Venus....

They did not rouse Hanlon from his hypnol stupor until the Terra IV fell into her spiral orbit for planetfall. Geddes broke the news to him then, steeling himself against Hanlon's biting irony.

"So you were right," Geddes finished baldly. "Earth is done for. Dead." He was thinking at the moment in terms of cities and governments and cultures, and the Irishman's reaction was sharply disconcerting.

"Done for?" Hanlon said, and hid his face in his hands. "God—all the little people!"

He was so quiet after that that the others, busy with the precarious business of landing, forgot him. He was still silent when the Terra IV dipped into the first milky mists of atmosphere and a sudden great blaze of white fire lashed up from the planet below and struck her with the crash of a million thunderbolts.

The Terra IV staggered, rolled half over and righted herself with a thin scream of straining gyros. The atomic propulsors faltered, recovered and drove them on into the roiling mists.

"Static charge," Geddes heard himself saying flatly. "So Hanlon was right again. It would have looked like a fuel pile letting go, if anybody were left on Earth to see it."

There was, miraculously, no serious damage. They brought the ship down, stern first, upon the waiting breast of Venus.

"The Silver Planet," Lowe said in the sudden quiet. "It was to have been the New Earth, remember?"

It was not until then that they learned the reason for Hanlon's quiet. Under cover of the landing he had plundered the supply cabinet for a plastobottle of medicinal alcohol, and was far into the process of drinking himself blind.

He cursed them thickly when they took the bottle from him. "Go out and claim your planet, you synthetic heroes. I don't want any part of it. I wish to hell I'd stayed on Earth."

They went, prompted by a conditioning that fell just short of posthypnotic suggestion, but this time they did not make the mistake of leaving their stowaway free. They overpowered the raging Hanlon and strapped him to the radio couch again before they put on their airsuits and went outside.

They climbed down the long personnel ladder and stood together on alien soil, feeling the brief thrill of accomplishment anticipated 

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