In the back of his mind he realized he ought to adjust his oxygen flow, but before he brought himself to make the adjustment the surplus took its effect. He began to hum, then to dance awkwardly over the sand. A moment later he was singing a wild space ballad that he thought he had forgotten years before. After ten feet he tripped and went sprawling down in the sand. He lay there, trickling the violet sands through the gloves of his spacesuit, feeling very lightheaded and very foolish all at the same time.
But he was still sober enough to realize he was in danger. It was an effort to reach over his shoulder and move the oxygen gauge back a notch. After a moment the flow levelled out and he felt his head beginning to clear.
He was marching through a fantastic baroque desert. Venus was a riot of colors, all in a minor key: muted greens and reds, an overbearing gray, a strange, ghostly blue. The sky, or rather the cloud layer, dominated the atmosphere with its weird pinkness. It was a silent world—a dead world.
In the distance he saw the wreckage of the ship; beyond it the land began to rise, sloping imperceptibly up into a gentle hill with bizarre sculptured rock outcroppings here and there. He walked quickly.
Fifteen minutes later he reached the ship. It stood upright—or rather, its skeleton did. The ship had not crashed. It had simply rotted away, the metal of its hide eaten by the sand-laden winds over the course of centuries. Nothing remained but a bare framework.
He circled the ship, then entered the cave a hundred feet away. He snapped on his lightbeam. In the darkness, he saw——
A huddled skeleton, far to the rear of the cave. A pile of corroded equipment; atmosphere generators, other tools now shapeless.
Cavour had reached Venus safely. But he had never departed.
To his astonishment Alan found a sturdy volume lying under the pile of bones—a book, wrapped in metal plates. Somehow it had withstood the passage of centuries, here in this quiet cave.
Gently he unwrapped the book. The cover dropped off at his touch; he turned back the first three pages, which were blank. On the fourth, written in the now-familiar crabbed hand, were the words: The Journal of James Hudson Cavour. Volume 17—October 20, 2570——