er him?"

"Peculiar about Charlie," Gimp answered, looking awed and puzzled. "Got
the news from old J. John, his granddad, when he acknowledged the
receipt of our latest draft, by letter. Hold your hat. Charlie got
himself killed... I'll dig the letter out of the file."

Nelsen sat up very straight. "Never mind," he said. "Just tell me more.
Anything can happen."

"Our most promising member," Gimp mused. "He didn't get much. The Venus
Expedition had to move some heavy equipment to the top of a mountain, to
make some electrostatic tests before a storm. Charlie had just climbed
down from the helicopter. A common old lightning bolt hit him. Somebody
played _Fire Streak_ on the bagpipes--inside a sealed tent--while they
buried him. Otherwise, he didn't even get a proper spaceman's funeral.
Venus' escape velocity is almost as high as Earth's. Boosting a corpse
up into orbit, just for atmospheric cremation, would have been too much
of a waste for the Expedition's rigid economy."

Nelsen had never really been very close to Charlie Reynolds, though he
had liked the flamboyant Good Guy. Now, it was all a long ways back,
besides. Nelsen didn't feel exactly grief. Just an almost mystical
bitterness, a shock and an uncertainty, as if he could depend on
nothing.

"So what about Two-and-Two?" he growled, remembering how he used to
avoid any responsibility for the big, good-hearted lug; but now he felt
surer about himself, and things seemed different.

"I guess the Expedition medic had to straighten him out with
devil-killers," Hines answered. "He bubbed all the way back to Earth,
alone, to see J. John about Charlie. I beamed him, there, before the
Earth hid behind the sun. He was still pretty shaken up. Funny,
too--Charlie's opportunity-laden Venus has turned out to be a bust, for
two centuries, at least, unless new methods, which aren't in sight, yet,
turn up. Sure--at staggering expense, and with efforts on the order of
fantasy, reaction motors could be set up around its equator, to make it
spin as fast as the Earth. Specially developed green algae have already
been seeded all over the planet. They're rugged, they spread fast. But
it will take the algae about two hundred years to split the carbon
dioxide and give the atmosphere a breathable amount of free oxygen, to
say nothing of cracking the poisonous formaldehyde."

"Two-and-Two's back in Jarviston, then?" Nelsen demanded.

"No--not anymore--just gimme breath," Hines we