“Six days to study it over,” Disbro was saying. “Then we’ll have a try. If we land alive, we’ll laugh. If we die trying, we’ll have nothing to worry about. Float up here, will you? Take over. I’m going to have a little sleep.”
Through choking steam, white and ever-swirling, drove the silvery cigar that was the ninth rocket ship to attempt to voyage across space. From its snout blossomed sudden flame, blue and red and blue again—rocket counterblasts that were designed to act as brakes. They worked, somewhat. The speed cut from bullet-rate to falling-rate. From falling-rate to flying-rate. Then, of a sudden, partial clarity around it. Within an upper envelope of blinding vapors, Venus had a thinner atmosphere, partially transparent. Below showed a surface of fluffy greens, all sorts of greens—lettuce, apple, olive, emerald, spinach, sea greens. Vegetation, plainly, and lots of it. The ship, steadying in its plunge like a skilled diver, nosed across toward a wet, slate-dark patch that must be open ground. From the stern, where rocket tubes had ceased blazing, broke out a massive expanse of fabric—a parachute. Another and another. Down floated the craft, thudding, at last, upon its resting place.
Planter felt a cramping pain. He realized that to feel pain one must be alive. Then his head throbbed—it hung head downward. Gravity was back. He groped for his hammock fastenings, loosened them, and lowered himself to a standing position beneath, on the round port that had been forward. Disbro hung in his hammock, motionless but moaning faintly.
Planter hurriedly freed him and laid him flat on his back. He fumbled a locker open, brought out a water-pot. A little spurt between Disbro’s short, scornful lips brought him back to consciousness.
“We made it,” was Disbro’s first comment, full of triumph and savagery. “Help me up. Thanks. Whoooh! We seem to have socked in somewhere, nose first.”
He was right. No sign of light or open air showed through the forward port, nor the side ports from which Planter had been wont to study the reaches of space. Disbro looked up. The after bulkhead, now their ceiling, had a hatchway. “Hoist me,” he said to Planter, who made a stirrup of his hands and obliged. The slightly lesser gravitational pull of Venus made Disbro more active than on Earth. He caught Planter’s hammock, got his foot on a side-bracket for steadiness, and climbed up to the hatch. A tug at the clamps opened it, and he wriggled through.
“Wake up, you big buffalo,” Planter heard him snarling. Max was evidently unconscious up there. Planter, without a helper to lift him, made shift by climbing Disbro’s hammock, then his own, to gain the compartment above.
“He’d have died if he had an ounce of brains,” commented Disbro, pointing. Max lay crumpled against the bulkhead, close to the great bank of levers he had been working. In his hands were grasped broken pieces of network from his hammock.
“He was out of the lashings when we landed,” Disbro went on. “We were about to hit, and he grabbed hold. Must have passed out. But the big lump’s single-minded—abnormally so. He hung on without knowing, and the breaking of those strands kept him from crashing full force.”
Planter knelt and pulled Max straight. Max was tremendous, a burly troll in his coveralls. His shoulders were almost a yard wide, his hands like oversize gloves. His big face, with its broad jaw, heavy dark brows and ruddy cheeks, might have been handsome, was not the nose smashed in by a blow taken in some old ring battle.
“Don’t waste water,” cautioned Disbro as Planter hunted for the food-locker. “I’ll bring him out of it.” He knelt and slapped the inert face sharply.
Max’s mouth opened, showing a gap where his front teeth had been beaten out. He gave a grumbling yell, then sprang erect so suddenly that Disbro, starting away, almost fell through the hatchway. Max saw Planter, scowled and snorted, then fell into a boxing stance. He inched forward, his mighty fists fiddling hypnotically.
“Time!” yelled Planter at once. “This isn’t a fight, Max! We’ve landed—safe and alive—on Venus!”
Max’s eyes widened a little. He grinned loosely, and pulled off his helmet. His skull was thatched with bushy, black hair. “Uhh,” he said, in a deep, chiding tone. “I forgot. Uhhh.”
“Forgot!” echoed Disbro scornfully. “He sounds as if he had the ability to remember.”
Planter studied the ports in this compartment. They, too, were obscured by wet-looking grail soil. The ship must be well buried in the crust of Venus. What if it was completely submerged, a tomb for them? He glanced upward to another hatchway, one that would lead past the rocket engines.
“Don’t go up,” Max cautioned him throatily. “Hot up there.”
“Brilliant,” was Disbro’s ill-humored rejoinder. “Max actually knows that the engines will be hot.”
Planter clapped Max on the big shoulder. “It’ll be all right,” he reassured the giant. “Get me a wrench, will you? That long-shanked one for tightening tube-housings will do.”
He scrambled up along the levers, which made a ladder of sorts. The hatch to the engines had to be loosened with the wrench. Beyond, as Max had sagely warned him, it was stiflingly hot. He avoided gleaming, sweltering tubes and housings, scrambling to where a four-foot circle of nuts showed in the bulkheading. This would be the plate that closed the central stern, among the rear rocket-jets. He began to loosen one.
“Stop that, you fool!” It was Disbro, who had climbed after him and was watching. “Who knows about this lower atmosphere of Venus?”
“I’m going to find out about it,” replied Planter, a little roughly, for he did not like Disbro’s manner. He gave the nut another turn.
“Wait, wait,” cautioned Disbro. He climbed all the way into view, holding up a glass flask with a neck attachment of gauges and pipings. “I got a sample, through the lock-panel—plenty of air-bubbles were carried down with us. Let me work it out before you do anything heroic.”
Disbro was right. He was usually
