Silently.

Wheel your eternal wheeling, stars.

Darkly.

Cold.

The screens showed white, thick white, and the fuel-pumps disgorged the remainder of Vanguard I's life-blood into the roaring combustion chambers. The muted complaining of heavy atmosphere keened up the scale to a banshee's lament and sweat poured from Josh Thorn's half-nude body as his tiny metal cell grew stifling.

Power—how much power to keep from becoming a vagrant meteorite in Venus' milky skies? From flaring, white-hot, and falling ... a cinder from nowhere, with nowhere to go, the last of Earth's ashes....

One hundred miles.

Fifty. Thirty. Twelve....

Cooler, now. He shivered in 105 degrees Fahrenheit, shivered in 99, in 87.... His sweat was cold.

Ten thousand feet! Slowing, slowing, a century of time to drop to nine thousand, ease off the power, eight thousand, steady; fuel, barely, six thousand, steady.... Steady.

Watch your screens! Green. Brown, yellow, blue-veined green; low-rolling magenta mountains westward, cloud-shadows rippling, mingling with tenuous wisps of steam ... steam from the jungles of tall forest....

One thousand feet. No sign of mobile life on this planet, in this valley into which Vanguard-I lowered. But all sign—all sign, indeed, of the rich lushness that would support it, embrace it, hold it close like a long-denied lover....

Thorn sweated again—hot sweat, now—at his scanners, his control panel. Temperature again hovering past 100, but there was no time to notice or to feel. One hundred feet ... gently....

And then Vanguard-I was down, and at rest.

Josh Thorn hesitated. Baggy-Drawers? Or not? Beneath the white, tenuous outer atmospheric shell of methane and ammonia, what? Air he could breathe? Or poison that would strangle him—

He swung the inner air-lock open.

If poison, then death would be but a matter of days; the bubble of Made-in-U.S.A. atmosphere that he'd brought thirty million miles across Space had supplied him for the 

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