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The ship swung down into the cloud layer; floating wisps of gray vapor streamed past the orbiting Cavour. Finally Alan broke through, navigating now on manual, following as best he could Cavour's old computations. He guided the craft into a wide-ranging spiral orbit three thousand feet above the surface of Venus, and adjusted his viewscreens for fine pickup.
A moment later, after the screen flashed and went black twice, they were looking across the topside landing stage from a pickup at one corner. A slim fighter-bomber, with square-tipped, backswept, wings, was jetting up in almost perpendicular flight; another was coming in toward the landing stage, and, as they watched, a flight of rockets leaped forward from under its wings.
"Stick around, sergeant," von Schlichten told her. "I'll want you to take over when I'm through." He sat down in front of the combination visiscreen and pickup. "Now, lieutenant; just what happened?" he asked. "How did he die?" "We think it was poison, general. General M'zangwe has ordered autopsy and chemical analysis. If you can wait about ten minutes, he'll be able to talk to you, himself."
Pickup and I looked at each other with very blank faces on receiving this agreeable piece of news. What was to be done? I recovered the full use of my faculties first; and I was the man who solved that important and difficult question, while the rest were still utterly bewildered by it.
In the outside viewscreen, tuned to a slowly rotating pickup on the top of a tower spatially equivalent with a room in a tall building on Second Level Triplanetary Empire Sector, he could see his own conveyer rising vertically, with the news conveyers following, and the troop conveyers, several miles away, coming into position.
"Relay the pickup to the control-deck scanner, Roger," he ordered. "Let me take a look at that thing." In a moment the thin sweeping white line on the control-deck scanner swept around the green surface of the screen, picking out the blip that marked the meteor. Tom watched it for a moment and then barked into the intercom, "Stand by to execute change course!"
"Throw it on," Hetty said, "while I go change into some town clothes." Johnny started to hobble down the porch steps when Barney stopped him. "I'll get it boy, you stay off that ankle." Barney climbed into the pickup and drove it around to the tractor shed. He spotted two oil drums in the gloomy shed.
Claude gave him directions to both. "I don't have a car," Patrick said. Claude looked at him. "Can you drive?" "Yes." Claude reached in his pocket and handed Patrick a set of keys. "It's that '56 Ford pickup out there the black one with the wood rack." "Thanks, Claude. What are you going to do?" "Ahh . . . " Claude glanced around the room and smiled. "We shall see, mon ami.
"Look-a-here, Solomon Ezekiel Pickup," shouted Sergeant Halligan savagely, "it's against the regulations to talk to your superior orficers so damned impudent, and I'm a going to prefer charges against you, and you can face three months in the military prison for it. And I'm a-thinkin' that Briggs, the drill sergeant, will put you on the kickingest horse in the regimental stables.
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