Space had been monotonous. After the first thrill of watching Earth grow smaller and smaller until it was nothing more than another planet in the heavens, after the realization that the studded blackness to each side was real, and not some gigantic planetarium show, the trip had been a seemingly motionless thing, like high flight in a light plane at less than cruising speed. They had licked the problem of weightlessness by an artificial gravity set-up which functioned, as far as he was able to find out from the captain, on a complex system of gyroscopes--but not even they furnished so much as a tremor to the deck plates, and he might as well have been planted firmly on Earth for all the sensation there was of movement. Even when inversion began, the gyro system automatically compensated for its inertia effects, and he would have been unaware of it had it not been for the series of oral checks between sergeant and captain, captain and the base on Venus. Then suddenly, the second planet loomed large and white--it blotted out the blackness, and then there was no more blackness, and the telescreen seemed to be swimming in pea-soup fog. "Six minutes, sir." The syrupy whiteness seemed limitless and for a moment Doug felt little pangs of panic, of fear that they must be falling into a great pit to which there was no bottom, only the eternity of the falling itself. Then suddenly it was above them like a diffuse, infinite ceiling, receding quickly at first, then more slowly, more slowly.... There was a gentle pressure beneath his feet. The gyros had compensated to their limit and had automatically cut out, and true gravity and inertia once more were settling their grip about the sleek ship. "Switch the screen aft, captain." "As she blasts, sir." Blue. Great, incredible expanses of blue in every shade of color, every intensity of pastel, forced to the bending curve of a horizon that seemed like some great arching bulwark against the heavy, stifling whiteness that was the sky. For moments he was not able to distinguish land from ocean, but then he discerned it as the midnight blue, near-black mass that undulated slowly, in long, even swells--and it was the vari-shaded, lighter area, smaller in size than the state of Connecticut--that was the northern land mass. And it was toward that which they descended. Their formation had already split and far to starboard, he saw two long darts of silver pair off to land on the planet's southwestern mass. He drew the cloak about his shoulders, secured the decorative dress sword at his waist. Down. As silently as had been the long drift through Space, save for the nearly inaudible rumble of the great engine as it had checked in for deceleration. The descent was so perfectly controlled that if there was the heavy whine of atmosphere about their hull from too-great downward speed, he could not hear it. Down. He drew on the gauntlets. There was a gentle jar. * * * * *