times at lectures, but I’ve never got it over. I tell ’em the closest thing to it on Earth is the Painted Desert. Maybe it is; I haven’t been there. “The wind blows hard on Venus and it tears up the rocks. Soft rocks blow away and make the dust storms. The hard parts-well, they stick out in funny shapes and colors. Great big monument things, some of them. And the most jagged hills and crevasses you can imagine. It’s something like the inside of a cave, sort of-only not dark. But the light is-funny. Nobody ever saw light like that on Earth. Orangy-brownish light, brilliant, very brilliant, but sort of threatening. Like the way the sky is threatening in the summer around sunset just before a smasher of a thunderstorm. Only there never is any thunderstorm because there isn’t a drop of water around.” He hesitated. “There is lightning. Plenty of it, but never any rain … I don’t know, Mitch,” he said abruptly. “Am I being any help to you at all?” I took my time answering. I looked at my watch and saw that the return jet was about to leave, so I bent down and turned off the recorder in my briefcase. “You’re being lots of help, Jack,” I said. * “But I’ll need more. And I have to go now. Look, can you come up to New York and work with me for a while? I’ve got everything you said on tape, but I want visual stuff too. Our artists can work from the pix you brought back, but there must be more. And you’re a lot more use than the photographs for what we need.” I didn’t mention that the artists would be drawing impressions of what Venus would look like if it were different from what it was. “How about it?” Jack leaned back and looked cherubic but, though he made me sweat through a brief recap of the extensive plans his lecture agent had made for the next few weeks, he finally agreed. The Shriners’ talk could be canceled, he decided, and the appointments with his ghost writers could be kept as well in New York as in Washington. We made a date for the following day just as the PA system announced that my flight was ready. “I’ll walk you to the plane,” Jack offered. He slipped down from the chair and threw a bill on the table for the waiter. We walked together through the narrow aisles of the bar out into the field. Jack grinned and strutted a little at some ohs and ahs that went up as he was recognized. The field was almost dark, and the glow of Washington back-lighted the silhouettes of hovering aircraft. Drifting toward us from the freight terminal was a huge cargo ‘copter, a fifty-tonner,
its cargo nacelle gleaming in colors as it reflected the lights below. It was no more than fifty feet in the air, and I had to clutch my hat against the downdraft from its whirling vanes. “Damn-fool bus drivers,” Jack grunted, staring up at the ‘copter. “They ought to put those things on G.C.A. Just because they’re maneuverable those fan-jockeys think they can take them anywhere. If I handled a jet the way they-Run! Run!” Suddenly he was yelling at me and pushing at my middle with both his small hands. I goggled at him; it was too sudden and disconnected to make any kind of sense. He lurched at me in a miniature body block and sent me staggering a few steps. “What the hell-?” I started to complain, but I didn’t hear my own words. They were drowned out by a mechanical snapping sound and a flutter in the beat of the rotors and then the loudest crash I had ever heard as the cargo pod of the ‘copter hit the concrete a yard from where we stood. It ruptured and spilled cartons of Starrzelius Verily rolled oats. One of the crimson cylinders rolled to my toes and I stupidly picked it up and looked at it. Overhead the lightened ‘copter fluttered up and away, but I didn’t see it go. “For God’s sake, get it off them! “Jack was yelling, tugging at me. We had not been alone on the field. From under the buckled aluminum reached an arm holding a briefcase, and through the compound noises in my ears I could hear a bubbling sound of human pain. That was what he meant. Get it off them. I let him pull me to the tangled metal, and we tried to heave it. I got a scratched hand and tore my jacket, and then the airport people got there and brusquely ordered us away. I don’t remember walking there, but by and by I found that I was sitting on someone’s suitcase, back against the wall of the terminal, with Jack O’Shea talking excitedly to me. He was cursing the class of cargo ‘copter pilots and blackguarding me for standing there like a fool when he’d seen the nacelle clamps opening, and a great deal more that I didn’t get. I remember his knocking the red box of breakfast food from my hand impatiently. The psychologists say I am not unusually sensitive or timorous, but I was in a state of shock that lasted until Jack was loading me into my plane. Later on the hostess told me five people had been caught under the nacelle, and the whole affair seemed to come into focus. But not until we were halfway back to New York. At the time all I remem-