stifling prison of his hideout, and his prophecy shook them more than they dared admit.

"It's been coming to a head for months," he said. "They wouldn't have told you at the Foundation, because they didn't want you distracted from training, but the bombs will be dropping before we reach Venus. You'll see when you get the radio working."

They kept Hanlon strapped to the radio couch, knowing better than to trust him, giving him temporary freedom for the physical necessities only when all three were on hand to guard him. They made their astronomical readings and orbital corrections as their instructions prescribed, concealing even from each other their eagerness for the day when the atomic uproar of the propulsors could be cut and they could assure themselves via tight-beam that Hanlon was wrong.

They spoke little among themselves, but Hanlon talked incessantly, chafing against his bonds and lapsing periodically into near-delirium until his first insistent craving for alcohol wore off. Later he set himself to assess their chances of landing safely on Venus, ignoring after his headlong fashion everything that had been taught him before his discharge from the Foundation.

"The Terra I missed, back in 1969," he said once. "The Foundation picked up her signals clear out past Jupiter when she went derelict. They never did quite prove that the Terra II was lost in 1980. The boys at Palomar claimed that her fuel pile went up just outside Venus' atmosphere, but they didn't have time for a spectroanalysis. It could have been an electrical discharge instead—there's bound to be a hell of a difference in potential between worlds, or between a space-irradiated ship and a planet as close to the sun as Venus."

They tried to ignore his arguments, resisting the thought that after all their preparation they might not be the first to set foot on the new world. Too, they could not lay claim to Venus as a Foundation possession if the Terra II had landed first. She had been a privately owned ship, manned, along with his family, by a reckless and fabulously rich Irish misogynist named Sean Connors.

The Terra III, which was built by the Foundation but manned by Army personnel, made the jump in 1991, and fell pilotless into the sun when her crew mutinied against their single officer.

And if Hanlon had guessed right, the Terra IV in 1998 might be the last.

They endured his theorizing until even 

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