The Terra IV staggered, rolled half over and righted herself with a thin scream of straining gyros. The atomic propulsors faltered, recovered and drove them on into the roiling mists.
"Static charge," Geddes heard himself saying flatly. "So Hanlon was right again. It would have looked like a fuel pile letting go, if anybody were left on Earth to see it."
There was, miraculously, no serious damage. They brought the ship down, stern first, upon the waiting breast of Venus.
"The Silver Planet," Lowe said in the sudden quiet. "It was to have been the New Earth, remember?"
It was not until then that they learned the reason for Hanlon's quiet. Under cover of the landing he had plundered the supply cabinet for a plastobottle of medicinal alcohol, and was far into the process of drinking himself blind.
He cursed them thickly when they took the bottle from him. "Go out and claim your planet, you synthetic heroes. I don't want any part of it. I wish to hell I'd stayed on Earth."
They went, prompted by a conditioning that fell just short of posthypnotic suggestion, but this time they did not make the mistake of leaving their stowaway free. They overpowered the raging Hanlon and strapped him to the radio couch again before they put on their airsuits and went outside.
They climbed down the long personnel ladder and stood together on alien soil, feeling the brief thrill of accomplishment anticipated and allowed for by their Foundation mentors. But their elation was short-lived. They remembered what had happened to Earth and that there was no going home again, and there remained only the dreary routine of exploring a world that would never be used.
The ship had landed beside a clear, shallow river, a sluggish tributary feeding a larger river that emptied in the distance into a steaming, horizon-bound sea. The sky above was a smooth silver shell, with a vast circular rainbow surrounding the spot where Sol hid behind miles of vapor-laden air. The terrain undulated, closely turfed and dotted with wooded knolls, from the river upward to a low line of foothills that guarded a purple range of mountains beyond. Between the ship and the hills, undisturbed by the uproar of the Terra IV's landing, a scattered herd of fat, piebald creatures grazed comfortably.
They set about their business methodically, filling their little sterilized boxes with samples of air and soil and vegetation. Lowe went down to the edge of the shallow river and drew a bottle full of water, leaving behind him in the mud great shapeless tracks that looked more like the spoor of a mailed monster than of a man.