He computed his orbit and locked the ship in. Eyes pressed to the viewscreen, he peered downward, hoping against hope. This trip to Venus had been a wild gamble from the start. He wondered if Max Hawkes would have covered a bet on the success of his trip. Max had been infallible when it came to hunches. _Well_, Alan thought, _now I've got a hunch. Help me one more time, Max, wherever you are! Lend me some of your luck. I need it, Max._ He circled once more. The Venusian day would last for three weeks more; there was no fear of darkness. But would he find anything? _What's that?_ He leaped to the controls, switched off the autopilot, and broke out of orbit, going back for a return look. Had there been just the faintest metallic glint below, as of a spaceship jutting up from the sand? Yes. There was a ship down there, and a cave of some sort. Alan felt strangely calm. With confident fingers he punched out a landing orbit, and brought his ship down in the middle of the barren Venusian desert. _Chapter Eighteen_ Alan brought the _Cavour_ down less than a mile away from the scene of the wreckage--it was the best he could do, computing the landing by guesswork--and climbed into his spacesuit. He passed through the airlock and out into the windswept desert. He felt just a little lightheaded; the gravity was only 0.8 of Earth-norm, and besides that the air in his spacesuit, being perpetually renewed by the Bennerman re-breathing generator strapped to his back, was just a shade too rich in oxygen. In the back of his mind he realized he ought to adjust his oxygen flow, but before he brought himself to make the adjustment the surplus took its effect. He began to hum, then to dance awkwardly over the sand. A moment later he was singing a wild space ballad that he thought he had forgotten years before. After ten feet he tripped and went sprawling down in the sand. He lay there, trickling the violet sands through the gloves of his spacesuit, feeling very lightheaded and very foolish all at the same time. But he was still sober enough to realize he was in danger. It was an effort to reach 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.