They spoke little among themselves, but Hanlon talked incessantly, chafing against his bonds and lapsing periodically into near-delirium until his first insistent craving for alcohol wore off. Later he set himself to assess their chances of landing safely on Venus, ignoring after his headlong fashion everything that had been taught him before his discharge from the Foundation.
"The Terra I missed, back in 1969," he said once. "The Foundation picked up her signals clear out past Jupiter when she went derelict. They never did quite prove that the Terra II was lost in 1980. The boys at Palomar claimed that her fuel pile went up just outside Venus' atmosphere, but they didn't have time for a spectroanalysis. It could have been an electrical discharge instead—there's bound to be a hell of a difference in potential between worlds, or between a space-irradiated ship and a planet as close to the sun as Venus."
They tried to ignore his arguments, resisting the thought that after all their preparation they might not be the first to set foot on the new world. Too, they could not lay claim to Venus as a Foundation possession if the Terra II had landed first. She had been a privately owned ship, manned, along with his family, by a reckless and fabulously rich Irish misogynist named Sean Connors.
The Terra III, which was built by the Foundation but manned by Army personnel, made the jump in 1991, and fell pilotless into the sun when her crew mutinied against their single officer.
And if Hanlon had guessed right, the Terra IV in 1998 might be the last.
They endured his theorizing until even their conditioned calm wore thin, and silenced him finally by threatening to put him under hypnol for the remainder of the trip. Hanlon lapsed into sullen silence and worked secretively at his bonds. The situation stagnated endlessly until the eight-day acceleration period was up, when they released Hanlon from his couch in order to use the radio.
In their eagerness to make contact with Earth they neglected to bind Hanlon again, which was a mistake, since he had not been conditioned as they had against the weird physiological reaction to weightlessness that followed the cutting of the drive.
To Hanlon it was like being dumped suddenly into a bottomless shaft down which he fell endlessly. His heart came into his throat, his ears roared, the instinctive fear of falling inherited from arboreal ancestors knotted his stomach with terror and drove out all reason.
"I'm falling!" he screamed, and snatched at a guide-rail. "Falling...."
Disoriented mechano-controls reacted wildly, refusing him balance, and he smashed into a bulkhead. Geddes and Lowe tackled him while Hovic tried to fend all three gyrating bodies from the instrument board, but Hanlon was not to be quieted. He screamed and threshed like a maniac, his limbs jerking with spastic overcompensation to every movement.