ch over his shoulder and move the oxygen gauge back a
notch. After a moment the flow levelled out and he felt his head
beginning to clear.

He was marching through a fantastic baroque desert. Venus was a riot of
colors, all in a minor key: muted greens and reds, an overbearing gray,
a strange, ghostly blue. The sky, or rather the cloud layer, dominated
the atmosphere with its weird pinkness. It was a silent world--a dead
world.

In the distance he saw the wreckage of the ship; beyond it the land
began to rise, sloping imperceptibly up into a gentle hill with bizarre
sculptured rock outcroppings here and there. He walked quickly.

Fifteen minutes later he reached the ship. It stood upright--or rather,
its skeleton did. The ship had not crashed. It had simply rotted away,
the metal of its hide eaten by the sand-laden winds over the course of
centuries. Nothing remained but a bare framework.

He circled the ship, then entered the cave a hundred feet away. He
snapped on his lightbeam. In the darkness, he saw----

A huddled skeleton, far to the rear of the cave. A pile of corroded
equipment; atmosphere generators, other tools now shapeless.

Cavour had reached Venus safely. But he had never departed.

To his astonishment Alan found a sturdy volume lying under the pile of
bones--a book, wrapped in metal plates. Somehow it had withstood the
passage of centuries, here in this quiet cave.

Gently he unwrapped the book. The cover dropped off at his touch; he
turned back the first three pages, which were blank. On the fourth,
written in the now-familiar crabbed hand, were the words: _The Journal
of James Hudson Cavour. Volume 17--October 20, 2570----_

* * * * *

He had plenty of time, during the six-day return journey, to read and
re-read Cavour's final words and to make photographic copies of the
withered old pages.

The trip to Venus had been easy for old Cavour; he had landed precisely
on schedule, and established housekeeping for himself in the cave. But,
as his diary detailed it, he felt strength ebbing away with each passing
day.

He was past eighty, no age for a man to come alone to a strange planet.
There remained just minor finishing to be done on his pioneering
ship--but he did not have the strength to do the work. Climbing the
catwalk of the ship, soldering, testing--now, with his opportunity
before him, he could not attain his goal.

He made several feeble attempts to fin