d that there must be clouds
somewhere--the temperature only slightly less than normal for a July
day. A few men shaded their eyes and looked about, noticing that the
heat was not so intense--and thought it a blessing.

In some places in Europe, there were clouds and a little rain, and the
dimness was ascribed to this. It was raining in much of Asia, and there
were scattered afternoon showers throughout Latin America, which were
standard for the season. There was a flurry of snow in Melbourne and a
cold blow in Santiago de Chile.

The men in the weather bureaus noted on their day's charts that
temperatures were a few degrees lower than had been predicted, but that
was nothing unusual. Weather was still not entirely predictable, even
with the advances of meteorology that were to be expected of the latter
years of the twentieth century.

The world was reading about other things than the vagaries of the
weather. In the United States, baseball occupied the headlines, and the
nonathletic-minded could find some speculative interest in the
completion of another manned space platform racing along in its eternal
orbit twelve thousand miles away from Earth's surface. The U.S. Moon
Base in the center of the Crater Ptolemaeus had described the appearance
of this platform in an interesting radio dispatch which appeared on the
first pages of most newspapers. The third prober rocket sent to Venus
had been unreported for the tenth day after penetrating the clouds that
hid that planet's surface from human eyes. It was, like its two
predecessors, a minimum-sized, unmanned instrument device designed to
penetrate the clouds and radio back data on the nature of the Venusian
atmosphere and the surface. But after its first report, nothing more had
been heard.

Some discussion was going on in science circles about what had happened.
Speculation centered on the possible success of other types of prober
rockets, but it was universally agreed that the time had not come when a
manned rocket could safely undertake the difficult trip to Venus and
return.

The years of space flight since the orbiting of Sputnik I back in 1957
had produced many fascinating results, but they had also brought a
realization of the many problems that surrounded the use of rockets for
space flight. It was generally believed that no one should risk a manned
flight until absolutely everything possible that could be learned by
robot and radio-controlled missiles had been