ely.
Neither Burl nor Boulton had had time to look at his watch.

They hung over the cold side of Mercury for several hours more while the
two astronomers figured their next move. When the orbits had been
determined, the _Magellan_ turned its massive wide nose away from the
Sun toward a gleaming white disc that dominated the dark skies of outer
space. With full power on, they pushed away from the littlest planet
and began the long fall toward the Sun's second planet, that which some
had considered to be Earth's veiled twin, Venus.

There was a matter of thirty million miles to cross, and the crossing
would be made fighting the pull of the Sun all the way.

Caton and his men had spent the wait on Mercury working on the great
generators in the powerhouse nose. They recalibrated the output and
corrected it from the records kept during the flight inward. Now they
were confident of its ability to drive the ship away from the Sun.
Coming in, they had not been sure what their A-G drive would do and
could do. Going outward they knew just what to expect.

They did not travel blindly outward, for that would have been both a
crude waste of power and inaccurate. Instead, the ship drove at a long
slant from the Sun, moving in a gently curving orbit that would bring it
onto Venus at the same time that Venus itself was moving along in its
orbit. This is what they had tried to do before, but without success.
Venus travels around the Sun at a speed of about 32 miles per second,
and takes about 224.5 days to complete the circuit. From where the
_Magellan_ took off, it would approach and overtake Venus at a speed a
little greater than the 32 miles per second.

The days passed swiftly enough. They had developed the pictures taken in
the Mercury station, and the engineers and astronomers spent long hours
debating their features, matching up what they had seen with what was
known about the Andes station.

The shining face of Venus grew larger. It was a mysterious planet, the
most mysterious in the system, even though it was the closest of the
planets to Earth. Venus was a world whose atmosphere--of Earthly
depth--was a solid mass of clouds. Never had the clouds lifted to reveal
the surface. The clouds reflected the sunlight brilliantly, yet as Burl
could now see with the naked eye, parts of it were hazy, as if mighty
storms were raising dark particles from below.

"We've had a couple of prober rockets shot into its surface," said Russ