e probably isn't developed that far. You won't find animals until
there is dry land--and I'd guess now that there's no place on all Venus
where there is much dry land. There may be fish or fish life, but even
that's questionable. Consider--the long, long day, the absence of
violent, unshielded Sun rays, the steady damp warmth, the quiet, barely
moving waters, the heavy amounts of carbon dioxide in the air...."

He paused and went over to Lockhart's chart table to pick up a paper.
"Oberfield worked out the atmosphere. It is very heavy in carbon
dioxide, very low in free oxygen. There's water vapor down here, but the
clouds have kept it below; it didn't show up in the outer atmosphere at
all."

"There's the Sun-tap base," said Burl, and added as an afterthought, "I
think."

This one did not look at all like the other stations he had seen. There
was indeed a ringed wall station, but the wall was low and slanted
outward. It stood on the end of a wide mudbank, and near it veins of
rock glistened as if wet.

The interior machinery was a neat, compact mass of crystalline globes
and levers. But the masts and shining discs which had characterized the
stations on Mercury and Earth were missing. Instead, there floated upon
the surface of the water, for a mile around, great shining bowls, like
huge saucers gently rocking in the faint wavelets. Thin, flexible,
shining lines of metal connected this surface layout with the station.

"With no direct Sun to aim at, this station seems to be directed toward
a nonfocused system of light diversion," Lockhart announced. "The
wrecking crew please get under way!"

"I'm going down with you," Russ joined in. "I've gotten permission to
take some observations from the surface."

"Good," said Burl, and hurried with him down to the central floor.

They disembarked in two parties. Haines and Ferrati used the two-man
rocket plane and would make a wide encirclement of the vicinity, mapping
and finally blowing up the accumulator discs floating on the surface.
Burl, Russ, and Boulton took a helicopter.

The helicopter, under the control of the Marine captain, dropped out of
the cargo port of the _Magellan_. Steadied by the regular whirl of its
great blades and driven by tiny rocket jets in the tip of each wing, the
whirlybird swung down like a huge mosquito hovering over a swamp patch.

It moved over the water and finally hung directly over the mudbank.
Maneuvering so that the helicopter was d