Ward was disgruntled. Leave it to Portiz to get plastered. Leave it to Wagner to let a keying device, a teletype, a station location marker, a transmitter, the instrument landing beams or something go blooey in zero-zero weather. Sure! Silvy Ward, old faithful Silvy's here to handle it and get a few more gray hairs thirty years ahead of Mother Nature's usual schedule. Back in HQ on Earth a radio engineer is considered something like a Martian maharajah; he just doesn't have to get down on his knees and fool around with leads and circuits, keeping one eye cocked on an oscillograph and the other on a multi-wave meter. But leave it to HQ to send me to this bronchitis-stimulating hole called Pali-Vanyi, Venus, with a drunkard and an inexperienced college graduate for my only assistants when the Old Man damn' well knows I should have at least four old timers. Good man, Portiz, but he lets his reputation and connections carry him. Let Venus get him worn down to a frazzle and then started to drink like a native squid. Wagner's a good man, too. Fooled around with coeds and rocket polo too much in Astrotech, that's all. Boned for exams and passed them, but his knowledge is mostly theoretical. Usually blows up in a pinch, like now. The air conditioning apparatus had practically straightened out the previously cockeyed atmospherics, and Silvy was waking up. But he was still a bit rankled as he zipped on rubberoid coveralls, donned a filtration mask, went out to the garage and drove his caterpillar-treaded fog flivver out into the nearly-liquid ground atmosphere of dear, damp Venus. The fog certainly was settling in on Pali-Vanyi port! Usually the Hump, the five thousand foot mountain range which runs along the east of the field, breaks the storm winds which blow in intermittently from Draka Malarga, the mighty eastern sea. Sure, sometimes there's a real typhoon ripping beyond the mountain, chopping Malarga into thousand foot waves, at the same time there'll be a four thousand foot ceiling at the spaceport and probably ten miles visibility to north, south and west. But take tonight: the weather broadcasts said that Draka Malarga was practically calm and the plesiosaurs and their girl friends were probably sporting on the waves; Pali-Vanyi was completely fogged in! Ah, Venus, weatherman's headache and Authority's dire pain! Visibility _was_ nil. Even Frederic Ward's infrared headlights and special goggles could not cut the fog. He spent a good half hour on the fifteen mile trip northwestward and glimpsed the station barely in time to jam down the hydraulics and squish to stop in the sloshy mire deposited by a recent typhoon. * * * * * Wagner was looking blankly at the great bank of keying devices on the trajectory transmitters when Silvy walked in through the airlock. He turned around forlornly, laying a fat hand suggestively on a complicated blueprint.