The rest of the crew came to action. The spaceship began to move slowly, while Oberfield and Caton probed for the lines of force which would lead to the station. Now a long, low bank appeared, a ridge of mud protruding above the water. Here and there stretched other low mud bars, and once a ridge of rock. "I've seen no animals or birds," said Burl. "Do you suppose there are any?" Russ pursed his lips. "I don't think so. From the look of this world, life probably isn't developed that far. You won't find animals until there is dry land--and I'd guess now that there's no place on all Venus where there is much dry land. There may be fish or fish life, but even that's questionable. Consider--the long, long day, the absence of violent, unshielded Sun rays, the steady damp warmth, the quiet, barely moving waters, the heavy amounts of carbon dioxide in the air...." He paused and went over to Lockhart's chart table to pick up a paper. "Oberfield worked out the atmosphere. It is very heavy in carbon dioxide, very low in free oxygen. There's water vapor down here, but the clouds have kept it below; it didn't show up in the outer atmosphere at all." "There's the Sun-tap base," said Burl, and added as an afterthought, "I think." This one did not look at all like the other stations he had seen. There was indeed a ringed wall station, but the wall was low and slanted outward. It stood on the end of a wide mudbank, and near it veins of rock glistened as if wet. The interior machinery was a neat, compact mass of crystalline globes and levers. But the masts and shining discs which had characterized the stations on Mercury and Earth were missing. Instead, there floated upon the surface of the water, for a mile around, great shining bowls, like huge saucers gently rocking in the faint wavelets. Thin, flexible, shining lines of metal connected this surface layout with the station. "With no direct Sun to aim at, this station seems to be directed toward a nonfocused system of light diversion," Lockhart announced. "The wrecking crew please get under way!" "I'm going down with you," Russ joined in. "I've gotten permission to take some observations from the surface." "Good," said Burl, and hurried with him down to the central floor. They disembarked in two parties. Haines and Ferrati used the two-man rocket plane and would make a wide encirclement of the vicinity, mapping and finally blowing up the accumulator discs floating on the surface. Burl, Russ, and Boulton took a helicopter. The helicopter, under the control of the Marine captain, dropped out of the cargo port of the _Magellan_. Steadied by the regular whirl of its great blades and driven by tiny rocket jets in the tip of each wing, the whirlybird swung down like a huge mosquito hovering over a swamp patch.