"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.
It moved over the water and finally hung directly over the mudbank. Maneuvering so that the helicopter was directly in the protected circle of the walls, Burl and Russ dropped a rope ladder and swung down hand over hand to be the first human beings to set foot on Venus.
They were lightly dressed, for the temperature was hot, around 110°, and it was humid. No breezes blew here. They wore shorts and shirts and high-laced leather boots. Each carried two small tanks of oxygen on his back. A leather mouth nozzle strapped across the shoulders guaranteed a steady flow of breathable air. In their belts were strapped knives and army pistols. Russ carried recording equipment, and Burl a hatchet.
They dropped off the swaying ladder inside the station. The ground was hard-packed as if the builders had beaten it down and smoothed it off. The globes were familiar to Burl—he had studied the pictures of the two he had already visited and he realized that they followed the same general system. Where the mast towers would have been, there were leads running through the plastic walls out across the sea. He wondered briefly why the walls were curved outward.
As the helicopter moved away, the metal weight on the end of the dangling ladder brushed the top of the wall. There was a crackling noise, and a spark jumped between them.
"The wall is electrically charged," said Burl. "I wonder why?"
Russ shook his head. "From the looks of it, to keep off something. Perhaps some kind of native life. But what? I'm sure there's nothing of a highly organized physical structure here."