instrument panel turned amber and then green. Geddes pressed the firing button....

Weight bore them down like a giant hand. They were not disturbed. Inured to acceleration and knowing the exact instant when their discomfort must cease. They waited patiently, eyes closed, blackout fended off by past conditioning in centrifuges and endless sessions of psychological preparation.

They were free of Earth's atmosphere in a matter of minutes. At the end of an hour the chemical jets cut out and atomic propulsors took over, shoving the Terra IV on at a lessened acceleration that would bring her to Venus, allowing for orbital drift corrections, in exactly twenty-seven days.

Communicating with the Foundation later was in theory a simple matter of narrow-beam linkage. The Terra I had proved that in 1969, twenty-nine years before, when frozen fuel lines sent her drifting derelict into space. The catch was that the atomic drive with its monstrous din of interference must be shut off before the radio could operate.

It was eight days before null-area was reached, but long before that time—on the second day out, to be exact—the Terra IV's first emergency struck.

Lowe, making a routine check of supply crates lashed to bulkhead eye-bolts in the hold, heard a frantic hammering that originated, not from the outside hull as his first startled fancy had it, but from inside an airtight drum stenciled "FILM."

He called Geddes and Hovic, more for moral support than for assistance, and together they ripped open the drum. Inside they found Hanlon, unconscious upon a litter of food tins and exhausted oxygen flasks.

There was also a whiskey bottle among the ruck. Hanlon, true to form, was very drunk.

They carried Hanlon out of the hold and strapped him into the radio chair, a position not to be used for another six days. They clamped an oxygen mask over his purpled face and fed him intravenously, and finally his impossibly resilient constitution threw off the effects of acceleration, Irish whiskey and near-asphyxiation.

He laughed in their faces when they asked why he had stowed away.

"I'm dodging the draft," he said. "There's going to be another war any day now—the last one."

Hanlon was quite sane in spite of the punishment he had taken at blast-off and later in the 

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