harm; in the valley it provided a kind of perpetual moonlight, with only a trace of the murderous heat.
*While these words were being written, radio observers were discovering-to the embarrassed amazement of the astronomers-that Mercury does not keep the same face always turned toward the sun. This wiped out a whole category of science-fiction stories overnight, but makes very little difference to surface conditions on the planet.
Whitehead was not sorry to leave. He had done his job, and unless one was a geophysicist or a devoted solar observer, Mercury's peculiar charms soon waned. When he got back to Earth, he decided, he would like to take a vacation in Antarctica . But he suspected-correctly-that he was not going to have a holiday for quite some time.
Slightly closer to Earth, Victor Kaminski was in orbit a thousand miles about the dazzling white cloudscape of Venus. In the three months that he had been here, aboard Cytherean Station One, those clouds had never broken, and had shown only the most fugitive changes of color and shading. They were as eternal as the day-and the night-of Mercury; probably the sun's rays had not reached the surface of Venus since life began on Earth.
Nor had any men yet descended through those clouds, into the heat and darkness and pressure of the planet's hidden lands. But there were many instruments down there, sending up their reports to the space station, scanning and probing their hostile surroundings with radar, sound waves, neutron beams, and the other tools of planetary exploration. As information accumulated, so the personality of Earth's nearest neighbor slowly emerged; it was fascinating to see old mysteries resolved, and new ones loom up on the frontiers of knowledge. What, for example, could possibly cause that steady, continuous roaring at 125 North, 52 West? It sounded like a waterfall- but there could be no waterfalls on a world where the temperature was far above that of superheated steam. Microphones had pinpointed the source to within five kilometers, yet so far no probes had managed to locate it.
This was only one of the problems that made life exciting for Victor Kaminski, astronomer and planetologist. Venus was a strange, unfriendly world, yet he had fallen in love with her. (He never thought of the planet as anything but feminine.) And now, to his anger and disappointment, Earth was calling him back.
He did not know it yet, but he was after far bigger game.
Two miles from the Queensland coast, the hydroskimmer Bombora (Mario Lombini Pty., Coolangatta-Motor Repairs) gently rose and fell in the waters of the Great Barrier Reef . The three Lombini brothers, and the one Lombini sister, watched skeptically while their guest made the final adjustments to his new invention.
The object that William Hunter was kneeling beside looked, at first glance like a perfectly normal surfboard, painted a brilliant yellow. However, the curved leading edge was broken by a series of narrow slots, so that from the front it resembled an overgrown mouth-organ. There were two larger slots at the rear, on either side of the stabilizing fin.
Hunter turned a wide-bladed screwdriver, and a flush mounted panel opened in the underside of the board. The hollow interior held two slim gas cylinders and some neatly laid-out plumbing, as well as a few control wires and a tiny pressure gauge. After turning a valve and checking the gauge, he carefully replaced the panel.
'Stand back!' he warned, gripping the recessed handholds. There was a sudden high-pitched shriek of gas, and the board jerked like a living creature.
'Seems lively enough,' said the satisfied inventor. 'See if you can catch me.'
He lowered the board into the water, lay flat upon it, and squeezed the throttle.
The smooth plastic shook and bucked beneath him, the oily, blue-green water slid by with satisfying swiftness inches beneath his nose. Leaving a wide, creamy wake, he took off in the general direction of New Zealand . He was too busy controlling the board to look back, but he knew that Bombora would be following on her cushion of air.
A great wave was humping up ahead; over or through? That was the problem, and Hunter usually made the wrong decision. He aimed the nose of the board slightly downward, took a deep breath, and squeezed the throttle controls.
A curving green wall rose above his head, and he slipped effortlessly through its surface into the roaring underwater world. For a few seconds the wave tugged him landward; then he was beyond its power and an instant later emerged, shaking the water from his eyes, on the other side.
He looked round for Bombora, but there was no time to locate her, for here came another wave, its wind- ripped crest hissing like a giant snake. Again he dived into the luminous green underworld, feeding the tiny hydrojets a three-second jolt of power.
He had almost lost count of the waves that had gone storming by when suddenly he was in quiet water, rising and falling on a gentle swell. Swinging the board around he looked back toward the coast-and swallowed hard
when he saw the huge, humped shoulders of the moving, liquid hills that now separated him from solid land. Where was Bombora?
Then he saw that the skimmer had used her speed to take a longer but smoother route out to sea, and had avoided the line of surf. He also saw that Mario was signaling to him-perhaps warning him not to attempt to shoot those waves. If the Aussies were nervous, he was certainly going to take no chances; he relaxed on the board, and waited.
Bombora came whistling up to him in a cloud of spray; and then, with a sinking heart, he saw that Mario was holding out the telephone.
'Call from Washington ,' said the senior Lombini, as he cut the engines and Bombora settled down on her floats. 'I told them you weren't here, but it was no good.'
He handed over the cordless receiver, and Hunter, still bobbing up and down on the board, heard the peremptory voice from the other side of the world. He answered dully: 'Yes, sir-I'll be there at once,' and then gave the instrument back to Mario.
Being the number one propulsion specialist of the Space Agency had its disadvantages. His holiday was over almost before it had begun, and the Lombini brothers would have to finish the development and marketing of the Squid. Worse still, his trip out to the Great Barrier Reef with Helena was also off, and he'd have to cancel their reservation on Heron Island .
Perhaps it was just as well, combining business with pleasure was seldom a very good idea. But that, he knew, was only sour grapes.
Twenty-two thousand miles above the earth, aboard Intelsat VIII, Jack Kimball had been rather more fortunate. It was not too easy to find privacy aboard the great floating raft which now handled most of the communications traffic of the Pacific area, but he and Irene Martinson had managed it, with most satisfactory results.
The ribald speculations which had grown with the Space Age were not altogether ill-founded. In the total absence of weight, some of the more exuberant fantasies of Indian temple art had moved into the realm of practical politics; one did not have to be an athlete to surpass anything that the ingenious sculptors of the great Konarak Temple at Puri had been able to contrive. And it was an interesting fact-which the psychologists had not overlooked-that reproductions of such art were rather popular in all the larger, permanently inhabited space stations.
There were those who argued that sex in zero gee was tantalizing, and not wholly satisfying. One school of thought insisted on at least a third of a gravity-which meant that its advocates would be happy on Mars, but permanently discontented on the Moon. As Kimball filed away his memories for future reference, he decided that those who felt this way had too many inhibitions, or too little ingenuity. Neither charge applied to him.
When they were both presentable again, he unlocked the door of the spacesuit storage locker. As he did so, Irene started giggling.
'Just suppose,' she said, 'that there'd been an emergency and everyone came rushing in here for suits.'
'Well,' grinned Jack, 'we should have had a head start. When are you off duty again?'
Before she could reply, the corridor speaker cleared its throat and said firmly: 'Dr. Kimball-please report to Control.'
'Oh no!' gasped Irene. 'You don't suppose they had a mike in there?!'
'If there is,' said Kimball ominously, 'we're not the ones in trouble. I have to authorize all circuit changes, and I'm damned if I ever said anything about mikes in suit lockers.'
He realized, a little belatedly, that Irene might have a different point of view. Before she could express it, he
