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Title: Blind Man's Buff
Date of first publication: 1945
Author: Malcolm Jameson (1891-1945)
Date first posted: Mar. 19, 2022
Date last updated: Mar. 19, 2022
Faded Page eBook #20220347

This eBook was produced by: Al Haines

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[Source: Astounding Science-Fiction, February 1945]



BLIND MAN'S BUFF

By MALCOLM JAMESON



_The Commission had a fine-sounding offer--just show 'em how much of
Venus you wanted and it was yours.  Trouble was, you had to make a
map of the unmappable!_


The bright dot had grown to a disk days before, now it was a dazzling
silvery sphere, looming straight ahead.  Lorimer, the assistant
umpire, sat in the radio booth dozing, his headphone strapped on.
Hartley made a few last adjustments to his adored Maggy--the
instrument with the X-ray eye--and then walked over to where Travis
sat staring into the visiscreen.

"The big money sure ganged up on us," remarked Hartley, surveying the
outside scene as reflected before them.

"They've got numbers, if that is what you mean," said Travis, with a
grim chuckle, "but I'm not so sure about the brains.  The
Farrington-Driscoll combine always did their dirty work
statistically.  They're doing it now.  Most of those poor devils you
see out there won't be alive this time tomorrow.  Driscoll's game is
as simple as the Rule of Three.  The mortality of ships trying to
land on Venus is roughly a hundred to one.  Ergo!  He sends a hundred
and some odd ships.  His competitors--like you and me and old Buck
Turner--are playing singletons.  All of us combined, if we were
combined--which we are not--haven't a ghost of a show along with his
bird dogs."

"Unless we're smarter," amended Hartley.

"Yes," grunted Travis.

Other ships were to the right and left of them, abreast but curving
downward in a great circle that closed forty miles below their keel.
The formation centered on the lone cruiser that carried the chief
umpire and which followed the base course between the Earth and the
planet of their destination.  Shortly they would arrive at the point
ten diameters distant from Venus, and that was where the take-off
would be.  After that it would be a free-for-all scramble for the
honor--and untold riches--of being the first man down.

Most of the ships carried the yellow-and-blue markings of the newly
formed Venusian Land Development Co., the Farrington-Driscoll
enterprise.  Buck Turner's rusty old tub floated somewhere on the far
side of the circle.  Nearby were two crazily converted yachts manned
by adventure-struck college kids.  A quadrant away there were several
other independent entries, all of an impractical nature.  One was a
man who fondly held the theory that the only way to tear away the
deadly veil of Venus was to take actual soundings with wire drags and
then drop kite balloons with moorings.  His idea was to plant buoys,
so to speak, to mark the more dangerous crags.  Another was a fellow
who claimed to be an expert meteorologist, and whose ship was fitted
with bins containing colored flours.  By dumping those on the
Venusian cirrus he hoped to make stains whose motions he could study.
By charting the general circulation of the upper air and noting the
presence of updrafts and eddies, he hoped to deduce the locations of
the hazards below.

Travis and Hartley's own hope was pinned on magnar--the Maggy, as
they preferred to call it--a squat machine that embodied all the
virtues of super-radar plus, but inverted.  Where old-style radio
used oscillating electric currents to generate magnetic waves, magnar
operated on reverse principles.  Surges of magnetrons set up electric
strains which reacted from the surroundings.  The results were
incomparably more satisfactory than with standard electronic
equipment since it was penetrative and analytic as well.  But
marvelous as the instrument was in its tests under terrestrial
conditions, its behavior on Venus was yet to be ascertained.  Curious
magnetic phenomena had been observed there, due probably to the
proximity to the fierce radiation of the sun.  Auroras were
encountered at all latitudes, and there was known to be a low belt
practically opaque to all but long waves.  But for better or for
worse, they intended to depend on their device to get them safely
down, and for the later complying with the strict rules laid down by
the Bureau of Genomics in the staking out of their claim.

A gong struck warningly, and Lorimer came to life.

"It's the standby signal," he said, and cut in the loudspeaker.

"All ships, attention," boomed the voice of the chief umpire.  "In
five minutes we will arrive at the take-off point.  See that you are
not ahead of the station or you will be disqualified.  Everyone
listen carefully while I refresh you on the rules.  Ships will go in
with open mikes, so that I can keep track of your whereabouts.  Upon
making your planetfall you are to ground your ship where it may be,
leaving the assistant umpire on board for communication purposes.
Set up a radio beacon at once so that if necessary I can visit you to
check up.  After that you are free to explore the territory about
you."

There was a pause for acknowledgments up to that point.  Travis
nodded.  He knew the rules.  The signals came through loud and clear.
Violent earthquakes and torrents of boiling volcanic mud falling as
rain drove him away shortly after he landed, but the beacon he left
behind served long enough to allow him to regain the stratosphere
safely.  It ceased sending within the hour, indicating that
subsequent earthquakes had destroyed it, but it showed what was
possible.

"After your reconnaissance," went on the voice from the cruiser, "you
should then stake out your claims.  Vague descriptions, wooden
stakes, blazes on trees, or loosely piled stone cairns will not do.
There was too much litigation arising from the careless early
surveying of Mars.  Good topographic maps must be submitted, tracts
described by metes and bounds, and the corners tied to salient
landmarks.  If possible, the survey should be tied to the planetary
grid.  In cases of conflict, title will be awarded to the most
accurately mapped.

"Imagine that!" sniffed Hartley.  "Expecting good topography in a
dense fog.  It's a good thing we have the Maggy."

Travis was silent.  He was wondering how those clauses happened to be
in the conditions.  Could it be that Driscoll had a hand in it,
knowing their meaninglessness but having devised some way to beat the
game?  For the term planetary grid implied either a previous
triangulation survey or the establishment of circles of latitude and
longitude, a manifest impossibility in view of the record.  Perhaps
Driscoll meant to perform such a survey.  He had an army of men, and
was known to have taken aboard a great quantity of infrared
equipment.  Given time and men enough, Venus could be triangulated,
using heat detectors and directional walkie-talkies.  It was a
disturbing thought.

"Ten seconds to go," warned the cruiser, after which came the long
buzz.

"Hop to it, and good luck," were the umpire's final words.

The screen was no longer jet-black with the bright silver ball in its
center.  It was half-and-half silver and black, the velvety
star-spangled sky covering the upper part, and the dazzling shell of
Venus the lower.  The dividing line had been a strongly curving
arc--a segment of the upper limb of the planet.  But it had flattened
little by little until it showed no curvature.  It was a straight
line--a horizon.  What lay below appeared to be an endless,
featureless field of snowy white, flat as a floor.  It looked like
snow, but it was not.  It was an expanse of spicules of ice, the
frozen upper cirrus that marked the boundary between the stratosphere
and the zone of cloud and fog.  Travis shifted the controls.  He took
the ship off its tangent and put it into gently curving "level"
flight.  The altimeter stood steady now.  Its reading was twelve
kilometers.

They had not hurried.  At the signal "GO" some of Driscoll's bird
dogs had, as well as the enthusiasts among the other entrants.  All
wanted to be the first in, as the bursts of violent fire from their
reserve tubes showed.  But as they fanned out, each toward the
assigned section of the Venusian perimeter, Travis hung back.  There
was no rush.  Most of the early birds would die, if history was any
guide, and he did not choose to be among them.  He saw that Driscoll
cagily hung back too, and the strategy of it was plain.  The foxy
financier would wait to see which of his scouts survived, then follow
in on his beam.  If none survived--well, he could write the
expedition off and go home again.  There would always be another time.

"What do you hear?" snapped Travis, addressing Lorimer, who cringed
in the radio booth listening through headphones to the other ships.
The man's face was white and his eyes large and glazed, and at times
he shuddered violently.

"I ... it is a shambles down there."  he said, licking his lips.
"They're crashing right and left.  You hear 'em reporting, then all
of a sudden there's a scream ... something about a pinnacle looming
up in the mist ... or else no sound but a burst of static ... oh,
sir, don't you think we'd better turn back?"

"We're not as crazy as we look," said Travis grimly.  "But we're not
turning tail yet."

He made other adjustments to the ship.  Much of the momentum had been
braked down by the air resistance.  Now only one tube was jetting,
and that at just a trickle to maintain steerageway.  Travis pulled
the levers, that extruded the vessel's stubby wings and stabilizer
fins.  From here in the ship would have to be handled as a glider,
but with ample reserve power at the throttle.

"Warm up the Maggy," he said, "and start shooting."

Hartley turned on the magnetoscope.  That was an attachment that
converted distances and bearings into light rays.  Magnetronic tubes
did the trick, throwing the resultant visual image onto a concave
screen on the far side of the compartment.  For a moment the screen
showed nothing but haze, but as fog dissolves and pictures emerge
from behind it, the haze melted.  What was revealed was truly amazing.

The layer of frozen cirrus vanished.  Several miles below its level
there suddenly appeared what seemed to be an azure sea sprinkled with
scattered rocky islets, arranged in long, twisting chains.  But it
was like no ocean man had ever looked upon.  Its surface appeared
hard and glistening, as if of ice, but that illusion of rigidity rose
and fell in mighty pulses, now covering, again revealing more of the
rough crags that jutted through it.  There was a mirage-like quality
about the whole scene, for nowhere did any of the islets show shores
or beaches, though their jagged outlines expanded and contracted in
phase with the heave of the strange crystalline sea.

"That must be your ionosphere," ventured Travis, squinting at the
astonishing vista.  "That is the phenomenon that distorts radio
beams, though it seems to stop ours cold.  But at least we are able
to define it sharply.  That is some help."

"Go down as close as you can and see what it does," suggested
Hartley.  "Maybe the angle of incidence has something to do with it.
Maybe it will recede or vanish."

"Right-o," said Travis, and nosed the ship over into a dive.


Inexorably the gleaming surface seemed to rise up to meet them.  It
did not give an iota, or fade.  It was an absolute thing.  The
magnetoscope version may have been pure illusion, but what met their
eyes appeared hard and unyielding.  If Travis maintained his angle of
dive, it could be but a matter of minutes until the ship would be put
to the acid test.  It would either crash against reality or else
plunge through--_what_?

"Stop!  Don't go on down.  Please don't!" wailed Lorimer.  Unnoticed
he had stolen over and was staring wildly at the screen.  "It's
suicide, I tell you."

Travis eased off on the controls and half-way flattened out.

"What do you mean?" he asked, roughly.

Lorimer was thoroughly frightened.  Trembling and whimpering he
blurted out what he had been overhearing on the inter-ship.  Most of
the other entrants were gone--all the independents and scores of
Driscoll's ships.  Many shattered themselves against hidden crags, a
few reported themselves stuck in morasses that were about to engulf
them.  A number of the Driscoll vessels had mutinied and turned tail.
Only one was down safely, and he was complaining to Driscoll and the
umpire of his plight.  He was being tossed about on a turbulent ocean
and shipping water with every giant wave, for his altimeter had been
at fault and he cracked his plates on striking.  Venus was living up
to her deadly reputation.

Lorimer never finished his piteous narration.  He caught another
glimpse of the pseudo-sea over Travis' shoulder.  It was now but a
matter of yards away and impact was at hand.  Lorimer uttered a
little moan and keeled over in a dead faint.  Travis shot the slumped
figure a contemptuous glance and flicked a lever.

"Shall I try the chute stunt?" asked Hartley, cheerfully, as Travis
pulled the ship into a saving climb.

Travis shook his head.

"Too risky.  I had rather we stick together.  What about supersonic
frequencies.  Can you tune the Maggy to those?  I doubt if anyone
ever thought of using them for soundings."

"I can try," said Hartley, and proceeded to alter the magnostat
setting.  He was not sorry to hear the parachute alternative was out,
since it had been a forlorn hope at best.  One of them was to jump
overboard with the automatic beacon, trusting to luck that he fell
near a place where the ship could land.  If radio failed there was
still hope of sending up messages tied to soundage ballonets.  But
snaring those, or even seeing them in the upper air would be a tough
task for a fast-moving vessel.

The sonic soundings did work.  The Maggy was not geared to convert
that data to vision, but Hartley could interpret the echoes.

"That string of islands to the right," he said, "terminates in a
sheer cliff.  What I get from beyond it is very faint and much
delayed.  I think the precipice is a high escarpment or else the near
wall of an immensely wide canyon.  Try it there."

"Here goes," said Travis, grimly, and started the hazardous plunge.


The passing through the mysterious ionosphere was an impressive
moment.  They winced in spite of themselves at what looked like
imminent deadly impact.  Then the magnetoscope faded into a blur of
milky blue, matching the formless haze of swirling mists that still
showed on the standard visiscreen.  The terrible uncertainty lasted
for a second, and then the picture cleared again, this time with the
strangely oscillating azure surface vaulting close overhead.
Stretched out below them was a magnificent vista--incredibly weird,
but as open to their gaze as any bird's-eye view ever obtained on
Earth.  Magnar had pierced the veil of the promised land.  Venus was
theirs!

The terrain was a magnificent jumble of Earth forms.  The sierra that
formed the crenellated top of the escarpment was lost above the
ionosphere, but all else was there for the seeing.  Steep talus
slopes at the foot of the mighty cliff led down to what on a normal
planet would have been a plain.  But this plain was broken by scores
of volcanic cones, many of which were shrouded in a curious pall of
dirty brown--probably volcanic ash turned to falling mud by the ever
present moisture.  Elsewhere there were badly tilted plateaus and
solitary mesas, between which meandered great rivers.  Far away and
to the right lay the sea.  It was a real sea this time, and dappled
with islands, great and small, many surrounded by reef-inclosed
lagoons.  The borderline between the sea and land was a vague marshy
area where the rivers lost their identity in a maze of tortuous
bayous, deltas and lagoons.  Over all, wherever the ground was fairly
level, there were vast forests of incredibly high trees.

Travis cruised along with his eye peeled for the best place to land,
for once they were down they would have to leave the ship and proceed
as best they might in the amphibious crawler in the hold.  Suddenly
he caught sight of a curious arrangement of naked stones near the
crest of one of the tilted plateaus.

"That's a funny outcropping," he began.  "it looks for all the world
like--"

The rest of the sentence died on his lips, for Lorimer came suddenly
to life.  The man was crazed with fear.  He dashed across the room,
screaming with hysterical frenzy.

"I won't let myself be murdered," he howled.  "You are not going
through with this madness!"

Travis and Hartley hurled themselves at him, but Hartley's flying
tackle and Travis' vicious uppercut landed too late.  The damage was
done.  Lorimer slumped back into unconsciousness, but it was by the
eerie light reflected from the still glowing visiscreen.  Everything
else was dark.  The magnetoscope was dead.  Lorimer's wildly clawing
hands had managed to yank half the switches on the panel open.  The
emergency lights slowly blinked on, but meter pointers still
oscillated wildly, especially those having to do with the magnetic
circuits.  The abrupt interruption of the current had set up
magnetronic eddies that would not die down for minutes.

"Get the supersonics going again if you can," said Travis between his
teeth, "but it looks as if I'll have to land this baby blind."

He cursed fervently, trying to recall all the varied detail of the
topography he had been studying.  But there was no time for reasoned
action.  The altimeter reading stood at a bare kilometer, and was
dropping fast.  Before he could get the vessel under control it
lurched heavily to the crackle of snapping branches and the scraping
of tree-tops along the underside of the hull.  The lurch turned into
a bucking forward fall punctuated by many jolts and bumps.  For a
moment the ship seemed to tear itself clear but only to go into free
fall.  There was the briefest sickening instant of thudding impact,
and their voyage was ended.  With a squishy thud and a lazy roll, the
ship came to rest.  Travis and Hartley sat up in the respective
corners into which they had been pitched and listened.  To their ears
came the steady lapping of water alongside their keel and the patter
of raindrops on the roof.

"So this is Venus!" said Hartley, wryly.

"Uh-huh," grunted Travis, hauling himself to his feet.  "So it seems.
Better get the beacon set up.  I'll take stock."

"Dismal place," was Hartley's comment.  He was gluey mud to his
midriff, having just climbed back into the entry port.  Back of him
was a curtain of hot rain that splashed to the ground only to rise
instantly in clouds of steamy vapor.  Dimly seen below was the
crawler, itself mired to the hubs of the half-track rotors.  Gurgling
rivulets of water ran past it toward a larger stream they could hear
roaring in the background.  Vision stopped five yards away.  Beyond
that was only uncanny yellowish light, of equally mild intensity in
every direction.  Sogginess, and a dispiriting sort of amber
semi-light was the keynote of Venus.

"What's the lay?" asked Travis.  A distinctly chastened Lorimer
peered over his shoulder.

"Trees, mostly.  Unbelievable trees," said Hartley.  "The California
redwoods would be saplings here.  If it's organics they want, we've
got 'em.  Shade doesn't seem to mean anything here with the light
evenly diffused the way it is, because between the big trees there
are all sorts of others, some with fruits like melons.  And
underneath everything is giant brush.  Gosh.  The going is plenty
tough.  I'm glad we don't have to survey this planet inch by inch."

"We'd better get going with the Maggy, then," said Travis.  "Lorimer
helped me set it up.  All we need now is the pantos and your expert
assistance."

Hartley washed the worst of the mud off him and then followed Travis
up the ladder that led to the dome hatch.  The instrument rested on
the flatter part of the roof, shielded from the downpour by a hastily
stretched tarpaulin.  By it stood the box that was to receive the
scale relief map the Maggy was to construct.  It was a three-sided,
open-topped affair, made of plates of transparent synthetic crystal.
Travis fastened the pantograph's arms to lugs extending out of the
magnar's side, and attached the quills at their tips.  When he
finished the rigging, the pantos extended out into the receiving box.

"We'd be sunk without our Maggy," said Travis, gazing at the veil of
water that poured down on all sides.  "Driscoll's men brought along a
flock of infrared equipment and bolometers, but even with those they
will find surveying this country a tough job.  What the--"

The ship groaned and trembled beneath them, and they were shaken
until their teeth rattled.  They had to cling at the swaying
stanchions to keep from being tossed off the ship.  But the
earthquake, though severe, did not last long.  It died out in a
series of shuddering tremors and then there was quiet again--the
watery quiet of splashing rain and gurgling ravines.

"Log the time of that," Travis called down the hatch to Lorimer.

"Ready to ride," announced Hartley, promptly putting the earthquake
out of his mind and going back to the machine.  "Let's make this
first try accurate.  They'll be more like to accept the later
abbreviated ones if we can show them all our paces.  I'll start with
the underlying igneous rocks and fill in above as I go.  Use black
for that."

Travis filled the panto quills with a tarry substance that when
exuded hardened quickly into a dark glass.  That was the symbol that
stood for granite in their code.  He had other plastics for the other
rocks--dark red for sandstone, olive green for shale, a dirty yellow
for limestone, and so on.  Hartley cut in the juice.

It took the Maggy an hour to lay the foundation for their work.  The
weaving pantos worked in and out in an every widening arc as directed
by the operator, squirting the colored plastics onto those laid
before.  Where volcanic necks intervened--and there were
many--Hartley stepped up the current so as to force the reluctant
radiation through, since when it was set to be reflected by basalt it
would bounce back from the nearer surface.  It took skill and
understanding, but in the end they were well pleased with the result.

What stood in their box was the skeleton of what was to be a diorama
of their surroundings--so far just the naked land on which they
rested.  One could walk around the crystal box and see just how far
down the basic magma lay, and how the stratified rocks above were
twisted, folded, and faulted.  It was the geologist's dream come
true.  If they had been interested in ores, they would have had only
to adjust the radiation to the proper setting and delineated it
neatly in any special color they chose.  As it was, in case of
challenge, a simple drill rig could verify their claim in a short
time.

Hartley stopped long enough to have a smoke, though the sodden
tobacco did not draw well.  Then he changed his tuning slightly and
ran in the mantle of soil and mud that clothed the bedrock.  Toward
the sea the alluvial muck was quite deep.

"Say," said Travis, "we have to put up with the ship's shadow, but
what is that thing up there?"

He pointed to a narrow pointed, irregular wedge lying sidewise on the
model's surface.  It was a wedge of emptiness, in which nothing had
registered.  Except for its queer shape, it was the counterpart of
the conical hollow in the very center of the model.  That was the
shadow cast vertically downward by the hull of the ship itself, since
no amount of power would push the magnetrons through that thickness
of alloy steel.  Hence the pantos could only build an irregular empty
cone topped off by the cigar-shaped upper contours of the vessel.

Hartley scrutinized the wedge of vacancy.

"It may be thrown by a moraine.  Who knows, they may have had
glaciers here once upon a time.  Put the black pigment in and I'll
test for granite."

The result he got was surprising.

"That's a funny thing," frowned Travis.

"No action of ice or water ever left detritus like that, and I can't
think of any normal upheaval that would cause it."

The cause of the shadow was granite, but in a form most unnatural.
Far away from any known outcropping, it lay there in thin slabs.  In
the scale model they were of paper thinness, meaning that actually
they were less than a yard thick.  They were about ten times wider
and occurred in all lengths up to several hundred yards.  Not only
did the slabs exist contrary to all known laws of granite cleavage,
but their disposition was unorthodox.  They lay roughly end to end,
though by no means continuously since in spots there were wide
vacancies.  The pattern was that of a circuitous line that sometimes
wound around low hills and at others went straight over them.

"What do you make of it?" asked Hartley.  "The remnants of an old
wall, perhaps, overthrown by an earthquake?"

"Too thin for a wall," shrugged Travis, "but let it go just now.
When we extend the survey we will have to go up that way and then
we'll take a look.  Let's get on with the rest of the topography now.
The light is getting dimmer and this rain is chilly."


Hartley put the Maggy to defining water, and the irregularities of
the Venusian surface swiftly filled with clear plastic.  Ravines
turned into streams and saucerlike depressions into lakes.  It was
necessary for them to know the depths of the water hazards before
they set out later in the crawler.  And then, after shifting the
quills, the pantos began sketching in the vegetable matter, reporting
only what was composed of cellulose.  The forests took shape, but not
as clusters of individual trees.  The scale was too small for that.
They came out as masses of greenish glass or as a thin glaze where
only grasses were.

"Hey," exclaimed Travis, pointing.  "What's that there--another
shadow?"

A clean V-shaped vacancy had been left by the moving arms--a tapering
semi-conical tunnel through the tree mass where it intersected it,
and barrenness beyond.  It was far too regular to have occurred in
nature.

The appearance of it puzzled Hartley, for it terminated where it met
the face of a mesa he had run in earlier.  That would indicate that
the unseen obstruction was softer than the sedimentary rocks but
harder than wood.  Hartley twisted a dial.  The shadow persisted.  He
twisted other dials and stepped up the power.  Nothing went through.
Whatever it was was exceedingly hard.

"A ship!" said Travis, as the outlines of it suddenly began to grow
under the weaving pantos.  It was a cigar-shaped affair, and beside
it were a pair of flat objects of the same material.  Its lines were
familiar.  It was Driscoll's _Pathfinder_, and the two other objects
were his crawlers.  Their steel effectively masked what lay beyond
them.

"It must have just landed," said Hartley.  "It couldn't have been
there before or I couldn't have shown the mesa complete."

"He used our beam to come in on, the skunk," said Travis, huskily,
and wheeled toward the hatch.

"What are you going to do?"

"Call up the chief umpire and protest."

The umpire answered soothingly.

"Now, now, Mr. Travis--there is no need of distressing yourself.
Venus is big.  Tremendously big.  There's room enough for both of
you.  I would suggest that you make contact and reach an agreement.
One of you go one way, the other the other.  After all, Mr. Driscoll
has suffered terrific losses in ships and men and you can afford to
be generous.  As for that, there is nothing in the rules to cover a
conflict of this sort.  Later you may take your complaint to the
courts, but it is beyond my jurisdiction.  Moreover, no part of Venus
belongs to you yet--not until you have made an adequate survey."

"But we _have_," insisted Travis, raging.  "My partner and I have
developed an instrument that maps in total darkness, or through solid
barriers for that matter.  It is by means of that that we discovered
this trespasser.  I demand--"

"Ridiculous," said the umpire, crisply.  "My assistants have reported
conditions down there.  You are overruled."

The click of the severed connection left Travis in a state of
sputtering fury.  The umpire's stupid action was not final, of
course.  A display of the map would show his error.  But Driscoll's
intrusion was not only not sportsmanlike, it had an ominous quality.
For he had power and the cunning to exploit every technicality.  It
would have been bad enough to have him on the other side of the
planet, for sooner or later they were bound to meet.  But to enter
into conflict at the very outset was bad.  Very bad.

Travis strode to the safe and took out the rules.  He scanned them,
fuming, but in the end had to concede that the umpire was partly
right.  The rules were silent on the point.  Everything hinged on the
quality of the survey made.  The best mapped claim would win,
regardless of priority.  Travis relaxed a little.  In that field the
Maggy should win hands down over the clumsy bolometric methods
Driscoll would probably employ.  Hartley agreed with him in deciding
to ignore Driscoll for the time being, and carry on.

"Tomorrow," Travis declared that night, as the three of them were at
supper, "we will stow the topographic map in the hold, dismantle the
Maggy, and move on to the far edge of what we've already done and add
another sheet from there.  Lorimer will have to stay here to maintain
outside communications.  We'll keep in touch with him by means of our
walkie-talkies."

Lorimer nodded agreement, when Travis suddenly sat bolt upright.

"_Psst_!  Do you hear what I hear?"

Outside was the rush and hiss of the rain that never stopped falling,
but over it was a louder sound--the rumble and grating of heavy gears
and the burbling of an exhaust pipe half submerged in slime.  A
crawler was coming.  Then they heard a hail, faint and
unintelligible.  The crawler noises grew louder, then ceased.
Someone was rapping on the hull.

"In the ship there--ship, ahoy!" came the hail again.  Travis rose
scowling and spat viciously.  The voice was Driscoll's.

Under the distress clauses of the inter-planetary code, he could not
be denied entrance, but Travis' greeting when he opened the lock was
frosty.

"I can't keep _you_ out," he said, "but your gorillas stay in the
crawler."

He closed the door in the faces of the four strong-arm men that
Driscoll carried with him whenever he visited one of the outplanets.

"Now what do you want?"

"I?" laughed Driscoll, with easy politeness.  "Why, nothing for
myself.  I wanted to see if you were all right, that's all.  This is
a beastly place, you know."

"You know we are all right," said Travis, sternly.  "You followed
down on our beam and have doubtless been eavesdropping ever since.
Quit beating about the bush and come to the point."

Driscoll raised an eyebrow in mild surprise.

"Your hostility amazes me.  However, I did have another purpose in
coming.  My assistant umpire carelessly came off without a sufficient
supply of report forms.  He asked me to obtain some from your man."

Travis silently indicated Lorimer, who rose and went to his booth.
Travis and Hartley looked on with steely eyes as Driscoll followed.
Nothing apparently passed between them except the pad of government
forms, but there was justification in being profoundly suspicious of
anything Driscoll did.  Driscoll pocketed the forms and uttered
profuse thanks all around, but just as he was about to leave he added.

"As I am here, we may as well discuss our future relations, since it
seems we are the only two to get through."

"Now it comes out," said Travis, with a curl of the lip.  "Let's have
it."

The two partners listened stonily as the financier unreeled his
come-on talk.  Venus, he said suavely, was too vast a field to be
exploited on a shoestring ... skyports must be established and
immense amounts of capital devoted to transportation alone ... the
orderly development of the immense resources would require an army of
technicians and astronomical amounts of specialized equipment.
Simple pioneers could not cope with the problem.  They simply
cluttered up the field and impeded others.

"All right," snapped Travis.  "So we impede.  That is our right."

Driscoll was not upset.  Look at the history of all such
undertakings, he suggested, patiently.  When did a pioneer ever cash
in on his potentialities?  Wouldn't it be better to accept the honor
of having paved the way and then retire gracefully to easier fields?
Would a million valors tempt them?  Each, that is?  No?  Five
million?  Ten?  Ten million valors was a lot of money.  How much
then?  There need be no cutthroat race to stake out land.  They could
become partners in the big company by virtue of the transfer of their
rights.  Blocks of stock could be had in addition to the cash.  Why
not see the light?

"You're keeping us up," yawned Travis elaborately.  "We've had a hard
day.  Good night."

Driscoll never dropped the mask of buttery smoothness, but as he
bowed himself out there was an ominous glint in his eye.

"I never make an offer but once," he said.

"Fair enough," said Travis, and twisted the dogs home with a bang.


It was the earthquake that woke them up.  It came in the middle of
the night, just eleven hours after the shock of the afternoon.  The
din in the ship was terrific as every loose article banged against
its neighbor.  The dim standing lights flickered on and off and the
bunks pitched wildly.

"We'd better get topside and check on the Maggy," said Hartley,
blinking.  "Rouse Lorimer to give us a hand."

But Lorimer was not in his bunk.  They found him on the roof plate,
since they wasted no time getting up there when they saw the hatch
was open.  It was Travis who was first up.  He climbed through the
hatch and stepped outside the shaft of light that stabbed upward into
the misty haze of night.  The beam from his sweeping torch fell upon
no magnar or diorama, though the stanchions still stood swaying under
the tarpaulin.  The ruptured power lead still snaked across the
slightly curving dome, but it terminated in a frayed end a yard away.
There was nothing but a startled man in night clothes squinting into
the flashlight's rays.

"I ... I came up to secure the equipment you left here," stammered
Lorimer.  "I ... it's not here!"

"We see it isn't," said Travis, grimly.  He cast his light down onto
the hull plates.  They were beaded with moisture and streaked with
rivulets, but a wide, glistening smear showed where something heavy
had slid over.

"We'll have to allow for these earthquakes hereafter.  They may be
tidal," he said.  His voice was harsh, but he held it rigidly even.
There was no hint of reproach or dismay.  "It's too dark to assess the
damage now.  Let's go back to bed."

Down below.  Hartley cautiously closed the door of their room behind
them.

"You took it calmly."

"Why not?" asked Travis, wearily.  "The rat pushed them over, of
course, but there isn't a vestige of proof.  The earthquake might
have done it, you know.  But it serves to tip us off to what to
expect."

"Like?"

"That Driscoll's preparations for surveying this accursed fogbound
land are not so hot ... that Lorimer is by now on his payroll, and
probably tipped him off to the excellent performance of the Maggy ...
that that umpire up in the stratosphere is probably not his creature
after all, but just a dope.  Otherwise Driscoll wouldn't have slogged
over here through the mud to make us those fancy offers.  I knew then
that he was afraid of us, but I didn't expect him to act so quickly.
He was slick about it, too.  Our evidence is nothing but surmise that
would be laughed out of any court in the world."

"Then you think we're licked?"

Travis gave a short, hard laugh.

"After we dig the Maggy out of the muck in the morning I'll tell you
more.  There's no use worrying about it now."

Neither one of them went to sleep at once.  For Travis' part he felt
a sense of relief that the first blow was struck.  It was outright
warfare now, even if veiled.  It served to remove inhibitions.
Neither Travis nor Hartley had come to Venus inspired by greed.
Their motives were otherwise--a compound of scientific curiosity;
pride in their miracle-working machine, and to some extent the love
of adventure.  Vaguely behind it all there was the sober conviction
that the human race must have new frontiers or stifle.  They needed
money, to be sure, as did everyone, but only in reasonable
quantities.  Yet Driscoll's avarice was such that he was attempting
to defraud them of even that.  Very well.  The only retaliation the
land shark could appreciate would be in kind.  His lies and sabotage
must be countered with blows where they hurt--in the pocketbook.
Travis considered that angle dreamily, and then dropped off to sleep.

The severity of their loss did not become apparent until well after
the dim, slow-creeping dawn.  They found the fragments of the diorama
deep in the slush beside the ship.  It was broken into three big
chunks and marred with jagged cracks.  Glumly Hartley fished the
pieces out and washed them off.  But except for a few chips
irretrievably lost, it could be fitted together and cemented back
into a serviceable map.  The Maggy that lay under it was
different--it was beyond salvage.

It must have fallen first and then received the impact of the heavy
mass of glass.  Its unique tubes and delicate coils were hopelessly
smashed.  There were spare parts on board to make good some of the
damage, but to fully restore the instrument meant a trip back to
Earth.  That they could not afford to do.  Departure now would
forfeit all they had gained.

"We're sunk," said Hartley, gloomily.

"You're never sunk until you admit you are," reminded Travis, grimly.
"We still have the helios and the bolos, and a few other tricks up
our sleeve."

"Like?"

"I've got a hunch I want to play.  We'll talk about that later."

They carried the topographic model inside and repaired it.  Then they
took photographs of it and locked it away in the hold.  The Maggy
they sadly consigned to a vacant bin.  The advantage it gave them was
gone.  From then on they would have to explore Venus the hard way.

"Pile our stuff into the crawler, Hartley, and warm the motor up."

Then Travis called the chief umpire by radio.  He spoke with
restraint, but he was firm in his demands.  The umpire had certain
duties and he should perform them.  The stratosphere was not the
place.  He should bring his ship down to the surface and park it
between the two contestants.  Travis went on to report Lorimer's
panic on the flight down and his subsequent "carelessness" in
tumbling their equipment overboard while ostensibly trying to secure
it.  He wanted Lorimer's immediate replacement, and a guard for the
ship, for he intended leaving it to carry out the required field
work.  He did not propose to submit tamely to being stabbed in the
back while he was gone, and concluded by reminding the umpire what
happened to some negligent officials after the scandals on Mars.  The
umpire sputtered indignantly but said he would come on down.


An hour later Travis and Hartley piloted the slithering, splashing
crawler away.  Travis grinned at recalling the umpire's reaction when
they showed him the map.  The fellow had been honest in the belief
that they could not possibly have accomplished so much in so brief a
time.  In other respects he was simply a run-of-the-mine civil
servant, more afraid of violating the letter of his instructions than
any other thing.  He was weak and not too bright, but he was not
venal.  They could go off into the fog and leave him behind as a
buffer with a fair degree of confidence, for before leaving they had
seen that he sent through to Earth a complete report of progress to
date.

"I still don't get what you're driving at," said Hartley, peering
into the dirty yellow mist that had replaced the rain.  He was
steering.  His chart was a photo of the model, his compass a gyro set
to an arbitrary base line called "pseudo-north."  He ducked one of
the numerous ponds and got back on the course.  It led straight to
the nearest part of the curious winding granite slab formation.

"You will," said Travis cheerfully.  He was less depressed by the
crippling of the Maggy than his partner.  "You thought those pieces
of granite were the remnants of a wall.  Maybe, but my theory is that
they are what is left of a road.  Our own ancients built some pretty
good roads.  It could be that this planet is inhabited, or was.  If
so, and that long line of broken slabs is a road, all we have to do
is follow where it leads and maybe we'll bump into something that
will help us."

"Yes, but I still don't see--" objected Hartley, still puzzled, but
he had to pull up suddenly.  They had been plowing through the
gigantic grasses that rose in clumps to untold heights above them,
but for a few moments the visibility happened to be amazingly good.
There were instants when they could see all of fifty feet.  And there
before them lay one of the old slabs.

It was canted sharply and riven by stalks of the bamboolike growth
that had upset it, but it was obvious that Travis' guess had hit the
mark.  Despite the slimy moss that clung to the flat, tilted surface,
they could not miss the two deep grooves--distinct, parallel furrows,
the marks left on a hard road by generations of shod cart-wheels.
The distance between the treads was just short of six feet,
indicating that whatever vehicles had made them were not dissimilar
in size to those used by men.

"This does it," said Travis, triumphantly.  "Now we're getting
somewhere.  Do you remember when Lorimer went crazy on the trip down
and cut our lights?  We were studying some funny rock shapes on the
top of a plateau.  It looked like the ruins of a town to me.  If so,
it can't be far from here.  In any event, a road always runs from
somewhere to somewhere else.  Turn right and let's see where this one
takes us."

They drove on.  Often they lost the road, but for a while the map set
them straight again.  As Hartley manipulated the crawler's heavy
wheel, Travis unloaded some of his views.

"We are required to make a survey.  One look around shows how tough
that is.  Astronomical observations or triangulation as done on Earth
are out of the question.  We work in a medium that is worse than
dark.  That means we will have to triangulate by heat beacons, picked
up by bolometer or radar or supersonics, all crude methods.  A heat
source is necessarily large, not a pinpoint like light.  Radio is
fuzzy in definition except where metal is the target.  Supersonics
are entirely unreliable in an atmosphere as humid as this.  Now that
the Maggy is on the blink it's a case of doing the best we can, and
that best has to be better than Driscoll's."

"Well?" said Hartley, sheering to avoid a monster geyser that loomed
up ahead.  It was one of a row that was spouting boiling water
thunderously into an already saturated air.  The crawler slumped over
into a quagmire and then had to wait other minutes while one of the
recurrent earthquakes shook itself out.  Simultaneously the thudding
roar of a distant crater vomiting into action boomed in their ears.

"What a planet," gritted Hartley, hanging on to the bucking wheel.
"When you do survey it what have you got?  I bet whole gobs of this
topography comes and goes overnight."

"Not improbable," said Travis, unperturbed.  "Which makes it all the
more desirable that we establish ourselves geographically--by
latitude and longitude--if it could be done.  Since that is tough we
are left with a bolo survey.  How good that will be will depend a lot
on how good our base line is.  Back there in the jungle where we
were, and Driscoll is, it would take a year just to cut out one
through those big trees.  You would still have to mark the end of the
line with a well-defined monument.  Now cities are a lot more
distinctive than trees or lakes or mountain peaks, and if we can
find a few there, we have our corners ready made.  Not only that, but
cities promise other rewards--caches of ancient treasure, if the
cities are as dead as the condition of this road seems to indicate
they are."

Hartley nodded his agreement.  By then they had progressed to the
place where they were about to run off their Maggy built map.

"Just keep following the road," said Travis.

They continued to climb.  After a bit the bamboo growth was less
dense.  It was also less gigantic, and the humid air was cooler, too,
indicating a gain in altitude.  The steamy vapor of the forest was
replaced by the cold, swirling mists of the plateau.  It was better
going, and even seeing, in every way.

"Here we are," said Hartley, swerving to a stop as a rift in the fog
showed what lay ahead, "and the dump is as dead as Babylon, from the
looks of it."

Wreathed in trailers of clinging mist a high, crenellated wall stood
athwart the road, pierced by a single, towered gate.  To the left a
part of it had been overthrown and tumbled forward into what may have
been a moat, and chunks of rubble half filled the lower part of the
gate.  But Hartley surveyed it briefly and then slid in the crawler's
gears.  The clumsy vehicle grumbled, and then started to climb.  In a
moment it was through the relative gloom beneath the dark arch of the
gate and clattering out into the streets of the dead city.

"Why, this town is half buried--like old Pompeii," exclaimed Travis,
pointing.  On either side there were rows of buildings, their lower
floors submerged and with a mixture of mud and rubble masking the
sills of the upper windows.  "Its city walls have helped to hold the
muck in or the rains should have washed it out long ago.  No telling
what we'll find when we go to digging."

They went on with their exploration.  It was a fairly extensive town
with many buildings of massive masonry, but it had been a dead city
for a very, very long time.  In the heart of it they came upon a
great open square out of which protruded the upper portion of a sort
of pyramid.

The pyramid was a six-sided affair, and curiously truncated.  Slimy
moss covered most of it, but they found handholds in crevices and
managed to climb to the top.  In that slanting surface they found a
circular hole about a foot across, the only visible entrance, but
when they crouched down and peered into it with sweeping flashlights
they saw only a cavernous room half filled with stinking rain water.

"Well," said Travis, brightening and straightening up.  "It looks as
if we had something.  Call up the umps on the walkie-talkie and tell
him we have established our advanced base, but nothing more.  Get it?"


The days that followed were ones of intensive exploration.  They
broke into the upper stories of the buried houses and dug out the
volcanic ash and mud that filled them.  They found bolted doors that
had been forced, but beyond them they discovered passages leading to
the nether parts of the house where the doomed Venusians had fled in
fright when extinction came upon them.

Considering the prevalence of moisture, what they found was in a
surprisingly good state of preservation.  The original catastrophe
must have been accompanied by dry heat, for the remains of the Venus
creatures had dessicated to mummified cadavers easy to study.  They
were remarkably anthropoid, differing from man chiefly in that they
were taller and more slender and also had six digits to the hand and
foot.  Beside them were an abundance of artifacts of every
description, including weapons and armor.  The armor was of
incredible richness in many cases, being of gold and silver damascene
inlay in hard steel, the whole crusted with gems of rare fire and
color.  In a single day the boys found wealth enough to satisfy the
greediest.

Travis shortly left the work of cataloging the archeological finds to
Hartley.  It was imperative, now that they had come upon this antique
city, that they stake out a claim that would stand up against any
machination of the Driscoll crowd.  Therefore he set up his
instruments and began the patient accumulation of recorded data.

The diffusion of light and heat was practically perfect, and the
unaided eye had but the vaguest notion where the sun rose or set or
the path it followed.  But the helio was an instrument of rare
delicacy and Travis felt he could find the sun within an accuracy of
a degree or two.  The bolometer readings were less satisfactory,
since the greatest heat recorded was in mid-afternoon, but between
them he was able to roughly know when it was apparent noon and more
or less what the altitude of the sun was.  The time of sunrise and
sunset was indefinite, in the absence of knowledge as to what the
horizons were, so he could not say what was the length of the actual
day.  But the noon to noon intervals, and the regularity of the tidal
earthquakes gave him the length of the mean day.  Venus revolved
about its axis once in every twenty-two hours and a few minutes.

It was a triumph, of a sort.

"The latitude here is about sixty-five degrees," he told Hartley,
jubilantly.

"Yeh.  What about the longitude?"

"Zero--a hundred--anything I want to call it," grinned Travis.
"Longitude is arbitrary.  The first maps at home used the westernmost
of the Azores for the kickoff point, thinking the world began there.
Later the Americans used Washington, the French Paris, and so on
until they got together on Greenwich.  It doesn't matter really.  The
guy that states it first and hollers loudest wins."

But Travis' elation was short-lived.  His figures were rough, but
they had a clear trend.  Every noon's altitude was greater than on
the day before.  Venus' axis was also tilted to the ecliptic.  She
had seasons.  The sun was climbing in the sky, which meant it was
spring.  Travis groaned.  He might have expected it, but it was a
shock.  He would have to track that elusive area of light for a full
Venusian year--two-hundred and twenty-five terrestrial days--to
establish the full curve.  And it would take another year or two on
top of that to make sure he was right.  It was too long.  Driscoll
would beat him to the gun with an inferior survey.  Once the deeds
were passed the jig would be up.

He frowned as he considered another difficulty.  He would win over
topography with astronomical latitude, given time, but at that his
latitude was fuzzy.  Within a degree or so was not good enough.  It
left a probable error of up to a hundred miles.  He was wasting time.
He had better drop this nonsense and tackle the slow but surer way of
piecemeal triangulation.  It was when he broke that news to Hartley
that Hartley brought better news to him.

"Say," he said, "today I found this picture in the cellar of a house.
We ought to break into that pyramid."

He produced a thin sheet of bronze on which was engraved a view of
the central square.  The lines were very fine, as if etched, and they
depicted the great plaza as it must have looked in its days of glory.
The massive pyramid dominated the picture, and throngs of people
swarmed in the square, holding their hands up in apparent
supplication.  A group of what were probably priests stood on the
sloping platform made by the truncation, looking down on the masses
below.  It was apparently the day of some great festival, but the
significant feature was that it showed a large portal leading into
the pyramid at the level of the street.  Its wide doors were open,
and the men and women were streaming into it.

Travis studied the etching.  The great door was delineated as being
on the face of the pyramid immediately below the lowest side of the
truncation, a great help.

"Well," he said, "this tells where to dig.  Let's get going."


Digging in the heavy, compact mud was hard going, but luckily it was
not far.  They hastened the work by rigging up a scraper and used the
crawler for a drag.  In the end they also had to employ the clumsy
vehicle to batter in the heavy bronze leaves of the door, for they
were securely fastened from within.  Then the doors crashed inward
and the crawler lunged through into the dim interior.  They stopped
and turned on its spotlight.

"It's a temple, not a tomb," pronounced Hartley.

It was a huge cubical room, bare of all furnishing except a high
altar reached by a flight of wide steps.  Above the altar rose a
pylon on whose face was a glittering sunburst, evidently of pure gold
and richly set with jewels.  About the altar stood a few vases, and
on the floor lay the smashed remnants of others.  From them spilled
mounds of gems of all colors that sparkled brilliantly under the beam
of light.

Travis swung the light around and swept the walls.  On either side of
the pylon were two huge embossed characters of the Venusian language,
and around the entire room ran a wide frieze covered with
ornamentation of interlaced hexagons and duodecagons.  Every square
foot of the walls underneath was given to elaborate mosaics.  The
theme of most were battles, confirming the opinion already reached
that the Venusians were a warlike people.  One big picture
represented a ceremony which might have been a coronation.  The most
revealing of all was the last they came to.

It was done in dark-blue glazed tiles, and spangled with diamonds set
in tiny silver rayed settings.  Across it ran a wavy line of narrow
gold ribbon, the highest point of which was adorned with a replica of
the sun symbol.

"As I live and breathe," shouted Travis.  "A map of the sky.  I hope
whoever laid out that sun track was an astronomer, not an artist,"
and he hastily rigged his camera.

It took hours to give the pyramid a thorough search.  By means of
winding stairs behind that pylon they came to upper levels, each
being smaller than the one below.  Most were the living quarters of
the priests, and there were some dark cells for the sacrificial
prisoners.  Some day archeologists would translate the hieroglyphics
and learn what those about to die had scribbled on the walls.  There
were other caches of treasure, too, but the greatest of all was the
library.  Here they found many scrolls, most of which were still in
tubes sealed with wax.  The majority were unintelligible, but they
took away for study all that furnished clues in the way of
illustrations and diagrams.

The topmost level was barred by another bronze door that defied all
their efforts.  In the end they had to get dynamite from the crawler
and plant a charge.  It was well they took ample cover on the floor
below, for the aftermath of the explosion was unexpected.  A freshet
of trapped water came tumbling down the stairs and spread out on the
floors of the rooms below.  After a little it shrank to a dribble,
and they climbed the slick, weedy steps to see the ultimate
compartment.

Here they found another pylon and sunburst, though mossy from the
dammed up water, presiding over a flat stone altar faintly
illuminated by the light that shone through the hole overhead.
Travis cast his flash about.  Clinging algae showed the high
watermark overhead.  In the corners of the room were some strange
instruments deeply incrusted with damp verdigris.  They proved to be
astrolabes, octants and transits of bizarre design, and one was
fitted with a rude crystalline lens.

Travis and Hartley stood for a long time in sober thought, sizing up
the place and trying to visualize the rites that had been conducted
there.

"I think I'm beginning to get this," said Travis, suddenly.  "It's
clear enough these people were sunworshipers.  This is a combined
temple and observatory.  The Egyptians did something of the kind, and
so did the Aztecs.  My hunch is that that hole is set so that at the
summer solstice and no other time the sun would shine in here and
illuminate this altar.  What blood orgies followed then don't concern
us now.  The thing is that we have a check on my own
orientation--that truncation up there must face south, and, if I can
dope out just where that ray hit the altar, I'll have a verification
of the altitude of the sun on that day.  It's not all I need, but it
is a help."

"The climate must have been a lot different in the old days," said
Hartley, peering up through the gloom at the small, blurry spot of
light.

"Of course it was.  Vulcanism is the answer.  For a while this planet
was stable, and then another era of mountain building set in.  The
scrap of geology we got from the Maggy showed us what the last
upheavals have done.  But it wasn't only earthquakes and eruptions
that did the Venusians in.  Extreme volcanic activity heaves a lot of
water into the air.  Our own ones do.  They get it from the core of
the earth where it is still held in solution in the general mass.
The Venusians were losing cities fast and their skies were getting
thicker.  So the smarter ones of them got together and tried to
escape.  There must have been a very few advanced enough to conceive
of space-ships--the Venusian Leonardo da Vincis, ahead of their
time--but we know they managed it, and with a little better luck
their race might have survived."

"All right," agreed Hartley.  "But how does that help us?"

"We've got a swell observatory here--for Venus.  The sun climbs
higher every day.  I'll keep checking it from the outside and you set
up some equipment here.  If your instruments register with mine the
day it hits the solstice, my theory is proved.  This will be the key
point--longitude zero and whatever we find the latitude to be.  Then
we'll move on to another city and get another set of figures.  It
won't be long before we've whipped this thing."


That night they opened a bottle of their medical brandy and had a
celebration.  Then Hartley remembered that he hadn't made his routine
report of the day.  They didn't want well-meaning rescue parties come
fumbling their way.  He made the usual report that they were O.K.,
but finding the going slow.

"Ask how Driscoll is doing," prompted Travis, taking another swig.

"Not so good," said Hartley when he clicked off.  "For us, that is.
Umps says that he recalled the ships that got cold feet and deserted
him, claiming that since they had not yet actually reached Earth they
were still part of his expedition.  So now he has scores of more
parties out.  Umps says he has taken in hundreds of square miles of
territory on the other side of ours.  They're even talking of sending
for more gangs to start clearing a landing field."

"That's bad," growled Travis.  He wouldn't have grudged it to any
other man, but with Driscoll it was different.  Calling in extra help
was hitting below the belt.  "Did he mention finding any cities?"

"Nope, but he said that Driscoll looked pretty cocky.  He's probably
playing it cagey like we are."

"Uh, huh," grunted Travis.  It wasn't good news.  There were plenty
of smart men on Driscoll's payroll, and there was no copyright on
unraveling antique mysteries.

The summer solstice occurred two days later, but it took several days
more to make sure, for the sun declined too imperceptibly to make
certain of it with his crude tools.  Travis spent the time poring
over the documents unearthed in the sacerdotal library and the
photostats of those dug up in Persia.  The hieroglyphics were quite
beyond him except for the numerals.  They stopped him for a while
until he angrily noticed that he had persistently overlooked the fact
that there were twelve characters employed and not the usual ten.

"Of course," he declared sourly, "people with six fingers and toes
_would_ have a duodecimal based numerical system.  I should have
guessed it from their ornament, the shape of the pyramids, and all."

After that it did not take long to unravel the simpler computations
left by the ancients, but in the absence of explanatory texts they
remained incomprehensible operations in arithmetic.

Hartley broke open another scroll and unwound it on their makeshift
desk.

"Say--" he shouted.

"A map!" exclaimed Travis, jumping to him.  Then his hopes sank.  It
was a map, but of what?  There was no shorelines or rivers or
mountain ranges, nor was it another star map.  It partook of the
qualities of both.  Sprinkled over it was a myriad of little black
sunbursts, some smaller, some larger, and they were connected by a
network of lines jagged as conventional lightning streaks.  Each of
the tiny symbols bore a pair of hieroglyphic characters, evidently
the name of the place or thing, but he could not read them.  Over all
there was a light rectangular grid with numerals in fine script at
their ends.  Four of the horizontal lines were heavier than the
others, and between the middle pair and in the center of the map were
two double sunbursts done in gold leaf--one just beneath the upper
line, one just above the lower.

They puzzled over the map for hours.  Travis got out his code table
of numerical values and ran in the translation of the figures.  The
vertical lines were marked with figures running up to three digits,
the values being from zero to 999 on the duodecimal scale--just one
short of the cube of the base.  The horizontal lines had no number
higher than 499 on the same scale.  But all the values were
consecutive, the horizontal series running from the top down, the
vertical ones from right to left.  The extreme upper and lower parts
of the map were otherwise blank.

"It is a dead ringer for a Mercator projection," insisted Hartley.

"I know ... wait!"  Travis came suddenly out of his gloom into life,
then laughed.  "This shows what a fixed idea can do to you.  We keep
thinking in terms of three-hundred and sixty degrees to the circle.
These people had a simpler system.  They had one thousand seven
hundred twenty-eight degrees to the full circle--the cube of twelve!
Now it makes sense."

He snatched open a drawer and yanked out the photos they had taken
inside the pyramid temple.  One was the picture of the giant pylon
above the main lower altar.  He grabbed a pair of reading glasses and
gave one to Hartley.

"See if we can match those characters anywhere.  They may stand for
the temple or the town.  My hunch is that it will be in the middle
latitudes, so you take the upper half and I'll take the lower."


In a little while Hartley let out a yelp.  He found a matching pair.
And a relentless search for the next half hour showed there was not
another spot on the map with the same markings.  That indicated that
each of the small sunbursts stood for a pyramid, and the ragged lines
between were probably the connecting highways.  What they had was an
ecclesiastical map of Venus.

There was much more to do before Travis was satisfied.  He ran and
dug out the measurements of the upper sacrificial chamber.  He had
all along suspected that the slope of the truncated roof was such as
to be normal to the midsummer rays.  It was twenty-one degrees from
the horizontal.  He deducted that value from the observed maximum
altitude of the sun, sixty-seven.  The answer was forty-six.  That
wasn't what the figures on the map showed, but the Venusian scheme
was different.  Latitude according to their convention ran from pole
to pole, not from equator both ways.  Travis did some fast
subtracting and converting from the tiny Venusian degrees to the fat
terrestrial ones.  The answer was cheering.  It came out to forty-six.

"It's in the bag now," chuckled Travis.  "Now it all clears up.
These golden double sunbursts denote the happy land--the Twice-Blest,
so to speak.  They get sun in the zenith twice a year inside the
tropics, so the priests could have twice as many bloody parties.  My
money says that the temples there will be flat-topped, too.  Way up
here they had to tilt the top to let the sun in on the one day a year
it did come, and the angle gets worse the closer you get to the
poles.  Up above the arctic circles there are days they don't have
sun at all, so the temples are few and far between.  But now that we
have the key, what are we waiting for?  Let's get going."

"Where to?  The ship?"

"Not yet.  We'll stop by at the next town and do a little
double-check."

Without the map it would have been easy to have missed the place
altogether.  It lay in a shallow valley and all that showed above the
reedy mud was a sloping piece of flat rock that might easily have
passed for an outcropping of bedrock.  They unplugged the solar hole
of its muck and dropped a suction hose into the sacrificial chamber
of the buried pyramid.  The crawler's pump was set to work and soon
the dark water was gushing out.  The boys ate their lunch, and then
went to work with crowbars to enlarge the hole.  It was unnecessary
to blast their way to the great hall far down in the base.  The upper
room was also adorned with the temple's designating characters.  They
scraped the slime off them and compared them with the map.  They
tallied.

When they were up in the crawler again and sheltered from the rain
that had now grown from a steady, miserable drizzle to a roaring
torrent, they sat through another spine-wrenching earthquake.  They
had time to think and appraise the magnitude of the fortune that had
befallen them.

"This means that we own this whole dog-goned planet?" asked Hartley,
a little awe-struck.

Travis nodded.

"Hands down."

"But what are we going to do with it?  I wouldn't live here if they
gave it to me."

"I dunno.  Kick Driscoll out and give it to the poor, I guess."

He grinned.

"I wouldn't live here either."


[The end of _Blind Man's Buff_ by Malcolm Jameson]