He halted, swaying. "Not alone," he mouthed fearfully. "I can't get there by myself." "Of course you can!" Maggie's voice contained unexpected impatience. Ashamed, he forced his feet to move. At times, he thought he was going to crash to the floor. He lumbered on, hesitating, fighting to retain his balance. Maggie waited tensely, as if ready to leap to his side. Then his eyes turned straight ahead to the window. This was the first time he'd actually seen the arid, dust-cloaked plains of the second planet. He straightened, face aglow, as though a small-boy enthusiasm had been reborn in him. His tree-stump legs carried him to the window. He raised shaking hands against the thick glassite pane. Outside, the swirling white dust was omnipresent and unchallenged. It cut smooth the surfaces of dust-veiled rocks. It clung to the squat desert shrubbery, to the tall skeletal shapes of Venusian needle-plants and to the swish-tailed lizards that skittered beneath them. The shrill of wind, audible through the glassite, was like the anguished complaint of the planet itself, like the wail of an entity imprisoned in a dark tomb of dust. Venus was a planet of fury, eternally howling its wrath at being isolated from sunlight and greenery, from the clean blackness of space and the warm glow of sister-planet and star. The dust covered all, absorbed all, eradicated all. The dust was master. The dome, Ben felt, was as transitory as a tear-drop of fragile glass falling down, down, to crash upon stone. "Is it always like this?" he asked. "Doesn't the wind ever stop?" "Sometimes the wind dies. Sometimes, at night, you can see the lights from the city." * * * * * He kept staring. The dome, he thought, was a symbol of Man's littleness in a hostile universe. But, too, it was a symbol of his courage and defiance. And perhaps Man's greatest strength lay in the very audacity that drove him to build such domes. "You like it, don't you?" Maggie asked. "It's lonely and ugly and wild, but you like it." He nodded, breathless. She murmured, "Jacob used to say it isn't the strange sights that thrill spacemen--it's the thoughts that the sights inspire." He nodded again, still staring. She began to laugh. Softly at first, then more loudly. It was the kind of laughter that is close to crying. "You've been standing there for ten minutes! You're going to walk again! You're going to be well!" He turned to her, smiling with the joyous realization that he had actually stood that long without being aware of it. Then his smile died. Standing behind Maggie, in an open doorway, was a gray, scaly, toadlike monster--a six-and-a-half-foot Venusian. He was motionless as a statue, his green-lidded eyes staring curiously at Ben. His scaly hand was tight about the butt of an old-fashioned heat pistol holstered to his hip.