in order.
The Ark's pilot-the one who served on the council-asked for the recognition of the chair.
"Mr. Chairman, fellow members of the governing council of Venus. In my opinion, we owe a bigger debt to these two young fellows than we can hope to repay. They started this job; let's let them finish it."
That closed the discussion, and the chair put the question. The voting was seven to nothing in favor of Tal and Ben. Mr. Telford and Mr. Zimmer abstained from voting.
The next question to be brought up was: "when?" Right away was too simple. It was decided that it was probably too late in the Venusian afternoon to risk the flier and its pilots. It was further decided that the Dove I should not be permitted to set out until after the morning wind had died away. Altogether, Tal figured, it would probably be three weeks before they were allowed to find out what the Gash held. Well, the Ark would probably be in condition to thrust off by that time, which would give them the base at the rim that Ben wanted.
The long period of waiting for the Sun to roll around to the right sky angle wasn't all wasted. They had several interesting sessions with the committee appointed to determine basic astronomical facts about Venus. Its four members were the Ark's navigator, her two pilots, and a man from the Cumchagwa who had had a lifetime interest in astronomy and had even ground his own telescope lenses.
The most important thing to be learned was the rotation period of Venus, which had never been measured accurately from Earth because of the Venusian cloud layer. The astronomical committee was also interested in the compass bearings that Tal and Ben had taken, more specifically in the differences they had noted between the Earthly east and west of the compass and the Venusian east and west as indicated by the Sun. The facts that Tal and Ben were able to report confirmed previous observations made nearly two hundred years ago on Earth: north here simply wasn't the same direction that it was on Earth.
The polar axis of Venus, the committee believed, was tipped to an angle of about 32 degrees from the plane of her orbit. Earth's equator, as everybody knows, is inclined 23° 27' to her orbital plane, called the ecliptic.* The inclination accounts for the seasons. It also accounts for the fact that on Earth the hours of daylight and darkness are not equal except for a day in March and a day in September.

* The orbits of Venus and Earth are inclined 3° 23' 38".
On Venus, the committee concluded, the seasonal variation in hours of daylight and darkness would be even more marked than on Earth. Hence it was not possible to determine the rotation period of Venus by the interval between dawn and noon that Tal had previously timed. The only way to get an exact measurement of the Venusian day was to time it from noon to noon, or, as they expressed it, the interval between solar upper transits.
These dry facts were to prove of the utmost importance to Tal later on.
The committee sessions helped to while away the two-week Venusian night, which was mostly a dull period. The boys slept and took their meals exactly as on Earth; thus, they would wake up at the time the mind persisted in regarding as morning only to find it was still night outside. Ben didn't mind this nearly as much as Tal; Ben was used to even longer nights north of the Arctic Circle.
They were allowed to go out in the darkness but were specifically cautioned not to lose sight of the ship. Since there was nothing to see anyway, they had no inclination to disobey this command. They spent a lot of time watching the stars and planets. One of their pet projects was to find a star that would take the place of Polaris, but that was impossible. The polar axis of Venus pointed to a dull region in an obscure corner of the constellation of Cepheus. The inhabitants of Venus, assuming there were any, would have to get along without a North Star.
Dawn came at last and with it the same wind as before. This time, though, the people of the Ark were wise enough to stay inside, and there were no more casualties.
After the wind had died down, they expected the Ark would thrust off for the Gash, but her repairs had not yet been completed. Tal and Ben were greatly concerned over the loss of time; they wanted to get started, naturally, and they also wanted the full two weeks of daylight for exploration of the Gash. However, there was nothing they could do but try and be patient.
They spent a lot of tune playing cards with the Zimmer twins, and slowly the boring periods between sleeps passed. Six days past sunrise, the announcement was made that the Ark was again in condition to thrust off. A planetary thrust-off was a very gentle affair, and it was not necessary for the Ark's passengers to strap themselves in their bunks. They simply waited in the lounge, occupying themselves as usual.
The pilots of the two Doves were given a privileged position; they were allowed to watch the thrust-off through the transparent dome. Rather slowly, it seemed to these rocket pilots, the great ship lifted and pushed herself above the plain of yellow sand to the orange mountains. They continued across more sand, as Tal and Ben had done, until a line of white appeared on the horizon. No danger of missing the Gash. It stretched from horizon to horizon when the ship came to rest at the rim.
The Zimmer twins, who were helping Tal and Ben to wheel out and fuel their rocket, marveled at the size of the cloud-filled Gash. "You bums will get lost down there sure," predicted Joe Zimmer.
"And we'll have to jet down through that soup to find you," added his brother.
Very nearly every passenger on the Ark came outside to see the Dove I blast off. They said their farewells with handshakes, because the universally worn respirators prevented anybody from speaking. However, Tal knew their thoughts. While he climbed up to his seat, he was thinking what swell people they all were. Earth couldn't have sent better representatives to Venus than these solid citizens of the Cumchagwa.
Ben let the Dove get well over the Gash before angling down. They went down steeply on the wings, saving the jet for landing. They hit the clouds. During that seemingly endless descent, Tal remembered an ancient story for children about a girl named Alice. Alice had followed a rabbit (some sort of animal, he supposed) down a hole. Alice had fallen slowly, in defiance of all gravitational laws. She had had plenty of time to look about her and had seen shelves along the walls of the hole. She had even managed to take a jar of marmalade from one of the shelves as she passed. Their own fall seemed to have the same sort of slow-motion unreality. Only, of course, there were no shelves lining the canyon wall.
The Gash was deep. It might easily have been the ten miles that Tal had conjectured. There was no way of verifying this because their instruments weren't calibrated for Venusian conditions. However, the clouds began to thin out in a short time, and it became possible to see the floor of the mighty canyon, far, far below. And there was green down there; not the emerald-green color so common on Earth, but a dull gray-green.
Straining his eyes, Tal saw that the entire floor of the Gash was covered with the greenery except for a shining line near the horizon. There was no mystery as to what the shining line was. As they drew closer to the ground, he could easily tell that it was caused by sunlight being reflected from a river.
Yes, there was a river, with the green flanking it on either side. The green had to be vegetation, despite its peculiar hue. They kept gliding downward, and still more details were revealed. The green color probably meant trees. However, it took them a long while to get down far enough so that they could tell for sure. And just about the time they did, the air currents gave out on them, and they had to turn on the flame or risk a crash.
That was too bad because you simply can't slow down a rocket. They had to keep moving so fast that Tal couldn't make out very much except that they were unmistakable trees, very tall with bushy tops. He thought that they looked rather like palm trees but couldn't be sure. There was other vegetation below the trees, mostly the same gray-green color. Tal couldn't tell very much about it.
They settled down to fly above the river, where they could get low without risking a crash into a tree, and followed it for a long, long time. They came neither to the end of the river nor of the Gash. They didn't try to fly across the Gash either; that didn't seem too important. But Ben thought they ought to sample the air down here before they went up again.
"With all that vegetation, there could be free oxygen," he said.
Tal poked out his head like a cautious turtle venturing from its shell. He took a deep breath, exhaled it, then took another. This was breathable air. There was none of the stuffiness, none of the feeling of stifling, that you got from breathing carbon dioxide.
Just for brief periods, to learn what it felt like, Tal had tried the air of the desert without his respirator. He knew what carbon dioxide could do. A feeling of great weight in the head, pressure at the temples, ringing in the ears, drowsiness, dizziness . . . there were none of these symptoms. This was good air.
Ben sampled and confirmed the verdict. "Oxygen here, all right. Now we can climb upstairs and tell 'em we've hit the jackpot."
He tilted the Dove, her jet took hold, and they shot straight up like the rocket they were. Up they climbed, up, up, UP! Tal hadn't realized they had dropped so far since they had left the water clouds.
This was the Promised Land, he was thinking, the good land beyond the Jordan, the land flowing with milk and honey, with "wells digged . . . vineyards and olive trees." Their little colony would be able to live here.
They could chop down some of the palmlike trees to clear fields, as the early settlers of the old United States had done. They could burn the stumps, plant their crops, pasture their animals, stock the river with their edible fish. They could build houses, maybe a little town, and raise children to carry on after them. There would be no interference from Earth; they could do just as they pleased. Down at the bottom of the Gash was a future brilliant with hope for every man, woman, and child on the Ark. . . .
Ben's voice cut sharply across the current of pleasant thoughts. Ben sounded scared.
"Tal! I'm a dope! Didn't watch the gauges closely enough. Fuel's low. Should we go on up or land? We can land all right now. What do you say?"
Ben was putting it up to him. And the decision was difficult. Tal didn't know how much fuel it would take to get back up. He had no idea. They might be able to clear the rim of the Gash. Or they might not.
The only certain thing was that if they didn't clear, there would be no second chance. If they burned up all their fuel before they fell back, they wouldn't be able to land. Without a jet to brake them, they would fall unchecked like any burnt-out rocket. And what a crash that would be! Maybe a ten-mile crash.
They might reach the top. But they might not . . . you could go on like this forever without getting anywhere. You had to decide now, before any more fuel burned.
"Shut off the flame," Tal said abruptly.
Her jet out, the little scout dropped back into the abyss.

THE LAND BELOW

Because of their scanty fuel, Ben saved the flame until they were close to the ground. They landed close to the wall of the Gash and right in the middle of one of the few open spaces big enough to set down a rocket. Ben tore off the headset and wiped the perspiration from his forehead.
"Whew!" he sighed in huge relief. "Well, let's get out and see what kind of place it is."
It seemed to be mostly forest. The trees were like palms, as Tal had suspected from the air. The green-gray leaves were large and fan-shaped. Some of the trees had purple fruit, while others were bedecked with scarlet blossoms. Between the trees, the ground was carpeted with a moist, thick moss.
Thick-stemmed vines clung to the tree trunks and climbed up the rocky wall of the Gash as far as their eyes could follow. Scattered among the trees were bushes, some of which bore white flowers, others red and orange berries. The leaves were feathery like those of the locust tree.
A purplish-green insect was poised on one of the nearby bushes. It had the gauzy wings and darning-needle shape of an Earthly dragonfly, but its body was at least ten inches long. They didn't know whether it could sting or not and didn't attempt to find out.
There was plenty of light. The Sun's enormous disc was dimmed but not obscured by the clouds. The Sun was near to zenith, and Tal decided to keep a close watch on it. He was anxious to note the exact time it crossed the meridian down here. Such information might be very useful to the Ark's astronomical committee, assuming that he and Ben ever got back to the Ark again.
"Our big job right now," said Ben, "is to stay alive. Just to stay alive. Any ideas?"
Tal remembered from the microfilms that the first action of resourceful castaways was to inventory their assets. This inventory did not take them long. Their tangible assets were not many.
Tal had his calendar-watch and a pocketknife-one of the handy kind with an awl, screwdriver, can opener, and corkscrew to supplement the two stainless-steel blades. Ben also had a pocketknife and the flint lighter that had been so useful on the Ark.
Fortunately, they were not stripped to the skin as on their first expedition. In anticipation of cooler weather in the Gash, they had donned regular flying coveralls, garments of tough, waterproof fabric that would hold up indefinitely. Both were wearing stout plastic boots that came halfway up to their knees.
They also had their green sun goggles and the respirators.
They had the freshly packed lunch kits that had been handed to them just before they left the Ark. Tal didn't need to open the airtight seal of the box to investigate its contents. It would hold at least two sandwiches and probably a few bars of quick-energy chocolate. One good meal or two scanty ones.
They had their rocket ship. It probably could not be flown again, at least not very far, but they could always return to it as a base. They could probably manage to sleep on its seats, if they had to. That was the sum of their assets.
On the other side of the ledger, they had no food except that in the lunch kits. They had no sleeping bags nor other bedding. No cooking utensils. No axe nor hatchet. No weapons of any kind.
"Well," said Ben, when they had completed the inventory, "let's take a walk."
There were other insects on Venus besides the dragonfly. They noted some unpleasant-smelling beetles crawling on the moss, a few large and gaudy butterflies, a hairy green worm engaged in devouring the locustlike leaves of a bush. None of these seemed greatly different from insects on Earth, rather to Tal's surprise. He had been told over and over again that an alien planet would have alien life forms. But who back on Earth had been an authority on alien life forms? He and Ben were the first human beings to see a living creature on a planet that wasn't Earth. You couldn't really count the lichens of Mars.
"Squirrel!" Ben exclaimed, pointing to an animal about the size of a dog running up the trunk of a palm. They watched until it had reached the leaves and was hidden from view by the spreading fronds. It had gray fur and a long, bushy tail.
The next animal they saw was about the size of Ben's "squirrel," but didn't seem to be a tree climber. Head peeping from beneath a bush, it was hard to see because its fur was almost the same gray-green color as the leaves. It had enormous ears-just like those of the donkeys they had brought on the Ark-and sensitive, quivering nostrils. When they tried to get close for a better look, it suddenly bounded away in great leaps of five to ten feet at a time.
"Rabbit," pronounced Ben. "Or maybe a hare." He had evidently been reading up on this sort of thing during the long arctic nights. "We might be able to eat it," he added speculatively.
"Have to catch it first," Tal said. "How are you going-"
He broke off the sentence, his body stiffening in horror. Something was crawling over the moss toward them: a length of hose about eight feet long, rippling in sidewise waves as it came forward. Even Tal knew what it was!
He had never seen a snake-there were few alive on Earth-but the memory of them had lingered long after more pleasant animals like squirrels and rabbits had been forgotten. Yet, even after the snake had rippled under a bush to disappear, Tal stood trembling like an autumn leaf. He did not know that he had been gripped by mankind's most universal, most instinctive fear-one so strong in Earth's children that it persisted even after all snakes on the home planet had been exterminated. The ancient Terror of the Serpent!
"What's the matter with you, Tal boy?" Ben asked. "The snake didn't hurt you, did it?"
"No," Tal admitted. "It was just that-oh, I can't explain!"
"Funny idea people had about snakes," Ben mused. "Most of 'em were harmless; even did lots of good by eating bugs and rats and things like that."
"They were poisonous," Tal said, trying, like many men of past ages, to dig up a reason to bolster the ancient instinct.
"Some were. Rattlesnakes, cobras, copperheads, and maybe a few more. Most of them weren't; didn't hurt men at all. But men killed them off just the same. Say! This looks like a good spot for lunch!"
A little stream was cascading down the rocky wall and had carved out a channel for itself through the moss. They sat down at the edge of the brook and opened up their lunch kits. Allowing themselves one sandwich and one chocolate bar apiece, they quickly resealed the tin boxes. Then they washed the slim meal down with the hot coffee in their vacuum bottles and rinsed the bottles in the stream. Tal also tried the water. It was clear and cold, as good as any water he had ever tasted.
"Water isn't one of our problems," he said as he handed the cup to Ben.
"Maybe not, but food is."
"We'll find something," Tal replied on what he hoped was a cheerful note. "Let's keep on going for a while and see what turns up."
They kept close to the rocky wall of the Gash since that was their only guide back to the Dove. "Hope we can find a cave," Ben said. "We'll need some sort of shelter for a night that lasts two weeks. Particularly if it rains all the time, as I think it's going to."
All this while, Tal had been casting frequent glances toward the Sun, and now his patience was rewarded at last. The fiery ball was "on the meridian" and at its highest point in the sky. Immediately Tal memorized the readings of the day, hour, and minute dials on his calendar-watch. Now he could determine the rotation period of Venus as well as any of the scientists on the astronomical committee. All he had to do was to subtract the time of yesterday's noon from the time just taken. Before he could perform the subtraction, however, they broke through the forest into a clearing.
The boys found themselves in a fairly large semicircular area in front of a large cave in the canyon wall. Even though they had been looking for just such a cave, they had no time to consider this one as a possible abode. Their eyes were fixed on a group of small animals tethered in front of the cavern.
There were at least twenty stakes, driven vertically into the ground, to each of which a rabbit was tied with a cord of woven vines. The animals seemed absolutely paralyzed, and Tal did not in the least blame them. There was a horrible atmosphere of fear about the place.
Tal wanted to get away as fast as he could, but suddenly he spied another animal. This one was not tethered to a stake, like the rabbits, but was lying down right in front of the opening to the cavern. It had been converted into a helpless cocoon by cords wound many times around its arms and legs.
Tal had seen animals something like this many times in entertainment parks back home. The little monkey face was turned toward them, and an enormous pleading came from the large brown eyes. Tal could not resist the appeal. He took out his knife and began to slash through the cords. Ben helped, and in a matter of seconds the monkey was free. Rising slowly to its full height of three and a half feet, the creature began to rub its cramped limbs exactly as a man would do.
Tal started to cut loose the tethered rabbits, but the monkey stopped him with a frantic clasp at his forearm. "Kornloo!" it ejaculated, pointing toward the cave. "Kornloo! Kornloo!"
Whatever "Kornloo" might mean, there could be no doubt but that something horrible was about to come out of the cave. Tal heard a sort of slithering noise, and sprinted away as fast as his long legs would carry him. Ben followed closely, with the monkey trailing at their rear.
When he reached the edge of the clearing, Tal paused to look back, and was sorry for it forever afterwards. Coming out from the cave was an enormous serpent. The terrible horned head was reared high in the air, ready to swoop down on the helpless rabbits.
The gaping jaws were opened wide enough to swallow a cow.

GUK

Tal never knew what happened immediately afterwards. His mind blanked out for a few minutes, as if the shock were too horrible for memory to retain. His mind, but not his body. When he came to, he was still running and far from the clearing. His heart was thumping frantically, and he knew he couldn't run another step. He sank exhausted to the moss and tried to get his breath back.
Ben came up panting and flopped down beside him. Neither of them was able to talk for a few minutes.
"I was never so scared in my life," Tal confessed finally. "Did you see what came out of that cave?"
"I saw it," Ben said. "Pretty big."
"Big!" Tal exclaimed. "That's not the word for it! I bet it was two hundred feet long!"
"Might be," Ben agreed. "We only saw about twenty feet of it, but most of it could have been in the cave."
"Did they have snakes that size back on Earth? In the old days?"
"Not that big. They had some big ones, though, in the jungles of Burma and the Malay Peninsula. They were called pythons. The record length was thirty-three feet. A snake that size could swallow a pig whole, maybe even a goat."
Tal shuddered. "All those poor rabbits! Tied there for the snake to eat. What sort of creature could do a thing like that?"
"A man," Ben answered.
"Oh no!" Tal exclaimed.
"Those cords were braided from vines. Took intelligence to make them. Do you know anything as intelligent as a man? I don't."
"But a man wouldn't tie up helpless animals to be swallowed alive," Tal argued. "The rabbits and that monkey thing-I'm glad we were able to save him, anyway. A man couldn't be that cruel."
"Nothing can be as cruel as some men," Ben said.
"But why-" Tal stammered. "Why would anyone want to do an awful thing like that?"
"Maybe that big snake is their god," Ben suggested. "Maybe they feel they have to make sacrifices to him. Keep him satisfied so he won't start eating them up. Hello-there's your monkey friend. Thought we'd lost him!"
The monkey came running up to them. It stopped just in front of their extended feet, then bowed very low. "Why, he's thanking us!" Tal marveled.
For the first time, he was able to have a good look at the creature they had rescued.
It was a monkey all right. Not an ape because apes, he remembered reading somewhere, hadn't had tails, and this fellow had one nearly as long as he was. A very flexible tail. He could roll it up and out of the way when he was running, or even wind it around his waist, where it was now. He had six-fingered hands, remarkably like human hands except for their baby size, and six-toed feet. His short fur was greenish-gray color, almost the color of the foliage, except for large white circles around his great brown eyes. These circles gave him the appearance of wearing enormous spectacles. A more ludicrous sort of creature could scarcely be imagined.
The monkey pointed toward himself with one of his small fingers. "Guk!" he explained. "Guk! Guk!"
It suddenly came to Tal that the creature was trying to effect an introduction. He pointed to himself and said: "Tal."
"Tal," the monkey repeated. "Tal. Tal." He looked inquiringly toward the other boy.
"Ben," said the latter.
"Ben," echoed the monkey. Its voice was squeaky but the pronunciation was perfect. "Ben. Tal. Ben." He reached out and grasped one of Tal's hands and one of Ben's so that the three were linked together in a strange circuit. "Guk-Tal-Ben," he said. The meaning that they were three friends could hardly be more plainly expressed.
Without doubt the creature was intelligent, Tal decided. It might even have a language of its own. He remembered the sound the monkey had made in warning them of the approach of the big serpent. If Guk really did have a language-Tal thought of a way to find out.
He took out his knife-fortunately he had not lost it-and scraped loose a big fragment of reddish-brown bark from the nearest tree. The bark was rough, but its underside was fairly smooth, as he had hoped. You could even write upon it-if you had a pencil. Tal didn't, but he used the awl in his knife to make scratches while Guk watched curiously. When Tal had finished, there was a recognizable picture of a snake's head with wide open jaws issuing from a cavern. He handed the picture to Guk.
"Name it," he directed.
"Kornloo," the Venusian said. He began to shiver as though even the pictured image filled him with terror. Then he reached out for the knife in Tal's hand and began to make his own scratches on the bark.
Tal had no difficulty in recognizing the outline of a long-eared rabbit tethered to a stake. He compared it with his own drawing of the snake and admitted that Guk was the better artist.
"Meto," Guk informed them, pointing to the rabbit picture.
"Rabbit," Ben differed. Guk repeated the word two or three times and pointed inquiringly toward the serpent picture.
"Big snake," Tal suggested.
"Kornloo-big snake," Guk seemed to be linking the words from their different languages together in his memory. Suddenly he darted away from them and began racing up a tree, using his tail to help in the ascent and climbing as rapidly as any terrestrial monkey could have climbed.
"Golly!" Tal exclaimed. He simply couldn't think of any adequate comment.
"Little fellow's smart," Ben observed. "No monkey brain. Smarter than any of the big apes on Earth. None of them developed a language. Guk has the brain of a man."
It was a hard fact to accept. To all outward appearances, Guk was a monkey-a long-tailed monkey, entirely naked except for his natural fur. You'd expect him to be as brainless as a monkey, but he wasn't. Already in the short time they had known him he had introduced himself, picked up a few words of their language, taught them a word or two of his own, and even drawn a picture, using with skill an unfamiliar tool. All the evidence pointed in one direction: Guk was a reasoning being like homo sapiens.
Guk descended from the tree with a large purple fruit about the size and shape of an eggplant. He was carrying it as no human being could have done-by wrapping his tail tightly about it.
"Sinda," he informed them, dropping the fruit into Tal's outstretched hands, and made a gesture of conveying it from hand to mouth.
"Thank you," Tal said. Guk repeated that, too, but plainly did not get the significance of it.
Tal cut out a piece of the fruit for each of them. It had a delicious sweet-sour flavor and was full of juice. The three of them had no difficulty in finishing it.
By way of repayment, Tal decided to offer his remaining sandwich to Guk. To do this, he had to unstrap his lunch kit and open up the sealed tin box. Guk displayed intense curiosity over these simple operations and insisted upon learning the name of every object. He ate the sandwich by holding it flat in the palm of one hand while he nibbled all the way around and then toward the center. His teeth, Tal saw, weren't pointed like the teeth of a dog but spade-edged like the teeth of a man. Evidently he enjoyed the sandwich, for when he finished it, he stood up and made a low bow.
"Say thank you," Tal directed.
"Thank you," Guk repeated, mechanically, and then the meaning of the phrase seemed to penetrate. He seized the hands of both boys and squeaked: "Thank you, Tal. Thank you, Ben."
"Friends," Tal said. Guk repeated that word too.
The two Earth boys held a brief council while the Venusian listened intently to every word that was being said.
"Those purple things," Ben began. "You can find lots of them on nearly every tree. Food problem seems to be solved."
"Yes, if Guk stays with us." Tal noted how the alert Venusian picked up his ears at the mention of his name.
"Hope he does," Ben said. "Not just to do the climbing. I like him."
"You can't help but like him. What shall we do now? Go back to the Dove?"
"Do you know the way back?" asked Ben.
Tal looked about him for the first time since their frantic sprint from the clearing. There was no sign of the wall of the Gash they had counted on to guide them. The tree tops were too thick; you couldn't see through them.
"No," Tal said. "I can't even guess which way to go!"
"Neither can I. When we ran, we ran. First we lose the Ark, then we lose the Dove. Bright boys, aren't we?"
"Pair of dopes," Tal agreed. "But if we could find the canyon wall again-"
"Four directions," said Ben. "Take your choice."
"They all look the same. I'm completely disoriented. But maybe Guk can help us. Guk!"
The Venusian looked up expectantly. Tal produced the bark picture again and extended the wall of the cavern to the top of the bark. Then he scraped another piece of bark and drew a fresh picture from a different perspective. It showed the clearing before the cavern, the wall soaring toward the clouds (Tal even drew in a few clouds to make that meaning clear) and their rocket ship near the wall and beyond the clearing.
He drew the rocket pretty well, he thought, considering he had to make scratches on soft bark to do it. Guk wouldn't have any idea what it was, of course, but at least he would see that they wanted to get back to it. Tal drew tiny little figures of himself and Ben climbing down the ladder. He traced the course of this pair all the way up the clearing. Then he pointed to the rocket again, extended his arms wide and closed them in a gesture of embracing. He didn't know any other way of conveying the yearning that they felt to return to their flier.
As a final touch, Tal drew pictures of himself, Ben, and Guk resting in the forest. Then he showed them all in walking position with Guk in the lead, plainly guiding them through the forest and toward the Dove.
"No!" Guk squeaked. "No, no, no, no!" In some manner, he had contrived to pick up the meaning of the negative from their conversation.
Guk snatched the knife from Tal's hand, scraped another piece of bark and drew his own picture. It was the cavern again, with the snake's head rearing up and ready to swoop down on three helpless victims. Guk really had considerable artistic talent; there could be no doubt about the identity of the three tightly bound figures. Tal got it all right. Guk was telling them what would happen if they went through the forest that way.
To confirm his picture message, Guk leaped to his feet and began an expressive pantomime. The meaning was entirely clear. There was only one safe direction in the forest, and Guk would lead them that way. But it was not the way back to their flier.
"Shall we go where he says?"
Ben shrugged. "Want to stay here?"
Tal remembered a line from an old play, one of the oldest plays on Earth, which was still presented every now and then in third-dimensional TV. It seemed to apply, so he recited it aloud:
"But He, that hath the steerage of my course, direct my sail! On, lusty gentlemen."
Guk was delighted with the sonorous phrases. "On, lusty gentlemen," he repeated.
If there is anything funnier than a long-tailed monkey declaiming Shakespeare in a squeaky voice, Tal and Ben had yet to find it. They both doubled up in shouts of laughter. Guk looked hurt, and Tal immediately patted his shoulder.
"It's all right, old fellow; we're sorry. Just lead the way."
He had the feeling by now that Guk was understanding about three-fourths of what was said.

THROUGH THE FOREST

The forest was silent. Footsteps were muffled by the moist, soft moss. Occasionally, one of the squirrel-like mammals chattered angrily at them from the safety of a tree. Other than that, the only sounds were those of their own voices.
They lost sight of Guk for long periods of time. He had taken to the trees and was swinging from branch to branch with the agility of any terrestrial monkey. Unless the eye caught him in actual motion, he was hard to see among the fanlike leaves, which were practically the same green-gray hue as his fur. But Guk never lost sight of them. Let them stray from what he considered the proper course, and he was down on the ground almost instantly to set them right with expressive gestures.
For the most part, the two boys marched silently, each absorbed in his own thoughts. Tal remembered that he had been about to compute the rotation period of Venus when they came upon the clearing and the snake's cave. The time of the two noons had not been driven from his mind; Tal possessed the ability to "photograph" figures mentally and retain them almost indefinitely. He performed the necessary subtraction, an easy bit of mental arithmetic. The rotation period of Venus came out as 28 days 4 hours 48 minutes of Earth time.
This, Tal noted with surprise, was exactly four times the 7 days 1 hour and 12 minutes interval he had timed from the first dawn to the first noon. Either the astronomical committee had been wrong about the inclination of the Venusian axis, or they had hit Venus at one of her equinoxes. Equinoxes ought to come more frequently here since Venus had such a short year.
Since Ben was still inclined to remain silent-Ben was never very talkative unless he had information to impart-Tal amused himself by turning Earthly intervals of time into their Venusian equivalents. Venus could have no week nor month, both of which had been derived from the period of the Moon. But, though Venus lacked a moon, her day was just the right length for a month. Tal, who was pretty good at mental arithmetic, began to work out how many of the long Venusian days would occur in her year. A year on Venus had not quite eight days.
An hour on Venus came out as 1 day 4 hours and 12 minutes of Earthly time. A Venusian minute equaled 28V2 minutes of the kind his watch was now ticking away. A strange world this, where minutes were half-hours, hours were days, and days were equivalent to months. He wondered how Earthmen, whose daily lives had been regulated to the natural light-and-dark periods of their own world for uncounted thousands of years, would be able to adjust to the vastly different solar time of Venus. If they insisted on keeping to their native time, as the colonists on the Ark were doing, they would have to do a great deal of daylight sleeping and much of their work by artificial light.
They would have to get some practical unit of time to correspond to the length of an Earthly day. He remembered that the legendary Indians, and perhaps other primitive tribes, had counted their journeys by the number of sleeps that had to be taken. Perhaps they could do the same thing here. ... He broke off these interesting speculations as Guk came down to the ground again.
Guk picked a few red berries from a nearby bush and brought some to each of them. They were very good, tasting something like raspberries. Tal spied some similar berries, slightly more orange in color, but Guk slapped his hand away in a hurry when he tried to touch them. Probably poisonous. It was a lucky break for them that they had rescued Guk. Tal and Ben would probably not have lasted too long on their own in this unfamiliar world.
Guk, evidently feeling that he ought to be more sociable, tried to walk with them, but his legs were too short to keep up. After making sure that they were headed in the right direction and would not be likely to eat any of the orange berries, he reverted to the trees.
Suddenly, they came upon some strange plants. "Toadstools!" exclaimed Ben, and indeed these did seem very much like Earthly mushrooms, white-stemmed and red-spotted, but growing a foot to eighteen inches high. Their tops were just big enough around to provide a comfortable seat for Earthmen. Tal tried one immediately; the big mushroom supported his weight without difficulty. He tried to break off a portion of it near the edge for examination but couldn't do it. He finally had to cut a fragment loose with his knife. The texture was much more like wood than like a soft Earthly fungus. He doubted if these mushrooms would be edible.
Guk, always watchful from above, saw that they had stopped walking and came down immediately to rest with them. He selected one of the smaller plants and sat down as they did, but with his tail rolled up. He was always fastidious about keeping his tail from touching the ground.
At that moment a snake glided into the clearing.
They scattered instantly in three directions, Guk vertically upward, the boys to the left and the right. This wasn't anything like the monster of the cavern, but it was a snake of respectable size, fifteen to twenty feet long. Its body, about as big around as a fire hose, was a dark chocolate brown, patterned with tan markings. Unlike the small snake they had seen first, it crawled straight forward, not weaving side wise. The long forked tongue, flicking from the open mouth, imparted an unbelievably sinister appearance to the thing as it advanced.
Tal had watched it too long. Now he stood rooted to the ground in utter terror. He couldn't have run a step if his life had depended upon it. However, the big snake was not interested in him or in Ben, but only in the tree which Guk had climbed. Head reared up, it began to climb the tree in pursuit of poor Guk.
In spite of his terror, Tal was fascinated at the serpent's method of climbing. It simply wound the upper portion of itself around the trunk. When a middle portion took hold, the upper part let go and reached up for a fresh hold. This continued until all of the snake was stretched around the tree trunk. With its hold-loose technique it was climbing very fast, and Tal suddenly felt a tremendous compassion surging over him for Guk. That emotion broke the paralysis of the Ancient Terror.
"Guk!" he yelled at the top of his voice. "Don't let it catch you. Jump to another tree, boy! Jump!"
Whether Guk understood or not, he obeyed. They saw him flash through the air in an incredibly long leap. He almost missed. His fingers closed upon a leaf instead of a branch, and it broke off under his weight. His tail saved him as he fell, however, by coiling about a real branch with a good firm grip.
The snake was now well encoiled around the leaves of the tree that Guk had just vacated. Guk started to descend, evidently figuring that when the snake was up, it was a good idea to be down. He ran straight toward Tal and twined his arms about him like a small boy seeking reassurance. Tal reached down and patted the little head.
"It's all right, old fellow. I was scared, too."
"Any time you two brave characters are ready," Ben interrupted, "I suggest we get out of here."
It was a sound idea and they hastened to put it into practice. Guk stayed with them on the ground this time, not trusting to tree tops in which big snakes might be lurking. He had the usual difficulty in keeping up.
Finally, Ben called a halt, feeling that they had placed sufficient distance between themselves and their ancient enemy.
"Let's have a drink," he said. They brought out their vacuum bottles and initiated Guk into the rite of drinking from a cup. Then Ben passed out chocolate bars. These were very strange to Guk, but he ate his with relish.
"Tal, old son," Ben said, "I'm going to talk to you like a Dutch uncle. I never saw you scared of anything but snakes. I don't blame you for being scared of the really big one; who wouldn't be? But these little ones are a different matter."
"Little!" Tal exclaimed. "Twenty feet long!"
"The pythons of Earth were as big or bigger than that, but they left men alone. A snake is a realist. He knows when he can't swallow an animal, and he isn't going to waste effort on something too big for him. He didn't even smell us, probably. His tongue was too busy smelling our little friend here."
"His tongue smelling?"
"Sure it was. Snakes smell with their tongue; that's why he kept sticking it out all the time. Snakes can smell better than they can see. A snake's distance vision isn't too good. You can see him long before he is able to see you. And snakes can't hear at all, not as we do. They sense vibrations through the ground. Stop being afraid of them, Tal. Guk has a good reason for being afraid of these twenty-footers, but you and I don't. We're too big to be eaten."
Tal found this advice sound. That is, the reasoning part of his mind did. The part that could only feel, not think, refused to accept it. It kept telling him that every snake, big or little, represented a mortal danger. And he knew that if another snake crossed their path, he would either run madly away or stand paralyzed with terror. He was heartily ashamed to admit it, even to himself, but he couldn't control this snake fear any more than poor Guk could.
Fortunately, they didn't see any more snakes.
* * *
The rest of the journey was a curiously happy time to Tal. They never suffered the slightest lack of either food or water. Streams and rivulets abounded, and they had no difficulty in keeping the vacuum bottles of their lunch kits full. As for food, Guk brought them almost too much of it. Beside the purple fruits, he found in the tree tops a big brown ball that was too heavy for him to carry down. He squeaked: "Look out!" (words he had added to his rapidly growing vocabulary) and allowed it to drop to the ground. It hit the soft moss and bounced.
It turned out to be about the size of a pumpkin but had the hard rind of a coconut. Like a coconut, it held milk. Tal got busy with his awl, and they drained the contents into their bottles. To get the meat out was harder. Tal looked for a stone, but stones were hard to find under the thick moss. Impatiently, he banged the brown sphere against a tree trunk until it broke open. Its solid white meat made a rich meal for the three of them.
The boys ate so much that they felt sleepy and decided to stretch out on the moss. The waterproof fabric of their coveralls protected them from the dampness. They shut their eyes and were soon fast asleep.
Guk rested between them. His way of resting was to sit down with his knees drawn up before his face and go completely motionless. He slept as a cat does; that is, always ready to spring to its feet when aroused by any sound that could possibly indicate danger. When the two boys finally awoke, Guk had been up for quite a time. He was engaged in wrapping a cord about a large stone he had dug from under the moss.
"Kill rabbit!" he exclaimed, twirling the stone round his head by the end of the cord. "Eat. Kill big snake. Kill anything."
Decidedly, Guk's knowledge of Earthly language and customs was improving.
"Let me see that thing," Ben directed, holding out his hand. Obediently, Guk surrendered it. Ben studied the cord carefully. "Braided vines. Look at it, Tal. Would you say that this rope Guk made is the same kind as those used to tie him up?"
"It looks like the same to me."
"Same type of cord, same pattern of culture. No getting away from it: Guk's own people tied him up."
"A sacrifice?"
"Looks that way. I'm afraid that Guk's people are the serpent worshipers. That's why he wouldn't go back toward the Dove. He knew that monkeys like him would be the biggest danger we could face. All right, Guk, you can have your sling back. Good hunting."
"Good hunting," the Venusian echoed gravely.
"Maybe there are two tribes," Tal conjectured. "Guk's tribe and a tribe of enemies. Maybe it's only the enemies that sacrifice to the snake."
"Maybe." Ben didn't sound very convinced.
"Maybe Guk is leading us back to his own tribe. Maybe he's a king or something, and they'll honor us for rescuing him."
"You've been reading too many microfilm thrillers, son."
"Okay, okay," said Tal. "Let's wait and see what the next sleep brings."
"I hope it brings a rabbit dinner," said Ben. "Besides, I'd like to see Guk in action with that sling."
The big rabbits, however, seemed to know that they were being hunted. With the perverseness of game on every planet, they simply faded from the hunter's sight. The boys had to satisfy their hunger with more of the purple fruit and the remains of the coconut, which they had carefully packed in the airtight boxes of their lunch kits.
Before another sleep, they came to their destination: the river which they had partially explored from the air. It was a good-sized river, about as wide as the Mississippi in the neighborhood of New Chicago. As they started to run down to it, they dislodged a rabbit from its hideout.
Guk proved then that he was an experienced hunter. He simply whirled the sling three times around his head and let it fly after the rapidly bounding rabbit. The rabbit dropped instantly.
"Guk kill," the Venusian squeaked cheerfully.
"Guk kill," the boys agreed. They eyed their little friend with vastly increased respect.
A stretch of sandy beach along the river looked like a good place for a fire. They carried a stock of dried sticks down there while Guk watched, plainly baffled by their strange antics. Lacking a grill of any kind, they cut green branches and sharpened them into pointed sticks on which pieces of rabbit could be impaled for broiling.
A large flat stone provided an admirable dissecting table. With much enthusiasm but little knowledge, they got out their knives and proceeded first to skin and then to cut up the rabbit. They tossed a large piece to Guk, which he caught in mid-air and wolfed raw. No doubt he was sure they had gone crazy when they didn't eat their own pieces but put them on the pointed sticks.
Ben touched his lighter to the pyramid of twigs and leaves they had erected. When Guk saw the pile blaze up, he ran away.
"Biggest coward I ever saw!" Ben groaned. "No, don't go after him, Tal. He'll come back of his own accord when he gets over it."
They fed larger sticks to the flames and finally achieved a bed of glowing coals, over which they tried toasting their rabbit. The flesh was charred in spots and raw in other places, but it had a delicious flavor. They saw that Guk was back and watching them. In his insatiable curiosity, he was all monkey.
Tal offered him a piece of the smoked rabbit, and Guk smacked his thick lips at the flavor. "Good!" he pronounced. "More."
He was learning rapidly.
"No more," said Tal. "Fire's out. You'll have to help us build it up again."
Guk got the idea right away and helped them collect more dried branches. He was quick on the uptake; you had to hand him that. When the fire was ready for lighting, he stood there without running. They sharpened another green wand for him, and he even toasted his own rabbit without once flinching at the fire. They told him they were proud of him.
When they had eaten all the rabbit they could hold, Tal and Ben stretched out on the sand for another sleep. Guk didn't rest between them, as he had done during their last sleep. Instead he was busy drawing designs with the pointed stick he had used to toast his meat. But the sand was too dry; he couldn't make anything in it. He moved down near the water where the sand was moist and firm. Presently he called to them.
"Tal! Ben! Look."
Tal yawned and sat up. The warm sand was comfortable, and he had been just about to doze off when Guk's cry stopped him. "Wonder what's got into the monkey now?" he thought. He saw that Ben was fast asleep. When Ben slept, it took almost an earthquake to waken him.
Tal strolled down toward the water, rather irritated. "Got to teach Guk not to wake a man up," he grumbled. Then he caught sight of the picture in the sand. His shout woke even the sleeping Ben.
Spread out before them was the unmistakable outline of a spaceship. Guk had done his job well. Even her Thrust-tubes and auxiliary stern rockets were accurately delineated.

THE SERPENT WORSHIPERS

"Looks like the Ark," said Ben.
"But he can't have seen the Ark. It hasn't been down here."
"How do you know?"
"How do I know? That's a silly question. We'd have seen it if Guk had."
"Would we? Through all those trees? Guk was in a much better spot for observation than we were on the ground."
Tal conceded the truth of that. If the Ark had come down into the Gash looking for them, he and Ben might have missed seeing it. They wouldn't have heard anything either; a Thrust-ship, unlike a rocket, is almost noiseless. Guk could have seen the spaceship from the tree tops. But if he had seen the Ark, why hadn't he told them?
Well, what had Guk just done? He was communicating this wholly alien concept in the only way he possibly could; through a picture. He had to wait until he could find a place to draw it. Maybe he felt that he had to have a broader canvas than a piece of bark could give.
Guk was evidencing obvious gratification, like any artist whose work is being praised by competent critics.
"Guk see," he declared.
Tal would have given everything he owned right then if Guk had known the meaning of the adverb "when." He tried approaching it from another angle.
"How many sleeps?"
Guk had learned their new meaning of sleep as a unit for measuring time, but he did not understand the concept of "how many"-at least not in their language. Tal held up his fingers one by one and counted off "One, two, three, four. . . ." as each finger appeared.
Guk followed the count on his own fingers. He had two fingers left over when Tal had exhausted his fingers at ten and looked inquiringly toward his friend for further information. "Eleven, twelve," Tal supplied. "How many sleeps?"
Guk made a vague gesture. Then he counted off twelve pebbles and laid them in a heap; he laid twelve more on top of them, then another twelve, another and another . . . finally he shrugged in a manner that said plainly that this sort of thing could go on indefinitely. It was obvious that the spaceship had been seen long ago. It could not possibly be the Ark.
One of the ten lost ships? Yes, it had to be.
"When did the last ship leave before the Ark?"
"About five years ago," Ben remembered.
"Guk's seen it. Do you suppose he knows where it is now? How can we ask him?"
Ben solved that problem by simply extending his finger in a pointing gesture and turning around a full 360 degrees. "Where?" he asked as he did so. You could always depend on Guk to know when they were asking a question. He watched Ben's finger complete two more circles, and then he got the idea that it was direction that was wanted. He pointed his own finger. Ben carefully drew an arrow on the sand to mark the direction permanently.
"How many sleeps?" Tal asked.
Guk had the idea of "how many" down pat now and could count up to twelve. He counted up to three and stopped. Then he hesitated, as though thinking the matter over more carefully, and started counting all over again. It came out to three as before.
"He can lead us there in three sleeps," Tal said.
"No, no, no, no!" Guk denied. "No go. Look out! Scare."
There was no budging him from that position. Tal tried to pin him down as to whether the unknown spaceship was there at that moment, but the concept of "now" was too difficult for both of them. He finally gave up.
* * *
Ben got up from the sand. "I'm taking a walk. Want to come along?"
Tal voted against it. "Guk and I will stay here. I want to give him another language session."
"Okay."
Ben strolled off in the direction of the arrow he had drawn, the arrow that Guk said was pointing to the other spaceship, while Tal got down to the business of teaching school. His single pupil knew little as yet, but had a remarkably retentive memory. Guk forgot almost nothing that he learned. Moreover, he displayed phenomenal quickness of perception. It was astonishing to find out how much of their language Guk had managed to absorb.
There were many questions Tal had been aching to ask the Venusian. For four Earthly hours they wrestled with the difficulty of communication. When words gave out, there were always sand drawings and pantomime. ... By the time Ben had returned from his walk in the forest, Tal had managed to extract a great deal of information.
"Ben, you were on the beam when you guessed that Guk's people are the serpent worshipers. It's true."
"Logical," said Ben.
"That big snake is their god. There isn't any other like it here, thank heaven! Snakes, in general, aren't sacred; they hate them and will kill them if they can, but the big one is different. If it isn't kept fed, they know it will leave its cavern and start crawling through the forest. That's the one thing they are most afraid of."
"Can't say as I blame 'em," said Ben.
"It's not only the fear of the snake. There's a tradition that's been handed down for generations: on the day the big snake leaves its hole, Venus will come to an end."
"Pitching it a trifle strong," Ben said.
"That's what they are afraid of. That's why they are so careful to feed the snake regularly. It has to have live meat, won't touch anything dead. After dinner, it crawls back in its hole and sleeps another day."
"What do you mean by a day? Ours or theirs?"
"A month our time. Guk was quite clear about it: one complete light and one complete dark before the snake eats again."
"No wonder it has to have a good meal," said Ben.
"He gets hungry in the middle of the daylight period, Guk said. They have his dinner waiting for him every noon. He is always very regular, never sticks his head out until the Sun is at its highest point in the sky."
"Does anybody wait around to see?" Ben wanted to know.
"Well, we saw him," Tal answered. "It was right at noon, you remember. I had timed the Sun on the meridian just before we came to the clearing."
"Could be vibrations carried through the ground," Ben said. "He might have heard us walking-if you can call that vibrational sense hearing-and came out to investigate. I wouldn't like to take a chance going near the cave at any time. Could you get anything more from Guk about the other spaceship?"
"Some. He and his people actually saw it fall from the sky. He was on good terms with the others then. They hadn't picked him out yet for serpent fodder."
"What made them decide to pick him out?"
"Pure chance. The snake's dinner was slimmer than usual, and when that happens they have to add to it in the only way they know. By sacrifice. The high priest did a sort of eeny-meeny-miny-moe, and it came out at Guk. Now that he has escaped, he's taboo to every member of his tribe. If they catch him, he'll go right back to feed the snake."
"Figured as much," Ben said. "And by the way, I wonder why he is so afraid to take us to the other spaceship? His monkey relatives live near there?"
"I don't think so," Tal answered. "I distinctly got the idea that they shun that spot. A sort of tribal taboo. Guk clammed up on me when I tried to pump him about it. All he would admit was there was a terrible danger there to all living things."
"Sounds like men at work," Ben said. "Danger to all living things-that's us. Look how we wiped out the wildlife on our own planet. The monkeys are right to be scared. But if there are survivors from the last expedition, you and I ought to get to them."
"How?" Tal asked.
"Well, we know the right direction."
"How can we keep a line? We haven't even a compass."
"I was blazing trees this morning. I laid out a line that will get us started. It's our duty to try."
They argued about it until dinner time. Tal was happy with the river, and since they were in comparative safety here, he saw no reason for taking the chance of getting lost and perhaps being captured by Guk's people. Besides he was convinced that the Ark would be down here sooner or later and that it would be sure to cruise above the river. To stay where they were offered the best chance of being found by their own people.
These were good arguments, but Ben had better ones. It was very pleasant here in the daytime, he admitted, but the Sun was already on toward late afternoon. What would they do in the night? If it rained all night long, as he expected it to, how could they survive two weeks of continual hard rain without shelter? And how could they make a shelter? There was nothing in the forest that would help them, at least not with the meager tools they had. They would have to find a shelter ready made, and where would they be able to find it except in either the Dove or in the other spaceship? And the other spaceship offered the least risk.
Tal admitted all of this to be true, but he thought Ben was gambling too heavily on the other spaceship being in the direction in which Guk had pointed.
"Even if it did land there five years or so ago, that's no reason for believing it's still there."
"It could have been wrecked," Ben contended.
"Probably was. The Ark would have been wrecked if you hadn't had your brainstorm about the electrical wall and the Exec hadn't ordered those cables welded on."
"They might have welded on lightning-rods, too."
"But suppose they didn't. They would have crashed, wouldn't they?"
Tal wasn't sure. He didn't think that hitting the Gash was the same thing as hitting dry land. The molecules of water vapor in the clouds might allow the heavy charge accumulated in the ionosphere to leak off gradually during the long descent, avoiding any lightninglike arcing from the Thrust-tubes ... He admitted that this theory was mostly guesswork.
"All guesses, no facts!" Ben exclaimed. "That's the big trouble with us, Tal. Only way to find out whether or not the spaceship is still there is to look and see."
"But how are we going to find our way there?"
They were back on the same old circle. And they kept the argument up until Guk returned from a one-monkey hunting expedition with another big rabbit. Without any doubt, Guk was the practical member of their party.
After another sleep, Tal had swung around to Ben's viewpoint. What decided him was that the Sun was getting dangerously close to the three o'clock position, and Guk had said it would take them three sleeps to get to the spaceship. If they were going to have any chance of finding it before darkness clamped down on them for two weeks, they had better get started.
"Well, lead the way," he said.
Ben clapped him on the shoulder. "It's the right thing to do."
Tal wasn't at all sure of it. Privately, he thought their chances of finding the other spaceship were slim, that they could easily get lost, and that a great many unpleasant things could happen. He conceded, however, that two weeks in the dark, with the rain pelting down on them constantly, wouldn't be so good either. The trouble with a spot like the one they were in was that there were no easy alternatives. Anything you -did was bad.
And when you found yourself in a spot like that, there was only one thing to do. You had to pick out some course of action and follow it through as though it were a well-marked trail. You didn't dare waste any of your brains or energy worrying about the other courses of action that you hadn't chosen. Forget them forever; they could have nothing to do with you.
They both hated to leave Guk, who had proved himself a real friend to them, but that was inevitable. A pitiful scene followed when they finally made Guk realize that they were going off in the direction of the spaceship.
"Tal! Ben!"
He took each of them by the hand in the familiar gesture of threefold linkage.
"No go. Look out. Scare. No leave Guk."
"We don't want to leave Guk," Ben answered. "Guk come with us."
"Guk no come," the monkey said stubbornly.
"Then I guess it's good-by." Ben patted the little furry shoulder. "Take care of yourself and try to be a brave boy."
Guk clasped Tal around the leg. "Tal stay," he pleaded.
"Sorry, fellow," Tal said, unloosening the grip of Guk's tiny fingers. "Tal go."
Guk wept then, actual tears, which streamed down his monkey cheeks. They looked back once and saw him still standing there on the bit of beach they had made their headquarters, a forlorn little figure.
"I feel lousy," Tal said in a choked voice.
"I know how you feel!" Ben's voice didn't sound too strong either.
"That wonderful little guy! The way he was always doing things for us, you know, bringing us fruits and nuts and rabbits. And the way he had of holding both our hands together. His tiny little hands-"
"Shut up!" Ben ordered gruffly.
They followed Ben's blazings and continued beyond that. It was slow going. Ben's method was to line up a tree or bush that was in the right direction and keep their eyes fixed on that particular object until they reached it. Then he would cut a fresh blaze, in case they should have to retrace it, and pick out a fresh tree to sight on. He kept this up doggedly for landmark after landmark.
But all that they had to go on really, Tal mused, was an arrow drawn in the sand. Even though Ben was able to hold a true direction, their chances of ever reaching the other spaceship seemed practically non-existent.
There was a rustle in the treetops. Tal looked up fearfully. But it was not a snake. It was a green-gray monkey.
"Tal! Ben!" The monkey squeaked with joy. "Guk come."
His tail was wrapped tightly about a purple fruit he had plucked for them.

THE OTHER SPACESHIP

The ship was still where Guk had seen it land. One look at her burned and crumpled Thrust-tubes told Tal that she wasn't able to lift. She had landed hard, all right; you could tell it from the way the trees were knocked down. Dead trees were rotting away all around the ship.
Her name, said the still legible letters on the hull, was Morning Star. She was about the size of the Ark of Venus and looked very much the same from the outside. Her airlock door was closed, but Tal and Ben were familiar with spaceship doors. They quickly found the rounded and very slight protuberance that must be pressed. The door swung open. They waited there an instant before going in.
"In space, that door would be double locked," Ben observed. "It couldn't be opened except from the inside."
"So somebody came out after the ship fell?"
"Looks that way."
Guk, who had led them uncomplainingly for three sleeps, shrank back from following them into the airlock. "Guk die," he explained. Turning from the dreaded portal, he surveyed the wrecked trees and the forest beyond them. Then he looked sadly away as though seeing death in that direction, too. "Guk die," he said again.
"Guk not die," Tal denied emphatically. "With Tal and Ben, Guk safe as houses. Come on in and see what a spaceship looks like."
Reluctantly, the monkey followed them. As they stepped across the threshold, however, the ceiling light in the airlock turned on automatically. The sudden burst of illumination was too drastic a test for Guk's courage. He turned and ran outside.
They waited in the little chamber for him to come back to them, as he always did sooner or later. While they were waiting, they opened the inner door, which also yielded to a touch at the right spot. More lights came on in the room beyond as soon as the door opened.
"Looks like somebody survived, all right," Ben declared. "Shouldn't think the electrical system would be working this well after a crash landing."
"Not if her generator had to take the overload ours did in the ionosphere," Tal concurred. "Shall we wait any longer for Guk?"
Ben started to shake his head, but at that minute Guk rejoined them. He had mustered up enough courage to come into the airlock, but he slipped his baby-size hand into Tal's for comfort. They entered the big hall that had once been the ship's lounge.
"Electrotennis anyone?" Tal shouted at the top of his lungs. There was an echo but no other response. Guk whimpered and snuggled close to Tal's side. His courage was beginning to run out again.
Even though the lounge was empty, there was plenty of evidence that somebody was living here. At one end a cupboard had been improvised for dishes and cutlery. An electric cooking unit had been set up on one of the tables, and a sink moved in from the galley. Wiring and plumbing had been installed. A mattress and bedding over in one corner revealed where an unknown person slept. Tal felt rather like Goldilocks when she visited the deserted home of the Three Bears.
"Well, let's see it all," Ben directed.
Everywhere the lights came on just before they entered a room or corridor, turned out behind them as they left. Even Tal, who knew the principle, found it eerie and uncanny.
This ship might almost have been the Ark's twin sister. Exploration was easy because her plan was so familiar. But the Morning Star had taken far more of a beating than the Ark had suffered. In the bridge, the damage had been particularly heavy since the ship had landed with her nose tilted forward. There was even a crack in her transparent dome, and Tal knew how hard it was to crack that plastic.
There was no one in the bridge. There was no one in the badly damaged dining and cooking sections below the lounge. There was no one in the roomettes-at least no one who would answer them. Naturally, they didn't take the time to open all the closed doors, but they shouted frequently. Tal felt more than ever like Goldilocks while she waited for the bears to come home.
The warehouse volume of the ship was a treasure trove. Even though the contents of many compartments had suffered badly, a colony of men could live a lifetime on what was left. But they didn't find what they wanted most. There wasn't a human being on the Morning Star.
Like the Ark, this ship had carried a pair of scout rockets. Tal and Ben rushed toward them eagerly and then turned away, heartsick at the extent of the harm that had been done. These "doves" would never fly again. But the drums of rocket fuel and oxidizer were still intact.
Of course, the drums were cushioned by elaborately designed spring mountings against the shock of impact. That was a necessary precaution because if any substantial amount of the two fluids should be mixed and ignited, the resulting explosion could blow up the whole spaceship. Rocket fuel was something that had to be handled with the utmost caution. Still, it was odd to think that this ship's fliers were both gone, while its fuel and oxidizer, even the fuel pumps and handling dolly, were ready to service them.
"If we could only get that stuff down to the Dove," Tal thought wistfully. But he knew it was impossible.
In the storage volume, they also found the ship's arsenal. The Morning Star carried an even larger store of rifles and pistols than the Ark of Venus. They all used chemical cartridges, of course, since these were the only weapons allowed to be manufactured in the peaceful twenty-second century. Why the cartridges had not been detonated by the shock of landing, Tal never knew, but he found box after box unharmed. For the sake of standardization, both pistols and rifles were designed to use the same cartridges. The arsenal also contained a good supply of shoulder holsters for the pistols and cartridge belts with numerous pockets. There were also carrying straps for the rifles.
Tal's heart yearned to possess one of these beautiful weapons! He had never fired one, but he supposed that was something you could learn. He started to buckle on a pistol holster, but Ben stopped him.
"Tal! Have you gone crazy? People live here. This is their home. We can't just barge in and help ourselves."
Reluctantly, Tal divested himself of the holster and turned away from the too-tempting array of weapons. Ben was right, of course; it would be stealing. He was about to follow Ben out of the arsenal, when he spied a rack of metal balls about the size of oranges.
Each of these balls was resting halfway embedded in a deep cushion, as though it were a kind of jewel. Tal noted the spring mountings and other devices that had been used to preserve the contents of this rack from the shock of impact. Locking bars fitted over each row of balls to hold them securely in place.
Tal unfastened the catch of the locking bar, noting how carefully it was made to fit over the short tubes that protruded from each ball. The end of each tube terminated in a half ring. For carrying? Tal was starting to lift one of the balls by its ring when something stopped him like a blow in the face. He remembered what these balls were.
"Ben! Come here, quick! Look at these!" Ben came back and looked. So did Guk, his fear momentarily smothered by his insatiable monkey curiosity. He reached out to grab one of the rings, but fortunately Tal saw him in time. He slapped the tiny hand away hard.
"No, Guk, no! Never touch. Danger!" "Nothing like this on the Ark," Ben said. "What are they?"
"An old, old chemical weapon. As old as guns, maybe older. I read about them in a microfilm thriller while we were out in space. They were used during the early wars of the twentieth century, before the Atomic Age."
"The trash you read," Ben groaned.
"Well, I learn things," Tal defended himself. "This was a primitive sort of war. The soldiers would defend themselves in deep trenches and shoot over at the enemy in similar trenches. Between the two sets of trenches, both sides strung barbed wire to make it as hard as possible to cross between them. The two sets of soldiers would live in their trenches for months sometimes, doing no more than taking a pot shot at a head if it popped up over the enemy trench. But every once in a while the high command would grow impatient and give the order for 'Over the Top.' They usually picked a dark night because the enemy was constantly watching. The attacking soldiers would creep on their stomachs toward the other trench, cutting the barbed wire as they came to it and freezing whenever an enemy searchlight swiveled around."
"All very interesting, but where do these things come in?"
"They're called hand grenades. Each of the attacking soldiers carried one or two with him. When they got as close to the enemy trench as they dared crawl, they would all jump to their feet and throw their grenades. The things exploded as soon as they hit the enemy trench."
"Antipersonnel weapon," Ben classified. He recited the ancient military phrase as though it made the idea of wholesale carnage less frightful to contemplate. "Did your thriller tell you how to set them to explode?"
Tal pointed to one of the rings. "You pulled that ring out just before you threw. Never at any other time. A crude mechanism inside was timed to cause the explosion just about when your grenade would hit target."
He lifted out one of the balls from its cushion, carefully avoiding contact with the ring. "See these deep grooves in the surface. They are cut that way so the grenade will shatter into fragments. You can figure out what just one of these would do to a trench crowded with soldiers."
"Always knew they were a barbarous lot of guys back in the twentieth century," said Ben.
"Things got worse as the decades wore on. Grenades were mild. They were used in the earlier and more civilized years before the invention of fission and nuclear bombs. Did you know," Tal went on, "that they rated the value of the nuclear bomb according to the millions of deaths it could cause? They even invented a word for a million deaths: megadeaths."
Ben shuddered, and he was not one to shudder easily. "No wonder all atomic weapons were banned universally! Or that all nations agreed to strip themselves of everything but chemically powered hand stuff, and even that restricted. Let's get out of here, Tal. These twentieth-century ideas of yours are beginning to turn my stomach."
"Not my ideas," Tal denied vehemently.
They went back to the passenger lounge, and Tal repeated his invitation to electrotennis. Again only a hollow echo. Ben went to look outside. "Getting close to dark," he reported. "Wonder what Guk's people do all night long?"
Tal tried to find out. The pidgin they had worked out now sufficed for fairly elaborate ideas. Tal was much more facile with it than Ben, which was why he usually acted as the official spokesman and interpreter.
"Guk's people are used to the dark," he summarized at the end of a long series of questions and answers. "They aren't afraid of it."
"Only thing they're not afraid of," Ben remarked.
"It rains all night just as you said it would, but they don't mind. Their fur sheds water and keeps them warm. They can see a little in the dark; enough to find food. They don't sleep any more than they would sleep in the daytime. It isn't safe to sleep; the big snakes are night crawlers."
"Does everything here lead to snakes?" Ben wanted to know.
And then-
"Earthmen!" roared a bull voice. They turned at once toward the door of the airlock. A ragged stranger was striding toward them. His unkempt hair had grown as long as a woman's, and his long beard was equally shaggy. He was wearing a pistol holster, two cartridge belts, and a rifle strapped across his back. "Earthmen!" he roared again in a tone that didn't sound too unfriendly. Then he caught sight of Guk, cowering at Tal's feet.
"By space, a monkey! I shoot 'em on sight."
He drew a pistol and pointed it straight at Guk.

STEVE

Tal never moved so fast in his life. Almost instantly he was in front of Guk, shielding the little Venusian with his own body.
"No! You can't! He's our friend."
Eyes tinged with madness glowered at him from a hairy mask. "Stand away, son. I don't want to shoot an Earthman, but you're in bad company."
The round opening in the pistol barrel looked like the face of Death. But something made Tal remember his father, tall and unafraid, during the attack on the Ark. He answered the furious stranger much as his father had answered Asa Painter.
"You'll have to shoot me first."
"By space, I will!" the hairy man roared. But he had made a bad mistake in allowing his entire attention to be occupied by Tal and Guk. He had failed to watch Ben.
Ben had been edging slowly toward the stranger from the other side. Before he could pull the trigger, Ben had launched himself like a rocket in a beautiful tackle at the man's knees. The man went over backward, and the pistol exploded harmlessly.
Ben snatched the pistol away and hurled it to the far end of the room. It fell to the floor with a clatter. The man, who had rebounded from the fall like a cat, was already back up on his knees and fumbling at the strap of his rifle. Tal leaped forward and took it away from him. He pointed the gun and tried to make his voice stern and commanding.
"Stand up. Throw your hands in the air."
Mad eyes glared at him for what seemed eternity. Then some of the madness seemed to drain away, and the man slowly obeyed. "Are you really Earthmen?" he demanded in an unbelieving tone.
"Like yourself," Ben said. He stooped and recovered the pistol. "Do you want to talk quietly or do we have to tie you up?" He dropped the pistol into a pocket of his coveralls and zipped the flap shut.
"I'll be quiet," said the stranger.
"Then sit down," Ben motioned toward a chair. "Keep the gun on him, Tal. What's your name?"
"Steve." The name came out rustily, as though from a long, disused memory chamber. "Steve-I had a second name once but I can't remember it."
"Steve's good enough. How many of you are living here, Steve?"
"I'm alone. Been alone ever since-" He caught sight of Guk, and the madness came back to his eyes. "Blasted monkey!" he shouted, half rising from the chair. "I'll wring its neck."
Ben gave him a hard push backwards. "Sit down and shut up."
Guk broke into the conversation. "Him kill Guk. Him kill many. Him kill one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve . . ." he stopped as he ran out of numbers.
"Why the thing talks!" the man exclaimed. "The monkey talks."
"Stop calling him a monkey," Tal ordered. "He's a person-and our friend."
"Him kill Guk," the latter repeated. "Him kill everybody."
"Nobody's going to kill Guk," Tal said. "I can see why you were so scared to come around here, though. It seems to be open season on your people in this vicinity."
Steve nodded confirmation. "Twenty-seven monkeys so far; count the notches on the butt."
Tal didn't count, suspecting some sort of trick. However, he could feel the rough notches, and there were a great many of them.
"Well, Guk is one you're not going to kill," said Ben. "Try it, and I'll kill you. Is that clear?"
Steve nodded his hairy head. "If you say so. Sorry I rushed you fellows the way I did. I guess I get kinda mixed up sometimes. Every time I see one of those green monkeys, I-" he choked back the thought. "They don't come around here any more. Haven't seen any for-say how long have I been here?"
"Our ship left Earth about five years after yours did," Ben told him.
"Five years!" Steve ejaculated. "Five years." He repeated it over and over like a man in a daze. "Alone all the time. Alone because of those misbegotten monkeys!" He started up in a fresh fury toward Guk.
Ben gave him another push. "We'd like to hear your story, Steve, but you've got to be more quiet about it. Maybe you should know who we are. I'm Ben Telford, and this is Tal Roberts. We're scout fliers for the Ark of Venus."
"You came to rescue us?"
"Sorry, Steve, but I can't say we did. Everybody had written off your ship by that time. No, what happened was that Earth decided to have another crack at Venus. Probably the last one."
His matter-of-fact manner was having its effect. Steve was behaving more rationally.
"Telford and Roberts, glad to know you. I haven't had a chance to talk to anybody for the last five years. I was chief electrician of the Morning Star. Everything went according to calculations till-" He broke off to ask: "How did your ship get through the electrical barrier?"
Ben told him. Steve nodded approvingly. "If we'd done that, we'd have probably made it. But nobody had any idea what we were getting into. We hit the clouds, and they hit us back. Everything in the book. I can't tell you half the things that happened. All I remember is fireballs roaming the ship, and people screaming on account of electrical burns."
"We were lucky there. We got rid of everything metal."
"We didn't even think about it until it was too late. I evidently didn't have any metal on me, because I got through without a burn. The generator went, of course, and the next thing I remember is the crash. That did for most of us. Again, I was lucky, if you can call it luck. Didn't even get a broken leg out of it. Most of 'em got worse than that. Got the works. Only a few of us-" He broke off and buried his head between his hands.
"You've had a rough time," Ben said sympathetically.
"The cripples! And the dead! A ship of the dead. Far more dead than living on the Morning Star, I tell you. Those of us who could walk carried them outside. There were too few of us to dig graves, but we found a swamp. It behaved like quicksand. Anything tossed into that bog went down for good. We said a service for each one-all of it we could remember-and hoped it would do for a funeral. It took a long time; there were so many. And while we were away, the monkeys got into the ship. Those misbegotten sons of-"
"Just a minute," Ben interrupted soothingly. "Did the monkeys open the airlock doors?"
"No; they didn't need to. We'd left them open to give our cripples some light and air. The monkeys killed them all."
"Killed the cripples!" Tal exclaimed incredulously.
"That's what I said. Bashed their heads in with stones. They tied ropes around the stones. Some of them had lassos. When they'd finished their murderous work, they stayed there in the ship waiting for us."
Tal looked at the gentle Guk with dawning horror.
"I was glad I'd thought to pack a gun. I got a chance to use it. I shot six monkeys before one of their slings got me. I fell down, covered with blood, and they took me for dead. They weren't interested in the dead. I had sense enough to keep still, but I could see what they were doing. They had the rest of our poor fellows roped up and were leading 'em off like a chain gang. As soon as they were out of the ship, I got another gun and some more ammo. Loaded on as many belts as I could carry and started trailing. I-" He broke off abruptly.
"Kill 'em! Kill 'em!" Steve's story ended with a high-pitched screech.

RETURN TO THE DOVE

You could not say that Steve was wholly mad. For long periods he was as sane as anyone. He would tell them, quite sensibly, how he had repaired the ship's electrical system single-handed, how hard he had labored to make the wrecked ship a fit place to live. He was extremely handy with tools; he could build or make most anything. That was Steve.
Nevertheless, the two-week night in the Morning Star with Steve was the most trying ordeal through which Tal had yet passed. Try to live cooped up inside a steel shell with a man you can't trust. Against whom you have to be always on guard, even when he is behaving perfectly. That was also Steve.
Fortunately, they got to the ship's arsenal before Steve thought of it. They locked the door, and Ben kept the key. The heavy steel door would resist practically anything except an oxyacetylene cutting torch. Ben kept Steve's pistol, and Tal the rifle they had taken from him during their first encounter. And, to do Steve justice, he made no move to harm either of them. In fact he seemed to be growing quite fond of Ben. All of his murderous rages were directed against Guk.
When the maniacal side of Steve was uppermost, there was nothing he would not do. Once they caught him chasing poor Guk all over the spaceship with a hatchet. They were able to get the hatchet away from him, though only after a tough struggle. After that, they made it a rule to keep Guk and Steve apart.
That wasn't an easy rule to implement. Since they could ostracize neither one, they had to split up into two groups. Tal stayed with Guk; Ben with Steve. The division even extended to sleeping quarters. Ben made up a bed near Steve's in the ship lounge, while Tal and Guk occupied one of the least damaged roomettes (Guk was first astounded, then delighted at having the upper berth to himself).
Ben's company was what Tal missed most during the two weeks they were waiting for the dawn to come up. He had grown to depend on Ben far more than he realized. Now he seldom saw Ben; the two groups even took their meals apart. Tal's only companion was the Venu-sian monkey.
His feelings toward Guk were rather mixed. After Steve's terrible story, Tal couldn't help wondering if any of Guk's race could be trusted. The thing that shocked him most was the murder of the cripples. Beings that would do a thing like that were utterly beyond the pale. He couldn't help but let some of the disgust he felt leak out toward the sensitive Guk.
Guk was bewildered. Tal was his friend, almost like a god to him. He couldn't understand why Tal should turn cold toward him now. What had he done to deserve it? Tal knew he was being unjust, yet he couldn't help his feelings. He labored hard to try to make Guk understand what a terrible thing the monkey-men had done. It was no use.
Guk simply could not comprehend the horror that Tal felt over the killing of the helpless. To his own race, it seemed quite in the natural order. A monkey unlucky enough to break an arm or a leg was-the word for it in Guk's language meant, as nearly as Tal could translate -unwhole. An unwhole monkey was killed immediately by his fellows. How else was he to be saved from the tree-climbing serpents? A monkey with a broken limb wanted to be killed, begged for it. So when the raiding party had discovered a roomful of strange people all of whom were obviously unwhole, they had acted at once to put them out of their misery. In their eyes, the wholesale slaughter was supreme mercy.
Needless to say, Tal could hardly accept this viewpoint, but the explanation tempered his harsh judgment of the monkey people. They weren't fiends, he realized, just frightened and ignorant savages. A great deal could be made of them with kind treatment and proper teaching. They had a wonderful capacity to learn, as Guk evidenced. But before anything else could be done, they would have to be weaned away from their belief in the divinity of the Big Serpent.
During those many hours of darkness, his mind was too preoccupied by their own affairs to dwell on the colonists of the Ark. It was quite otherwise with Ben.
"Tal, I've been thinking about the Ark," he asserted on one of the rare occasions when they were together. "She's probably still waiting for our report. We've got to get back up there to deliver it."
"But we can't."
"There's a chance. As long as there's any chance at all, we have to take it. It's the obligation we assumed when we accepted our job as scouts."
Tal didn't like the idea of leaving the present safety and comfort of the spaceship. But he hadn't liked the idea of leaving the pleasant surroundings of the river either, and Ben had been right about that. Anyway when Ben considered something to be his duty, there would be no dissuading him. Tal sighed and accepted the inevitable.
"What's the chance?" He had a feeling as he asked that he already knew Ben's answer.
"To refuel the Dove."
"We can't roll those heavy drums through the forest."
"Wouldn't even consider it. We'll have to bring the Dove here."
"We can't. She ran out of fuel."
"Not clear out. Enough left to get her up again."
"And down?"
"Think so. At the worst, we could try a glide landing."
"There's hardly the space for it with all these trees."
"I said at the worst. I'm hoping it won't be necessary. Anyway, that's for the future. Our main problem now is how to get back to the Dove."
Put like that it sounded simple. Deceptively simple.
"Guk insists that that part of the forest is the most dangerous. His people stay there in the neighborhood of the Big Snake."
"It's a risk. But we've got to accept it." Ben's lips set in a firm line.
Long ago and on another planet, Tal had felt the same reluctance because he had received the teleprint compelling him to leave luxurious Virginia Shore. But then he had only been asked to go to Seattle, and now- he blotted out quickly the mental picture that came to him.
He wasn't a heroic character like Ben. He knew by now that he wasn't brave at all. He liked the easy way and the soft way and the safe way; probably always would. But if Ben would lead, he would follow. He would do anything rather than let Ben down.
There was still the problem of how they were going to find their flier.
Steve had admitted that he had once been to the snake clearing. If Steve would guide them that far, they could dispense with Guk. But Steve, even in his sane moods, was as reluctant as Guk to lead them in that direction.
"I wouldn't go near the place," he said uncompromisingly.
So they had to have Guk. They both worked on him, and it was a long-drawn-out and a cruel business. By himself, Tal could never have gone through with it.
Their main card was Guk's affection for them. They played it for all it was worth. They told Guk over and over that without him to guide them, they would be lost and captured. They would be gone forever. Guk would never see them again. And it would be all his fault. They repeated these things over and over, on the theory that constant dripping wears away a stone.
The emotional Guk was reduced to tears on more than one occasion, but he would not yield. His fear was too strong. So they switched tactics. They fought Guk's overmastering fear by strengthening the counter-fear of Steve.
"Steve kill Guk when Tal and Ben are gone."
Guk had no doubts whatsoever about the truth of that assertion. "Guk die," he agreed at once.
"Guk safe with friends."
Eventually, they broke him. But Tal felt pretty low about it. And he also had a feeling that Guk had been right.
They fitted themselves from the arsenal with pistol holsters and cartridge belts. Each took a rifle as well, strapping it on his back as Steve had done. Ben didn't think they would have too much difficulty in frightening away the monkey people, who were already so much frightened of Steve's rifle. Tal wasn't so optimistic. He had a feeling that they were headed for trouble this time. Big trouble.
They returned Steve's rifle and pistol after exacting a promise that he would not attempt to shoot Guk. Steve gave his word and also offered to accompany them a short distance. "Just to get you started right in case the monkey plans to lead you wrong."
Shortly after the Venusian dawn, the four strangely assorted companions left the spaceship. Guk took to the trees at once, and Tal kept immediately behind Steve, whom he still did not trust. "If he tries to break his word, I'll shoot him," he thought. "So help me, I will." But Steve was behaving admirably. He never once glanced in Guk's direction.
Finally, Steve decided that he had gone far enough. He shook hands and wished them luck. He even wished Guk luck. Then the mad light came back into his eyes, and he rushed off to continue his one-man war with the monkey people.
"Queer character," Ben commented. "Can't understand how he's managed to live this long. He's a dead shot and an old hand at taking cover, but the monkeys have all the advantages. They can see him from the trees when he can't see them."
The monkeys could also see them, without their being aware of it, but Tal kept that thought to himself. Anyway, they had a scout in Guk, who was in the trees most of the time. Steve was strictly by himself and on the ground. It was strange, when you came to think about it, that in five Earth years the monkeys hadn't been able to get him. Then he saw at least a partial answer.
"His rifle outranges their slings, and he's shot so many of them from a distance that they're afraid to get close to him."
"One of these days," Ben prophesied, "they are going to gang up on Steve. And when they do, it will be just too bad for that character."
"What do you think of Steve?" Tal asked. It was a subject they had never had a chance to discuss before.
"He's been through more than one man can take," Ben answered. "Lots of good stuff in Steve."
"You know him better than I do."
"Yes, I got to know him pretty well. I felt awfully sorry for him. Did you know he trailed his friends all the way to the snake clearing?"
Tal hadn't known. He had heard Steve's story several times, but Steve had always broken it off at the point where he was about to start trailing.
"Did he find them?"
"He found them," Ben said. "Tied up the way we found Guk. Do you get it?"
Tal did.
"Steve said he could have put up a fight. He was heavily armed; he could have poured a round or two into the snake. But he didn't. When he saw it, he said, his blood turned to water. He ran away, just like we did."
"Leaving his friends?"
"Leaving his friends. That's what broke Steve. He told me he's hated himself ever since."
"Do you blame him?"
"We can't judge," Ben answered in his deliberate way. "It would take a high degree of courage to face that thing, and Steve simply didn't have it. But you can't blame him for that, any more than you can blame a fellow for not having what it takes to do tensor calc."
In his heart, Tal had to admit that he wouldn't have behaved any better than Steve had. The realization was bitter.
During the two sleeps that it took them to reach the serpent clearing, they practiced frequently with their unfamiliar weapons. The loud noises may have frightened the monkey people away; at any rate, they were not molested. Their only adventure was a chance meeting with a twenty-five-foot snake.
Like the other one they had seen so long ago, this snake took after Guk and chased him up a tree. Ben shot the snake in the head while it was climbing. Dropped it with a single shot.
As for Tal, the Ancient Terror had him by the throat again. By the time he had managed to bring out his own pistol, the snake was already dead. He tried to bluff it out by congratulating Ben on the shot.
"I had the best chance," Ben said. Good old Ben! He would always let you down easy, even when he knew as well as you did what you were really like inside.
Guk could scarcely be persuaded to believe that the snake was dead. When he became convinced of it, he acted as if his friends had wrought a miracle. He wasn't nearly as scared after that, even when they reached the dreaded snake clearing. He seemed to have developed confidence that they would be able to protect him.
They skirted the clearing on tiptoe, remembering Ben's conjecture that the snake might be able to hear the vibrations of the ground. Fortunately, it didn't-or at least didn't come out to investigate. But it seemed like eighty eternities before they had left the clearing comfortably behind and were able to lean against the cloud-soaring wall of the Gash and relax. Guk had grown scared again.
This was monkey territory, and Guk kept cautioning them to walk silently. He wouldn't go up into the trees now, which was a bad sign. Guk was afraid that other monkeys were up there watching them, and he wanted to stay close to his friends. They had to slow down considerably to allow him to keep up, but, luckily, the Dove wasn't far away.
They found her! She was still standing on her ring, and apparently all right. Ben climbed up the ladder, but Tal remained below, explaining rocket transportation to Guk. Tal tried to tell him all he had to do was to climb up the ladder and they would all go away through the air, but Guk wasn't having any rocket then, thank you, even if it did belong to his best friends.
Ben came down from the cockpit with a grave face. "Very little fuel," he said. "Less than I thought. She'll lift and that's about all. She'd never take three. Only one. Your job, Tal."
"No, yours. You're the senior pilot. You've forgotten more about flying than I'll ever know."
"Matter of weight," Ben said. "I'm built solidly, and you're a beanpole. Every extra pound makes a difference."
There was no answer to that, of course. Tal shook hands with Ben, patted Guk on the shoulder and climbed up to the cockpit. After he had switched on the motor, he looked down to wave goodby.
He caught a brief glimpse of his friends engulfed by a horde of green monkeys. And there was nothing he could do about it. Nothing at all because the Dove was in the air.

TIMING IS EVERYTHING

Tal leveled off the flier with most of his mind on his friends. He hadn't had a chance to see the end of that scene, but he knew how it would play. Ben would go into action immediately; you could count on that. By now Ben was a pretty good shot. He'd get at least one, probably two or three, of the monkeys, but what good would that do? There had been just too many of them swarming down from the trees. One of their slings would be sure to get Ben.
He was probably down right now. Ben! And lovable little Guk . . . With a supreme effort, Tal forced his mind away from those two. His job was to bring in the Dove, and that would take everything he had. Her fuel was almost gone; he didn't even know whether he could land. But he'd do his best, yes really his best, to bring her down.
He glided as much as possible, utilizing the air currents for whatever fuel-saving advantage they could bring. Fortunately, the Morning Star wasn't far away by air. And fortunately a spaceship is a large object and can be seen from a good, long distance if you look in the right direction. He didn't have any trouble finding her.
He circled, still on the wings, trying to make up his mind whether to make a glide landing as Ben had suggested or to bring the Dove down on the flame. But there wasn't enough clearance for a glide; he doubted if even Ben could do it. So it would have to be the flame. And the fuel gauge registered empty.
Suddenly, Tal began to pray. He prayed out loud and with all his heart that the flame wouldn't die. Then he tilted the Dove to vertical and let her drop. Straight down she fell. And the flame didn't die. Miraculously, he felt the always wonderful sensation that a great hand was reaching up from the ground to slow the fall. The flame held her until the ring dug dirt. Well, you could always count on a little extra fuel being in the pumps and combustion chamber after the tank was drained. But it had been a close thing.
He got down and walked over to the Morning Star. Sloppy landing! Not like Ben's beautiful control. There would be a long distance to haul the fuel. Well, that wasn't too important. He'd be able to handle it, or maybe Steve would help him. Who would think that the time would ever come when he'd be glad to see Steve? But Steve wasn't in the spaceship.
All right, then, he'd have to wheel out the drums by himself. He tried, he honestly tried, but he couldn't get a drum on the dolly. They all weighed too much and were too big and clumsy to handle. Refueling had always been a two-man job. Or more. He and Ben had been able to do it alone, but they usually hadn't had to. There'd nearly always been the Zimmer twins or someone else to help when refueling was done from the good old Ark. Now he didn't even have Ben.
Ben wasn't here! Tal sat down on a fuel drum and tried to adjust his mind to that tremendous fact. Ben was probably dead . . .
He decided to rule out that possibility, rule it out forever and forget he had ever thought of it. Ben wasn't dead. The monkeys were out hunting for sacrifices, and their monstrous god had to have live victims. The snake wouldn't touch even freshly killed corpses. So Ben and Guk would be kept alive and given good care, plenty to eat and drink, until the time came to offer them.
They could still be rescued. Not now-he could hardly hope to snatch them away from a whole tribe of monkeys, even if he knew where to look-but just before the time came. He could jet over to the clearing, land and then run up and cut Ben and Guk loose as they had once rescued Guk. It sounded easy, much too easy. There was still a tough question to answer. You could put it in one word. When?
Timing was everything. He had to land after the monkeys had staked out their victims, after the monkeys had all left the clearing, but before the snake came out. Was there any way he could figure out the right time to land?
Fortunately, he had acquired some data. He knew from Guk that the snake came out exactly at noon. And he knew the rotation period of Venus and the time of last noon, so he could figure the day, hour, and minute his watch would show when the Sun crossed the meridian. That part was easy. What he didn't know was how long in advance of noon he should land. Too early would be just as bad as too late.
The big question was this: How long before the snake was due to appear did the monkeys stake out their victims? And how could you answer that? You couldn't. But you had to. Your whole plan would fall through if you didn't have the answer. You'd have to think yourself into the mind of a monkey.
All right, then, here you are a monkey, an ignorant, primitive savage. You are convinced, absolutely certain of it, that your whole world will end if your god ever misses his dinner and has to crawl out looking for it. It's your job to keep him fed. So how do you set about doing it?
He won't eat anything dead, remember. And offerings are hard to get, and your god needs a lot of them. So you won't take unnecessary risks that these valuable offerings will die before the god comes for them. You will hold them until the last possible minute so they will be sure to be alive.
But when is the last possible minute? Well, it's going to take some time to tie them all up. And there's a safety margin: you certainly wouldn't want to take any chance that your god would come out too soon and catch you. Say an hour. No, might still be too early. Half an hour. The monkeys are timid characters, not likely to flirt with danger. You can bet everything you've got that none of them will be sticking around any longer than he has to. They ought to all be gone by half an hour before snake time.
How long will it take to run up in front of the cave, cut two fellows loose and then run back to the Dove again? Ten minutes? Fifteen minutes? Half an hour ought to provide all the margin that anyone could ask for.
But how accurate is a savage's idea of noon? And how accurate is the clock in a serpent's stomach?
"So this is where you've been hiding?"
Tal snapped out of his revery. He looked up to see a ragged man with hair as long as a woman's and a long, unkempt beard. "Steve!"
"I started back as soon as I saw your rocket come down. Where's Ben?"
Tal told him.
"Not Ben!" Steve exclaimed, shocked to the core. "I liked that boy. He was a good friend to me. Are you going to try to-"
"Yes," said Tal. He related his plan.
"Can't see anything wrong with it," said Steve, a wholly sane Steve with a sharp judicial mind. "You've figured it out well. Ought to work, too. Anything I can do to help?"
"Is there?" Tal exclaimed, jumping up from the fuel drum. "You don't know how useful you can be. I need a strong back."
Steve had that. He had the strength of an ox, and physical strength was what counted most in wrestling these big drums onto the dolly. Between them, they had little difficulty in wheeling the drums out to where Tal had left the Dove. The pumping hook-up was simple. Steve had never fueled a rocket, but he was clever with his hands. You had only to tell him what to do, and he'd do it as well as you could. Refueling took a long time, or seemed to, but there was fuel enough and to spare.
One question though. Would the fuel and the oxi-dizer be any good after the long time that had elapsed since they had been pumped into the drums on Earth? Both of them, Tal knew, were extremely active substances chemically. But the drums were porcelain-lined and sealed airtight ... All this speculation wasn't getting anywhere. There was only one way to find out for sure.
He climbed in and pressed the cycle button. Whoosh! They were up. Nothing wrong with this fuel; she behaved as well as she ever did. "Want a ride?" he asked Steve when he had relanded.
Steve almost grinned. At least it looked like a grin though it was hard to tell, coming through all that beard.
"Try anything once," he said, as Ben was always saying.
"Well, I'm going to fly over the clearing."
"You're not going to land?" Steve sounded more than a little anxious.
"Not now. This is mostly for timing. What I want you to do is to watch closely and report everything you see down there."
"Okay," Steve said. He followed Tal into the cockpit, and Tal showed him how to use the intercom.
Just before he switched on the flame again, Tal consulted his watch. Timing was everything with a plan like his.
They glided over the clearing as low as he dared descend. "Nothing to report," came Steve's voice over the headset. "Nobody-not even monkeys-down there."
"Too early. We'll have to go back and wait a few more days for noon."
This time he did a better job of planting the Dove. He set her down right in line with the airlock and only twenty feet away. They closed the flaps over their seats and locked them, which afterwards turned out to be a good thing. And it was likewise a good thing that they had landed so close to the spaceship door.
Because the monkeys were right there, waiting for them.

THE SACRIFICE

The line of dwarfish green-gray figures was directly between them and the spaceship. Tal flopped to his stomach just in time to beat the stones whistling through the air. He had his pistol from the holster before he touched ground, but he was not as quick as Steve. An old hand at this sort of warfare, Steve had fired three almost simultaneous shots as he fell. He got a monkey with each. Tal fired twice more and hit another monkey. It was enough; the monkeys skipped away from the line of fire.
"Rush it," Steve ordered.
They sprang to their feet and ran to the door. Tal reached it first. Stones struck the metal hull with a resounding clang. Stones were hitting all around them. He fumbled for the barely noticeable rounding that Steve's enemies had never been able to find. The door swung open. Steve staggered up and almost fell inside. Tal closed and bolted the door. The din of stones was iike a boiler factory. "Clang! Clang! Clang!" And then silence. The Venusians were too intelligent to continue wasting ammunition.
They went through the inner door, bolting that too. Blood streamed through Steve's great beard, and he was limping badly where a stone had hit his right knee. Tal had been struck in the left forearm, which he had thrown up instinctively to shield his face. But they had escaped. They were in a fortress so secure that it could never be taken by their primitively armed enemies.
"Let's look at that cut of yours," Tal said.
He put water to heat on the electric cooker and got out the first-aid kit. He had to snip out a considerable portion of Steve's beard before he could reach the wound. A long, deep cut, but it did not look serious. He sponged the blood away and blew on No. 1 disinfectant powder with the kit's portable blower. He then clapped an adhesoband over the wound. That ought to take care of it, but if an infection set in he would use No. 2 powder in the morning. And there were always Nos. 3 and 4 powders to fall back on. No. 4 would kill any type of bacteria, but you weren't supposed to use it, except as a last resort, because of the damage it might do to the tissues.
Steve's painful kneecap didn't seem to be broken, and the bruise on Tal's left arm was very minor. Altogether, they had come out of it well.
"Never saw so many monkeys around here," Steve was saying. "Usually they don't come within miles of the ship. Something queer's got into 'em."
Not queer at all. The answer could be simply that Steve's one-man war had grown unendurable. The monkeys were fed up with being shot at and had banded together to put a stop to it. They were probably no different from men in their hatred of being terrorized.
Violence begets violence-always! Tal remembered his father saying that. Evidently it was a universal law, applying as much on Venus as on Earth. First the monkeys, then Steve, then the monkeys, then he and Steve. . . . When do these cycles of violence ever end?
"They may be gone now," Steve said. "Let's have a look-see."
They walked forward to the transparent nose of the ship. The monkeys were not gone. They had set sentinels. Tal watched them skip off through the trees to carry the news that the hated human enemy was in sight.
In almost no time at all, a large war party had gathered. About forty of them, Tal estimated, though the quickly moving figures were hard to count. One by one, they ran up and hurled their slings against the transparent plastic. And the result of each blow was invariably the same. That plastic had been formulated to withstand the impact of particles traveling at velocities of thousands of miles a minute. Even the shock of landing-and the ship had fallen nose-first-had done no more than crack the outer shell. The inner was still undamaged.
The harder a stone was hurled, the harder it recoiled from the invisible wall. The monkeys could no more damage that transparent shield than a boy with a peashooter could hurt the hide of an elephant. But it took them a while to realize it.
Steve enjoyed taunting them. He stood up in full view, deliberately defying them to do their worst. After the slings had bounced back from the steel-tough plastic, Steve would slowly raise his rifle and take aim. It was ludicrous how quickly the monkeys skipped for cover. Naturally, Steve could not fire through the plastic. He could no more harm the monkeys than they could him, but they didn't know it. At first.
The monkey people were quick on the uptake, however. In a short time, they were ignoring the rifle, even when Steve pointed it directly at one of them. Nor were they wasting their energies in hurling useless stones. That stage of the campaign was over. Now they were gathering up all their old slings and repairing them.
It was interesting to watch them work. One very grave old monkey inspected each sling and decided whether it would do or not. Slings with cracked stones were thrown in a discard heap. Those on which the cords had frayed went to a monkey armed with a sharp-edged stone. He cut away the damaged cords, and did nothing else. Young monkeys kept running up with more stones and fresh lengths of braided cord. Three monkeys did nothing but rewind slings. Another monkey carried the finished products to a storage pile. All by themselves, the monkeys had hit upon the basic principle of the production line.
Forty stone-age monkeys against a spaceship!
Even though it was an unequal contest, the monkeys persevered. Evidently this was no mere skirmish to them but an organized war. A Holy War that they were not giving up.
At first Tal was not much concerned except for the Dove. She was outside and highly vulnerable. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to see her from the observation dome. Every now and then, he would risk a quick peek through the outer airlock door. He never opened it wider than a crack, but the monkeys always saw it open, and one or two of the trigger-happy ones would hurl their slings. Nearly as Tal could tell, the Dove was okay. At least, she was standing on her ring so it evidently didn't occur to the monkeys that she could be tipped over. Once or twice he caught a monkey on the ladder, but he wasn't much worried about any of them getting into the cockpit. He and Steve had locked the doors, thank heaven for it, and those locks would baffle them the way the lock on the Morning Star had always done.
Except for the Dove, there was certainly not much to worry about. He and Steve could eat for a lifetime from the ship's stores. They had ample water and lots of growing plants to keep the air pure. They could exist inside their spaceship indefinitely, and surely the monkeys would come to realize it. Surely they would become bored with this fruitless siege and go home. But they never did.
A surprising thing happened to Steve during those long Venusian hours they were under siege. He decided to clean himself up.
It began with Tal's removal of the adhesoband to see if the cut was healing properly. Steve naturally wanted to see how it looked, so Tal brought him at mirror. The cut was all right, but Steve's ragged beard was not. With a great hole snipped from the middle of it, it looked just like a bird's nest. Steve took a look and let out a yell.
"Space!" he shouted. "I'm getting these whiskers off!"
He went to the vibroshave cabinet that Tal had been using, but no vibroshaver ever made was designed for a growth like that. Tal had to cut most of it off with scissors before Steve could get the cabinet to work. And then Steve wanted his hair cut, too. Tal was no barber, but he did his best.
Steve went all the way with the clean-up job. He found fresh clothing-there was plenty of everything in stores. He stuffed the dirty, ragged garments he had been wearing into the atomic disposal chute. He even took a bath.
"Think I'll stop hating myself," he explained. Tal understood what he meant-and congratulated him.
Tal kept worrying over the Dove, even though he was fairly certain the locks would keep the monkeys out. It made him shudder to think what a gang of ignorant monkeys could do at the controls of that beautiful rocket.
As the tune wore on, he had a second worry to nurse -an even bigger one. How was he going to rescue Ben and Guk if the monkeys continued to keep him penned up in this spaceship? The monkeys were not going to go away of their own accord. And he and Steve together couldn't think of a practical plan for breaking through the monkey cordon.
Tal had one idea. He didn't like it; it wasn't foolproof; it might not work. But it was the only plan he could think of. And with only four Earthly hours to go, he had to do something. He brought it up again in a long conference with Steve. But Steve was very pessimistic.
"Sure, I'll cover you with a rifle. I'll shoot all the monkeys I can while you're making your run. But it won't work."
"It's got to!"
"It can't."
Nervously, Tal glanced at his watch. The time was running out on them. A little over three hours left to solve the problem that had been baffling them for Earthly days.
"You've got twenty feet to the Dove, another ten feet up the ladder," Steve summarized. "They're deadly with those slings. No matter how many I drop, they'll get you sure."
"They didn't get us before."
"Bull luck," Steve asserted. "Besides, they didn't open up until we had left the rocket. Don't just know why, but they waited."
There was a germ of an idea in that last statement. Tal decided to explore it. Obviously, the monkeys had been afraid of the Dove, descending upon a long stream of terrifying flame. They were afraid of everything new. But the trouble was their fears wore off rather quickly. Now they weren't even afraid of Steve's rifle; at least no more than a man would be.
Forty stone-age monkeys against a spaceship! And it was the monkeys who were winning.
"Blast them!" roared the frustrated Steve. "Wish to space we had an atomic bomb!"
They didn't. No atomic bomb had been manufactured on Earth for over a century. But you could wish, couldn't you?
"That would scare 'em." Steve pursued his fantasy. "Scare the living daylights out of 'em. They'd run like frightened rabbits."
An atomic bomb, if they had it, would also blow the Morning Star into a cloud of dust, but Tal refrained from pointing that out. Steve's words had started a trend of thought in his mind. A chemical bomb would do the trick better than an atomic bomb. They didn't need the vast power that leveled cities but a moderate explosion that they could localize. Something they could throw. Say a-
Throw! That was the trigger word. He remembered now. What an imbecile he had been to forget them!
"Know what a hand grenade is?" he asked.
"Never heard of one."
"Well, you're going to see one now. A whole rack-ful."
They went into the arsenal. "Oh, those things," Steve said. "Sure, I knew they were bombs of some kind, but I was afraid to fool with 'em. Didn't want to blow myself up. Do you know how they work?"
"You pull out the ring and then throw it. That's all."
A gleam of exultation came into Steve's eyes. "Man, let's load up! We'll give those monkeys a party."
They each took three grenades. Tal stuffed one into each of the front pockets of his coveralls and held the third in his hand. Steve was similarly loaded. Tal had great difficulty persuading him not to beat the deadline, he was so eager to see what the grenades would do to their besiegers.
"Save it till zero hour," Tal pleaded. "The monkeys learn quickly, but they panic from something really new. That's what we want-a good-sized panic."
"Guess you're right," Steve admitted reluctantly.
Zero hour seemed to take forever to come. Tal had plenty of time to develop a fresh crop of worries. One in particular was bad. It was bad because there was absolutely nothing that could be done about it.
His train of thought ran about like this:
Right after they opened the outer airlock door, he and Steve would be exposed for at least a few seconds. Before they could throw their grenades, they would have to know where the monkeys were. And while they were looking, they would be natural targets. The monkeys' reactions were quick as lightning, and Tal knew from personal experience what their slings could do.
Which side would be able to throw first?
He dismissed the unanswerable question. "Don't think failure," he told himself. "Go in and do your best; that's all you can do."
During that interminable period of waiting, he computed the time over and over. Take the exact time of noon. Subtract the half hour allowed to free the captives. Subtract the time it takes to get the Dove over the clearing, the time it takes to get into the Dove, the time needed to get the monkeys out of the way ... He figured it over and over, and the tune came at last.
Zero hour! Tal leaped to his feet with a relieved shout.
"Let's go!"
Several times before, he and Steve had rehearsed most of what they had to do. There were no lost motions, no fumbling. The inner airlock door had been opened long ago; they raced through it, each with a grenade in one hand. The outer door was, of course, bolted. Tal was feeling for the lock when he was shoved roughly aside.
"My party," growled Steve. "Out of the way, kid."
He had the ring out almost as the door opened, and he hurled the grenade as soon as he was through the door. But quick as he was, Steve could not avoid the monkeys' slings. He was beaten to the ground by the hail of stones that came simultaneously with the explosion.
Tal stepped over the prostrate form and lobbed his own grenade. No more stones were thrown; the monkeys were in full retreat. He went back to Steve. He knelt by the crushed and broken body. He lifted Steve's head.
"Stopped-hating-myself," Steve gasped. He smiled for a fleeting instant, and that was all.
There was nothing anyone could do for Steve-ever. But Tal carried his body inside the airlock and closed the door so that the monkeys would not be able to touch it. Assuming that any monkeys came back. Just to warn them to keep away, he tossed another grenade in the direction of retreat taken by the tailed warriors.
The explosion did them no harm; there wasn't a monkey left in the vicinity. The monkeys were licked. They had lost their Holy War.
But they had got Steve. Steve had deliberately sacrificed himself, not for Tal, but to give Tal his chance. It was up to him not to muff it.
All was well with the Dove. The locked doors had kept out the monkeys. He consulted his watch just before he pushed the button that actuated the pumping mechanism. He was right on schedule. Thanks to Steve. A brave man had paid a terrible price so that Tal could keep his timetable.
He brought the little flier down in the snake clearing. The rabbits were tethered to stakes as they were the last time. No monkeys in sight, either. His timing had been perfect. Good! A tremor of nervousness shook him as he started toward the cave. Here was he, who trembled like a frightened girl at even a six-foot snake, going up against the biggest serpent in all creation. Stop thinking of it! Only about fifteen minutes to go, and all three of you will be back in the good old Dove! You'll be up in the air again. You can jet over the snake and give him a taste of the flame. Singe him good. That would fix him all right.
But he knew he wouldn't have the nerve even to jet over that snake.
Ben and Guk were lying just in front of the cave. They were both wrapped with vine-cords until they looked like cocoons. Same old technique! He went to Ben first. Ben had been rubbing his bonds against a stone, but it wasn't a sharp stone, and he hadn't been able to get very far toward freeing himself. Tal jerked out his knife.
"Hoped you'd be coming," said Ben.
"You'd do as much for me."
Tal sliced the first thong. He started to cut another, and then he leaped to his feet. That sound! That slithering noise! He had heard it before and knew what it meant. Idiot he had been to land on the clearing! Snakes hear by sensing vibrations in the ground, and what can transmit more vibrations than the flame of a rocket? The snake was coming to investigate.
There wouldn't be time to cut Ben and Guk loose. There wouldn't be time!
There wasn't even time to save himself. The Ancient Terror held him, and he was as helpless as a new-born baby.
The enormous head poked out from the cave. It was a washed-out pink, mottled with sickly orange. Things like horns grew on top of the hideous head. The great jaws were still closed, but the tongue suddenly shot out. Even the tongue was immense. It seemed at least a yard long. The snake was smelling him as he stood there petrified. It was getting ready to strike.
Fear swept over him like an ocean wave. But in the midst of that wave of sickening fear, one quiet thought got through. Tal held to it with all his strength. The thought of Steve.
The snake's head shot up into the air. Ten feet or more, it was towering above him. The massive jaws opened to their widest extent. Jaws that could swallow a cow.
"For God's sake, run!" Ben cried.
But Tal didn't run. He reached into his pocket for the one grenade he had left. He pulled out the ring and hurled the bomb straight into the cavernous mouth. There was a muffled explosion and then, miraculously, the snake had no head.
There was a writhing, headless body. The snake was so big it would take a long time to die, but most of what was left was still in the cave and could not harm them. Nevertheless, Tal did not delay in cutting his friends loose.
A shadow darkened the clearing while they were racing to the Dove. "The Ark!" he cried. "She's seen us. She's going to land." He became aware of how hard Ben was slapping his back.
But the Ark had not seen them; she was not going to land. She passed over the clearing and went on.
"She's only cruising," Ben observed professionally. "We can catch her easy. Let's go!"
They climbed up the ladder. Somehow they got Guk wedged into a place between the two seats. They blasted off.
With a long tail of fire streaming behind her, the long-lost Dove returned to the Ark.

THE END
The Ark of Venus
Clyde B. Clason

Version 1.0 scanned and proofed January 2003.