Suddenly, Carl tensed forward on the edge of the chair, conscious of a cold icicle of movement that snaked the length of his spine. The picture on the screen flicked out, abruptly. The room lights were on again, and Stewart Ferguson was studying him with detached insolence.
"Well?" Ferguson asked.
Carl ignored him, and turned to Norman Hamlin. "Did I see what I think I saw?" he asked.
Hamlin nodded.
"But those men!"
"You recognized them?"
Carl swallowed, hard. The highball he'd had three hours before churned up in his throat. "Of course I recognize them," he said thickly. "They've been commemorated on postage stamps and cut in stone at every spaceport in the country. But they're dead! Been dead for forty years!"
Hamlin turned up his palms. "You saw the pictures," he said evenly.
"Possibly the military has been deceiving us for forty years," Ferguson drawled. "Maybe they only made up that story about the poisonous atmosphere."
Keating felt a hot flush rise to the back of his neck. "That's not true," he said with obvious restraint. "I was there—for two long years I was on Venus, and it's bad, every bit as bad as the army says it is. You'd have to smell the stuff yourself to know what I really mean. It's so bad that even after you drop your jumper in the airlock and shower, the stuff follows you inside and stinks the ship up from here to Pluto and back again. The army's not lying. Not about that they're not!"