Lowe, making a routine check of supply crates lashed to bulkhead eye-bolts in the hold, heard a frantic hammering that originated, not from the outside hull as his first startled fancy had it, but from inside an airtight drum stenciled "FILM."
He called Geddes and Hovic, more for moral support than for assistance, and together they ripped open the drum. Inside they found Hanlon, unconscious upon a litter of food tins and exhausted oxygen flasks.
There was also a whiskey bottle among the ruck. Hanlon, true to form, was very drunk.
They carried Hanlon out of the hold and strapped him into the radio chair, a position not to be used for another six days. They clamped an oxygen mask over his purpled face and fed him intravenously, and finally his impossibly resilient constitution threw off the effects of acceleration, Irish whiskey and near-asphyxiation.
He laughed in their faces when they asked why he had stowed away.
"I'm dodging the draft," he said. "There's going to be another war any day now—the last one."
Hanlon was quite sane in spite of the punishment he had taken at blast-off and later in the stifling prison of his hideout, and his prophecy shook them more than they dared admit.
"It's been coming to a head for months," he said. "They wouldn't have told you at the Foundation, because they didn't want you distracted from training, but the bombs will be dropping before we reach Venus. You'll see when you get the radio working."
They kept Hanlon strapped to the radio couch, knowing better than to trust him, giving him temporary freedom for the physical necessities only when all three were on hand to guard him. They made their astronomical readings and orbital corrections as their instructions prescribed, concealing even from each other their eagerness for the day when the atomic uproar of the propulsors could be cut and they could assure themselves via tight-beam that Hanlon was wrong.