At fifteen thousand feet I felt that we would be safely above the giant forests that are occasionally found on Venus as well as above most of the mountain ranges. We would have, at least, time in which to think and plan.

Now I was flying blind, without a compass, over unknown terrain; than which there can be nothing more baffling to the human mind and ingenuity.

I turned to Ero Shan. "Bail out, if you wish," I said.

"Are you going to?" he asked.

"No," I replied. "Even if we landed without spraining an ankle, or breaking a leg, or getting killed, the chances of our ever reaching Sanara would be practically nil.

The anotar is our only hope of salvation. I shall stick with it. I shall either live with it, or die with it."

"I think it will be the latter," said Ero Shan, with a grim laugh, "but I'd rather take that chance with you than the other; though if you had elected to bail out, I'd have gone with you."

Chapter Three

IF FATE HAD BEEN UNKIND to me in some respects, she had certainly not in the matter of a companion in misery.

You'd have to scour two worlds to find a finer chap or a more loyal friend than Ero Shan, soldier-biologist of Havatoo. Soldier-biologist! In Amtorian it is Korgan Sentar, and it is a title of high distinction.

We climbed rapidly, and at fifteen thousand feet we emerged into clear air with horizontal visibility limited only by the curve of the planet. Now we were between the inner and outer cloud envelopes. It was infinitely lighter and brighter here, but the air was hot and sticky.

I knew that at night it would be very dark and-cold, for I had dropped down through it that night that I had bailed out of my rocket ship before it crashed. What an experience that had been!

I hadn't the remotest idea of the direction in which I was flying, but I had the satisfaction of knowing that I could see mountains before I crashed into them. I flew on, hoping that there might come a break in the lower cloud envelope eventually that would permit me to come down again. I voiced this hope to Ero Shan.

"Such a thing might happen once or twice in a life-time," he replied. "I imagine that the chances that it would happen to us right when we needed it are about one to several billion."

"Well, I can always hope," I said. "I'm something of an optimist." How much of an optimist I am, you may readily judge when I admit that I have been hopefully waiting for years for seven spades, vulnerable, doubled, and redoubled. I might also add that at such a time my partner and I have one game to our opponents' none, we having previously set them nineteen hundred; and are playing for a cent a point-notwithstanding the fact that I never play for more than a tenth. That, my friends, is optimism."

"Keep on hoping," urged Ero Shan; "it doesn't cost anything, and it's an excellent tonic for one's morale.

Lovely scenery here," he added.

"Ever been here before?" I asked.

"No; nor anyone else."

"I have. It hasn't changed at all. There has been very little building activity since I passed through."

Ero Shan grinned; then he pointed ahead. "Look!" he said.

I had already seen. The inner cloud envelope was billowing up, gray and menacing. I nosed up to keep above it, and the first thing I knew the outer envelope billowed down and engulfed us. The two envelopes had met and merged.

What has taken such a short time to narrate really encompassed hours of flying. We might be thousands of miles from where we took off, or we might have been constantly circling and right back where we started from.

"How about bailing out now?" I asked. "It is your last chance."

"Why is it?"

"Because I am going down. The inner envelope has evidently risen: we have just seen it come up: the chances are that we have plenty of ceiling below it. If we hit a mountain, we die: if we stay here, we die."

"If we don't hit a mountain, we live to die some other day," cracked Ero Shan.

"Quite right," I agreed. "I am going down."

I came down in a long, slow glide-very slow: I was taking no unnecessary chances. Eleven thousand: ten thousand: nine thousand. I imagine that our visibility was something like a hundred feet, and at nine thousand

I saw a jagged mountain peak looming dead ahead! I banked, and how I banked!

Ero Shan whistled. "If your landing gear hadn't been retracted it would have scraped that mountain," he said.

"It was retracted." I felt as though my voice was pale: that had been a close call!

Now, in a new direction, I glided so slowly that most of the time I was almost on the point of stalling.