Nick looked startled. "Nothing. Everything checked out when I came off watch a few minutes ago." Barry shrugged. "Probably just me. Guess I'll go see if I can mooch a handout." He found himself a hero. The cook was ready to turn the galley inside out while a radio engineer and an entomologist hovered near to wait on him. But he couldn't enjoy the meal. The sensations of heat and dryness he had noticed on awakening grew steadily worse. It became difficult to breathe. He started to rise, and abruptly the room swirled and darkened around him. Even as he sank into unconsciousness he knew the answer. The suit's Kendall-shield had leaked! Four plunged toward Venus tail first, the Hoskins jets flaring ahead. The single doctor for the Colony had gone out in Two and the crewmen trained in first aid could do little to relieve Barry's distress. Fainting spells alternated with fever and delirium and an unquenchable thirst. His breathing became increasingly difficult. A few thousand miles out Four picked up a microbeam. A feeling of exultation surged through the ship as Captain Reno passed the word, for the beam meant that some Earthmen were alive upon Venus. They were not necessarily diving straight toward oblivion. Barry, sick as he was, felt the thrill of the unknown world that lay ahead. Into a miles-thick layer of opacity Four roared, with Captain Reno himself jockeying throttles to keep it balanced on its self-created support of flame. "You're almost in," a voice chanted into his headphones through crackling, sizzling static. "Easy toward spherical one-thirty. Hold it! Lower. Lower. CUT YOUR POWER!" The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled, steadied. Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order. "Airlock open. Both doors." Venusian air poured in. "For this I left Panama?" one of the men yelped. "Enough to gag a maggot," another agreed with hand to nose. It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying vegetation. But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened. The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light. Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out of the marsh. The Colony!