"Why there—rather than in any other direction?" Gerry asked quietly. The girl shrugged.
"Just a hunch. Of course, it's all guesswork."
The Viking had to go up to a level of 18,000 feet above this lonely Venusian sea before she was above the peaks of the mountains. Then Gerry turned her inland. Just before they left the shoreline they passed some sort of a flying thing that swooped down to prey on the sea-birds. It had a reptilian body, and a spread of leathery wings about twelve feet across.
"Will you look at that!" Steve Brent muttered.
"I'd hate to meet that on a dark night!" Gerry said grimly. Along the shoreline as they flashed inland he could see monstrous, crawling things that moved sluggishly along the beaches or in the shallows. It began to seem that life on Venus was on a different level than that of the Outer Planets.
The Viking drove steadily westward across the mountains. From the lower control room windows Gerry could see only drifted snow and naked boulders, and the gauntly lonely peaks. The air was thin and cold. The canopy of yellow clouds was only a little way above them. Then, across the mountains at last, they dropped down toward a broad table-land covered with patches of forest and alternate stretches of open grass-land.
"Cut rockets!" Gerry snapped. "Prepare to land!"
A few minutes later the Viking settled gently down in a broad clearing, where the coarse grass was knee high. For the first time in over six weeks the sound and vibration of the motors ceased. The expedition had landed on Venus!
The landing party filed out a door that opened in the lower part of the hull. The moist air was a little warmer than that of Earth, and it had an unfamiliar smell of growing things, but its density seemed about the same. Since the size of Venus was similar to that of their own planets, neither Earth-man nor Martian had much trouble in walking as soon as they became accustomed to a slightly lesser gravity. Gerry found he could leap eight feet in the air without any trouble.