They were approaching the planet visibly now. In the twelve hours that had passed they had covered a million miles, for now they were falling toward the planet under its attraction. It glowed before them now in wonderous splendour, a mighty disc of molten silver. For the last twenty-four hours they had been reducing their speed relative to Venus, to insure their forming an orbit about the planet, rather than shoot around it and back into space. Their velocity had been over a hundred miles a second part of the way, but now it had been reduced to ten. The gravity of the planet was urging them forward at ever increasing speed, and their problem became more acute moment by moment. "We'll never make it on the power units alone, out here in space," said Arcot seriously. "We'll just shoot around the planet. I'll tell you how we can do it, though. We'll circle around it, entering its atmosphere on the daylight side, and shoot into the upper limits of its atmosphere. There the power units can find some heat to work on, and we can really slow down. But we'll have to use the rocket tubes to get the acceleration we'll need to drive the ship into the air." There was a sudden clanging of a bell, and everyone dived for a hold, and held on tightly. An instant later there was a terrific wrench as the rocket jets threw the plane out of the way of a meteor. "We're getting near a planet. This is the third meteor we've met since we were more than a million miles from Earth. Venus and Earth and all the planets act like giant vacuum cleaners of space, pulling into themselves all the space debris and meteors within millions of miles by their gravitational attraction." Swiftly the planet expanded below them--growing vaster with each passing moment. It had changed from a disc to a globe, and now, as the molten silver of its surface seemed swiftly clouding, it turned grey; then they saw its true appearance, a vast field of rolling, billowing clouds! The _Solarite_ was shooting around the planet now at ten miles a second, far more than enough to carry them away from the planet again, out into space once more if their speed was not checked. "Hold on everybody," Arcot called. "We're going to turn toward the planet now!" He depressed a small lever--there was a sudden shock, and all the space about them seemed to burst into huge, deep-red atomic hydrogen flames. The _Solarite_ reeled under the sudden pressure, but the heavy gyroscopic stabilizers caught it, held it, and the ship remained on an even keel. Then suddenly there came to the ears of the men a long drawn whine, faint--almost inaudible--and the ship began slowing down. The _Solarite_ had entered the atmosphere of Venus--the first man-made machine to thus penetrate the air of another world!