The Lotus Eaters

"Whew!" whistled "Ham" Hammond, staring through the right forward
observation port. "What a place for a honeymoon!"

"Then you shouldn't have married a biologist," remarked Mrs. Hammond
over his shoulder, but he could see her gray eyes dancing in the glass
of the port. "Nor an explorer's daughter," she added. For Pat Hammond,
until her marriage to Ham a scant four weeks ago, had been Patricia
Burlingame, daughter of the great Englishman who had won so much of the
twilight zone of Venus for Britain, exactly as Crowly had done for the
United States.

"I didn't," observed Ham, "marry a biologist. I married a girl who
happened to be interested in biology; that's all. It's one of her few
drawbacks."

He cut the blast to the underjets, and the rocket settled down gently on
a cushion of flame toward the black landscape below. Slowly, carefully,
he dropped the unwieldy mechanism until there was the faintest
perceptible jar; then he killed the blast suddenly, the floor beneath
them tilted slightly, and a strange silence fell like a blanket after
the cessation of the roaring blast.

"We're here," he announced.

"So we are," agreed Pat. "Where's here?"

"It's a point exactly seventy-five miles east of the Barrier opposite
Venoble, in the British Cool Country. To the north is, I suppose, the
continuation of the Mountains of Eternity, and to the south is Heaven
knows what. And this last applies to the east."

"Which is a good technical description of nowhere." Pat laughed. "Let's
turn off the lights and look at nowhere."

She did, and in the darkness the ports showed as faintly luminous
circles.

"I suggest," she proceeded, "that the Joint Expedition ascend to the
dome for a less restricted view. We're here to investigate; let's do a
little investigating."

"This joint of the expedition agrees," chuckled Ham.

He grinned in the darkness at the flippancy with which Pat approached
the serious business of exploration. Here they were, the Joint
Expedition of the Royal Society and the Smithsonian Institute for the
Investigation of Conditions on the Dark Side of Venus, to use the full
official title.

Of course Ham himself, while technically the American half of the
project, was in reality a member only because Pat wouldn't consider
anything else; but she was the one to whom the bearded society and
institute members addressed their questions, their terms, and their
instructions.

And this was no more than fair, for Pat, after all, was the leading
authority on Hotland flora and fauna, and, moreover, the first human
child born on Venus, while Ham was only an engineer lured originally to
the Venusian frontier by a dream of quick wealth in _xixtchil_ trading
in the Hotlands.

It was there he had met Patricia Burlingame, and there, after an
adventurous journey to the foothills of the Mountains of Eternity, that
he had won her. They had been married in Erotia, the American
seitlement, less than a month ago, and then had come the offer of the
expedition to the dark side.

Ham had argued against it. He had wanted a good terrestrial honeymoon in
New York or London, but there were difficulties. Primarily there was the
astronomical one; Venus was past perigee, and it would be eight long
months before its slow swing around the Sun brought it back to a point
where a rocket could overtake the Earth. Eight months in primitive,
frontier-built Erotia, or in equally primitive Venoble, if they chose
the British settlement, with no amusement save hunting, no radio, no
plays, even very few books. And if they must hunt, Pat argued, why not
add the thrill and danger of the unknown?