"We dare not just sail in and land,” Thorn muttered. ‘It might mean the end of us, right there."
His face worked. “Yet we daren't lose time either! If Lana had only been able to tell us the secret."
"John, remember what Cheerly told Trask in. our cell on Saturn, after he'd got the secret from Lana!” Sual Av said eagerly. “That he'd learned from Lana that there was only one spot on Erebus where men could land without meeting a ghastly fate!"
"One spot, but where is it?” Gunner demanded. “There's no use of our hunting for that spot, for we wouldn't know it if we saw it."
"Yes, we would know it!” Thorn cried suddenly. “Cheerly's ship would have landed in that one safe spot. If we can find where Cheerly has landed here, we can land safely beside him!"
He swung around to Stilicho Keene. “We'll reduce speed and circle around Erebus looking for Cheerly's ship. Don't go lower than a hundred miles above the surface."
Unutterable tension gripped the Planeteers and the old pirate as the Venture swept in closer toward the mysterious planet from which only one man in all history had returned. Erebus slowly expanded ahead, a small world hardly larger than Mercury. At last the ship dropped to within a hundred miles of its surface.
It was a strangely luminous planetscape they looked down upon, a world shimmering everywhere with the dusky blue radiance they had noticed from afar. They had thought that faint luminescence a trick of reflected sunlight, but they saw now that it was somehow inherent in this world. Through that dusky blue haze they looked down upon a weirdly forbidding landscape.
Low, jagged, barren mountains rose like fangs bared at the dark, star-studded sky. Beyond their rocky slopes stretched dim deserts, wide blank wastes upon which moved little whirls of dust. And all this dreary landscape of eternal twilight was wrapped in the uncanny faint blue radiance.
"It's queer, the way it all shines,” muttered Sual Av. “But I can't see anything dangerous down there."