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 finish the job, and on the last of them fell from his crude rigging and fractured his hip. He had managed to crawl back inside the cave, but, alone, with no one to tend him, he knew he had nothing to hope for. It was impossible for him to complete his ship. All his dreams were ended. His equations and his blueprints would die with him. In his last day he came to a new realization: nowhere had he left a complete record of the mechanics of his spacewarp generator, the key mechanism without which hyperspace drive was unattainable. So, racing against encroaching death, James Hudson Cavour turned to a new page in his diary, headed it, in firm, forceful letters, _For Those Who Follow After_, and inked in a clear and concise explanation of his work. It was all there, Alan thought exultantly: the diagrams, the specifications, the equations. It would be possible to build the ship from Cavour's notes.