The heavy hull dropped sickeningly, struck with a mushy thud, settled, steadied.
Barry was weak, but with Nick Podtiaguine steadying him he was waiting with the others when Captain Reno gave the last order.
"Airlock open. Both doors."
Venusian air poured in.
"For this I left Panama?" one of the men yelped.
"Enough to gag a maggot," another agreed with hand to nose.
It was like mid-summer noon in a tropical mangrove swamp, hot and unbearably humid and overpowering with the stench of decaying vegetation.
But Barry took one deep breath, then another. The stabbing needles in his chest blunted, and the choking band around his throat loosened.
The outer door swung wide. He blinked, and a shift in the encompassing vapors gave him his first sight of a world bathed in subdued light.
Four had landed in a marsh with the midships lock only a few feet above a quagmire surface still steaming from the final rocket blast. Nearby the identical hulls of Two and Three stood upright in the mud. The mist shifted again and beyond the swamp he could see the low, rounded outlines of the collapsible buildings Two and Three had carried in their cargo pits. They were set on a rock ledge rising a few feet out of the marsh. The Colony!