"I'd give a lot," Halfrich said, "to know what's riding you. We'll soon reach Sunside and we'll find out, but I wish you'd tell me now." "All right," said Kellard. "I'll tell you. I've been disinherited. That's what's wrong with me." * * * * * He would say nothing more, nor did Halfrich ask him another question, until the Y-90 was far in past the orbit of Venus and going into its pattern of approach. "I assume," said Halfrich, "that you bear none of us any personal ill-will. If there is anything dangerous awaiting us, now would be the time to tell us." Kellard considered. "You're going to land, I suppose, at the same spot where we crashed." "Of course." "Then land," said Kellard. "As far as I know, there is not a thing there to harm you." In the scanner, he watched Mercury swing slowly toward them, a tiny crescent of white that was hard to see against the Sun. For here the Sun was a monster thing, fringed with writhing flames, paling the stars, drenching this whole area with radiation that already would have killed them but for the ship's anti-heaters. Kellard remembered that when he had come this way before, Binetti had quoted something, a line from William Blake's poems, he had said. "_The desire of the moth for the star._" And that was what we were, he thought. Three little moths, going right into the furnace, and I was the only one to get out of it, but now I'm going back. The Y-90 went into its landing pattern. It skimmed over the dark side of Mercury, the black cliffs and peaks and chasms that never saw the Sun, and then light seemed to burst ragingly up from all the horizon ahead of them, and they were over Sunside. In old days this little world had been called "the moon of the Sun," and it looked like it, the same stark, lifeless rock plains and ridges and cracks, the fang-like look of pinnacles in a place where no atmosphere eroded anything. But the Moon was cold and still, whereas Sunside seemed to throb with sullen hidden fires. Volcanoes spewed ash and lava, and the infernal storm of radiation from overhead made everything quiver in a shimmering haze. The indicator board told them that the temperature of the outside hull was climbing to four hundred as the Y-90 went down. And the wide valley that haunted his dreams opened up ahead. Across it the squat volcanic cones still dribbled ash and dust and it was all just as it had been when he had last looked back from the relief cruiser that had come from Venus Station to take him off. And there gleamed bright on its floor the crumpled wreck in which Binetti and then Morse had died. Kellard's gaze flew to the place north of the wreck, the tumbled, odd-shaped rocks. He felt his palms sweating. Maybe there would be nothing. After all, could it all happen again? They set down, and after the crashing rocket uproar, the steady throb of the anti-heaters was an anti-climactic sound. "You've got the armor ready?" Halfrich asked of Morgenson.