Carl shook his head. "Could have been anything, I guess. They could have got lost and ran out of oxygen. They could have gotten snake bit. I wouldn't know. The whole thing happened before I was born."
II
Dr. Hamlin got up. "No, there was more to it than that. In spite of the fact that it happened almost forty years ago, I happen to know that the situation didn't occur exactly as the history books would have you believe. The army, it is true covered up for them and made them heroes, but Edgerton, Mitchell, and Rhind, in reality, took off on their own. They took off without orders or permission, just a few hours before take-off-time, with nothing except a six week supply of oxygen, a portable air-blister, and a few supplies."
Carl studied the man's face. The story was true. In his cadet days, old spacemen had spilled the story too many times for him to doubt its authenticity. "Suppose you tell me what all this is getting at?" he hedged.
Hamlin crossed the room. From a desk drawer he removed a palm-sized photo-cartridge and inserted it in the video adaptor. The room lights dimmed as the three dimensional screen brightened, dancing in a kaleidoscope of color. The colors merged.
He was staring into a vivid reproduction of a Venusian landscape. The picture had been taken from a small hill. Below was the violet-brown monotony of a saroo forest, visible only in small islands, where the roof of the trees stabbed out from the swirling green fog. And beyond that, almost lost in the haze, was the outline of a pair of reddish-brown spires, that reared out of the jungle, rising, till they were lost in the ever present layer of upper clouds that shrouded the planet. It was an ugly scene—ugly, yet strangely beautiful.
The camera swiveled in a 180° arc. They were looking up the hill now—looking up to where the hill tore itself loose from the green-fog level, rising for perhaps half a mile, then disappearing in the white ocean overhead. Halfway up the hill was a cluster of flare trees, their purple-brown leaves drooping in the ammonia-soaked air, and underneath the trees, a house—not the blister-type oxygen tents used by the military, or the thatched hovels of the chowls, but a real earth-style house with a peaked roof and pillar supported porch. Abruptly, the picture widened into a sharp closeup, revealing an open doorway. A man—an earthman—stood framed in the threshold. He was a clean-shaven man, probably in his early twenties. Two other men slightly older, lolled in a pair of rustic chairs set on the open veranda. Apparently none of the men were aware of the camera that recorded their every move.
Carl was aware of his hands gripping the chair arms. Except for the weird backdrop of flare trees and raton vines that flanked the house, he might have been looking at a peaceful summer resort in the Canadian Rockies. But it wasn't an earth picture. These men were on Venus lolling about in their shirt sleeves and breathing in the atmosphere of chlorine and ammonia that was sure to kill a man in thirty seconds!
It was trick photography. It had to be. Quickly, he flicked a look at Dr. Hamlin, then looked back at the screen. One of the men was elbowing himself out of the chair now. He walked to the edge of the porch railing and stared directly into the camera. There was something vaguely familiar about the man—about all the men.