"All right, we'll stay." Rene spat the sentence out onto the ground. "But if you think I'm going to do any more looking, take another guess."

He tramped back into his own ship, leaving the outside port and the pressure chamber open.

If only Uncle Izzy had done that!

I went over his ship inch by inch, feeling with my hands, to be sure there was no extra door that might be opened. Rene would have laughed, but I was beginning to build up antibodies against Rene's laughter.

I got the bottom part of the ship dusted off and found nothing.

I pushed open the door of Rene's ship and asked him for a ladder.

"You'll have to pay for it," he warned. "Once it's open, I can't carry it in my ship and I'll have to get another."

"Okay, okay! I'll pay for it."

He handed me a synthetic affair that looked like a meshed rope, wound tight, about the size of a Venusian cigar.

"This is a ladder?" I asked incredulously, but he had shut the door in my face.

I slipped the cellophane off and unrolled it. It seemed to unroll endlessly. When it was ten feet long and four feet wide, I stopped unrolling. Sure enough, it hardened into a ladder in about ten minutes. It was so strong I couldn't begin to bend it over my knee.

I set it against the side of the ship and began to investigate the view ports. The first two were sealed tight as a drum.

The third slipped off in my hands and clattered over the side of the ship onto the rocks.

I was almost afraid to look through the "glass" beneath. I needn't have been. I could see absolutely nothing. It was space-black inside.

I went back to Rene's ship for a flashlight. He was unimpressed by my discovery.

"Even if you could break the glass, which you can't," he said, "you still couldn't get through that little porthole. Here's the flash. You won't be able to see anything."

He came with me this time. Not because he was interested, but because he wanted another cigarette and never smoked in the ship.

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