Funny, how the twists saved you when there was no longer any point in being saved. He was trapped here--trapped, and on Venus the trap would tighten and finally close when Tayne found some opening in his guard and plunged through it. "Well done, captain. As you were. Your qualifications seem quite adequate. See to it that they are continually maintained." "Yes, sir." With what nonchalance he could muster, Doug dropped the sickness act as though it had been a trick the captain might have expected, and opened the brief-tube. He would have to memorize every word of its contents, every direction on the plastic sheets it contained. If he wanted to see his own home again--for that matter, if he ever wanted to see Dot again, he would have to run a bluff that would, he mused, even amaze the United States Bureau of Internal Revenue. And that, he knew, would be damn near impossible. CHAPTER XII After Doug had gone, Dot tried to make herself forget why he had gone, where he was going. She wanted the old conviction to come back; she wanted to be smugly sure again that it was impossible for him to fly to another planet, and that what he had said was just a great joke. She twisted a dial on the luxurious radio console, sat for a moment beside it and wished that she could as easily twist fact away from belief, so that the awful fear would go. Yet blindness to fact was no answer to fear of it. It seemed long ago that space flight had been something for light dinner-table conversation, something for fanciful conjecture in an idle moment, something to discuss politely when the overimaginative person became serious with his day-after-tomorrow talk. But now suddenly it was none of those things. Now suddenly it was a thing of life or death to her; it was real, and she was afraid. The science-fiction stories she had leafed through in an idle moment--what had their writers said? What had they, in their irrepressible way, so logically theorized about the balance of life in the impossibly deep reaches of Space--about the precocious ships that men would some day build when they were at last free of their age-old fear of infinity? The soft music from the radio had stopped, and the newscaster's voice disturbed her reverie. "... this afternoon, the Prelatinate announced eight new amendments to the Constitutional Commandments, making the total for the day so far a slightly-under-average twelve. This afternoon's amendments deal specifically with Commandment Ninety-three, Section 189, Chapter 914, paragraph 382, sub-division 2103-K. The first stipulates...." She tried to find another program of music, but the daily amendment announcements were everywhere. With a fleeting smile she remembered what Doug had said--that at last the commercial had met its match as an instrument for ruining radio listening. Yet logical enough, for here the dollar was secondary, and Government was God.