Who wears two hammocks...."
Bat was something of a poet, in his lighter moments—though most of his stuff was lamentably unprintable.
I did get in on one little session with him and about a dozen of the crew. That was down in the forecastle where he was entertaining the off-watches by letting them blindfold him and then try to hide a bottle of the tetrant alky we called our "rations." Naturally, he always found it, and naturally he always drank it. It took them most of the sunward trip to wise up to the fact that he was a mutation with his own detecting system already built-in—courtesy of the Manhattan Project and Nakano Kendo's irradiated gametes. The crew lost most of its alky rations that way, and old Bat soaked the stuff up like a sponge.
We passed turn-over point and then the long fall down to Venus began—three weeks of it.
Contact was established with the settlement while we were still above the stratosphere, and our Ultra-wave-radar went into action, the endless scanning that is absolutely essential to the landing of spacecraft through cloud layers.
I don't mind admitting that there was a cold sweat on my brow when I started down through the soup. The reports from UVR indicated plenty of clearance from the mountains, but I was still leery. Some of those peaks are reported to be as high as 200,000 feet. The Eagle's gyros were screaming and the muffled thunder of the jets filtered through every plate of her. I'd let her slide a bit and then snatch her up with a blast of the jets. Each time I touched the firing consoles, I could hear the moan of the blasted atomic particles rushing through the venturiis, and I could see the glitter of the cloud moisture that hugged the ports as it absorbed lethal radiations from the tail-flare.
Then the clouds began to thin and I could make out the pattern of the spaceport beneath us through the billowing formaldehyde mists that serve Venus for an atmosphere.
I was a wreck by the time the Eagle's fins touched the ground and the dancing fire of the tubes flickered and died. I felt her sag as she sank slightly into the mushy soil, and then I was cutting the power switches and listening to the slowly descending whine of the gyros as they coasted silkily to a halt.
I looked out of the ports at the miasmic swamp that surrounded us, at the fifty foot ferns in ghastly colors, at the alien, repellent trees that grew pulpy and squat all around the settlement. This was Venus....