into shape with complicated motions of their tentacles. Nine they made, and set them in space with an approximation of the distances between the planetary orbits. It was the same kind of approximation which is necessary in any model of the solar system, for no model in which the planets are of recognizable size can cope, in scale, with inter-orbital distances.

Finally the worms grouped themselves in the center of all, merging their body glow into a fair replica of the sun. And all the eyes watched the space ship while they waited for the stupid little beings within to understand.

"Couldn't reach our poor minds with their vibrations, so they gave us something solid to look at. What did it mean? That they were the architects of the solar system? Some of my crew were screaming we had met God. All I knew was that we had to get out of there while a few of us were sane. Finally I drove a work gang outside to the tubes again, leading them myself, and we got to work on the liners, trying not to look at the worms and their solar system but feeling their eyes and feeling their awful, overpowering intelligence right through our suits...."

A buzzer cut in, not upon the tight beam but upon the Ceres' communicator.

"Excuse me, Captain Hoag," the Ambassador said acidly. "There is word from Venus: It seems I have business to attend to."

The old man, back on Earth, paused, and the President said, "We'll stay on beam, Phil, till you go."

"Say, wait a minute," Hoag said anxiously. "I didn't get to the point of the story."

But the Ambassador had walked out of the room.

He met the Ceres' captain hurrying toward him, white-faced. Infected by the man's haste and half-hysterical injunction to waste no time, he almost ran to the special communications compartment.

Here, in a screen whose outside viewer pointed downward, he saw the smooth, liquid-seeming blanket of Venusian grey clouds, weirdly touched with iridescence by a blinding sun. The clouds, believed to be over a hundred miles thick, blanketed the entire planet. They might contain water and oxygen somewhere below; here, where they touched space, they were metallic vapor charged so heavily that no beam could ever penetrate them. The Martians, who awesomely never lied, had told Earthmen that Venusians existed; told them contemptuously. It would not be wise to attempt a landing upon Venus without permission, 

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