ey skidded
to a stop.

The chasm that had caused him such a long detour before had widened,
evidently in the big quake that had hit earlier. Now it was a canyon,
half a kilometer wide. Five meters from the edge he looked out over
blank space at the far wall, and could not see the bottom.

Cursing choice Dutch profanity, Jan wheeled the groundcar northward and
drove along the edge of the abyss as fast as he could. He wasted half an
hour before realizing that it was getting no narrower.

There was no point in going back southward. It might be a hundred
kilometers long or a thousand, but he never could reach the end of it
and thread the tumbled rocks of Den Hoorn to Oostpoort before the G-boat
blastoff.

There was nothing to do but turn back to Rathole and see if some other
way could not be found.

* * * * *

Jan sat in the half-buried room and enjoyed the luxury of a pipe filled
with some of Theodorus Neimeijer's mild tobacco. Before him, Dr. Sanchez
sat with crossed legs, cleaning his fingernails with a scalpel. Diego's
mother talked to the boy in low, liquid tones in a corner of the room.

* * * * *

Jan was at a loss to know how people whose technical knowledge was as
skimpy as it obviously was in Rathole were able to build these
semi-underground domes to resist the earth shocks that came from Den
Hoorn. But this one showed no signs of stress. A religious print and a
small pencil sketch of Senora Murillo, probably done by the boy, were
awry on the inward-curving walls, but that was all.

Jan felt justifiably exasperated at these Spanish-speaking people.

"If some effort had been made to take the boy to Oostpoort from here,
instead of calling on us to send a car, Den Hoorn could have been
crossed before the crack opened," he pointed out.

"An effort was made," replied Sanchez quietly. "Perhaps you do not fully
realize our position here. We have no engines except the stationary
generators that give us current for our air-conditioning and our
utilities. They are powered by the windmills. We do not have gasoline
engines for vehicles, so our vehicles are operated by hand."

"You push them?" demanded Jan incredulously.

"No. You've seen pictures of the pump-cars that once were used on
terrestrial railroads? Ours are powered like that, but we cannot operate
them when the Venerian wind is blowing. By the time I diagnosed the
Venus Shadow in Diego, th