"Forget Hanlon's carping," he said. He punched Lowe in the ribs, trying to be jocular. "Those Foundation medics know what they're about. Come on, we've got to get our beauty sleep before the jumpoff." When they awoke three hours later and dressed for the flight they found that Hanlon had paid them a second visit and had stolen all three of their wrist chronometers, expensive instruments easily negotiable for their weight in platinum. "Cheap at the price," said Geddes, and shrugged away the loss with conditioned equanimity. Lowe had no comment. Only Hovic grumbled. "Those chronos will keep him in Irish whiskey for weeks," he said. "I hope the louse drinks himself to death on it." On that note they went down to the Foundation staff car that waited to take them to the launching site--three calm, resolute young men, serenely confident and prepared for anything. They arrived at dusk, just as the last supply drum was being hoisted into the vertical bronze spindle of the _Terra IV_. They went up the tall personnel ladder, undisturbed by the actinic lightnings of photographers' flash-bulbs, and vanished one at a time into the belly of the ship that was finally to bridge the emptiness between Earth and Venus. They sealed the port, checked the instrument gauges and the medicine cabinet with its hypnol equipment, and strapped themselves down on jointed pneumatic acceleration couches. A red-glowing bulb on the instrument panel turned amber and then green. Geddes pressed the firing button.... Weight bore them down like a giant hand. They were not disturbed. Inured to acceleration and knowing the exact instant when their discomfort must cease. They waited patiently, eyes closed, blackout fended off by past conditioning in centrifuges and endless sessions of psychological preparation. They were free of Earth's atmosphere in a matter of minutes. At the end of an hour the chemical jets cut out and atomic propulsors took over, shoving the _Terra IV_ on at a lessened acceleration that would bring her to Venus, allowing for orbital drift corrections, in exactly twenty-seven days. Communicating with the Foundation later was in theory a simple matter of narrow-beam linkage. The _Terra I_ had proved that in 1969, twenty-nine years before, when frozen fuel lines sent her drifting derelict into space. The catch was that the atomic drive with its monstrous din of interference must be shut off before the radio could operate. It was eight days before null-area was reached, but long before that time--on the second day out, to be exact--the _Terra IV's_ first emergency struck. Lowe, making a routine check of supply crates lashed to bulkhead eye-bolts in the hold, heard a frantic hammering that originated, not from the outside hull as his first startled fancy had it, but from inside an airtight drum stenciled "_FILM_."