Faster than an eye blink three snakes wrapped themselves around me. I saw another two wavering in the air, standing up like quivering antennas.

“No metal!” I screamed, as if they could hear or understand. “No metal!”

That didn’t seem to bother them at all. They had latched onto me and they weren’t going to let go. Could they sense the metal beneath my suit’s plastic exterior? Could they burn their way through to it? Liquid sulfur would do the job pretty damned quick.

I couldn’t sit up, not with their greedy arms wrapped all over me. I grabbed one of the snakes and pried it off me. It took both hands and all the strength of my servo-aided muscles. The underside of the thing had long, narrow mouths, twitching open and closed constantly. Disgusting. There were some kind of filaments around the lips, too. Really loathsome.

Fighting an urge to barf, I bent the snake over backwards, trying to break it. No go. It was rubbery and flexible as a garden hose. Blazing hot anger boiled up in me, real fury. These brainless sonsofbitches were trying to kill me! I twisted it, pounded its end on the red-hot rock, fought one leg loose, and stomped on it with my boot.

It must have decided I wasn’t edible. Or maybe I was giving it more pain than it wanted. All of a sudden all the snakes let loose of me and snapped back into their holes as if they had springs attached to their other ends. Zip! and they were gone.

Shaking inside, I slowly got to my feet again. Some scientists have a theory that the snakes are all connected to one big, huge, underground organism. Or maybe there’s more than one, but they communicate with each other. Either way, once it—or they—decided I was too much trouble to deal with, I wasn’t bothered with ’em again.

But I didn’t know that. I staggered on toward the return vehicle, scared, battered, bone weary, and very, very hot.

And there was the old Russian craft, up ahead. At first I thought it was a mirage, but sure enough it was the spacecraft, sitting on a little rise in the ground like a forgotten old monument to past glory.

Maybe I was just too tired to care, but it looked very unimpressive to me. Not much more than a small round disc that had sagged and half-collapsed on one side to reveal the crumpled remains of a dull metal ball beneath it, sitting on those baking, red-hot rocks. It reminded me of an old-fashioned can of soda pop that had been crushed by some powerful hand.

I staggered over to it and touched the collapsed metal sphere. It crumbled into powder. Sitting there for more than a century in this heat, in an atmosphere loaded with corrosive sulfur and chlorine compounds, the metal had just turned to dust. Like the mummies in old horror shows. Nothing left but dust.

I walked slowly around it anyway, letting my helmet camera record a full three-sixty view. History. The first man-made object to make it to the surface of another planet.

Just like me. I was going to be history, too. I was baking inside my suit. The temperature readout was hitting fifty; damned near two hundred in the old Fahrenheit scale, and that was inside the suit. I was being broiled alive. If it weren’t for my monomolecular long johns my skin would’ve been blistering.

Plodding along. I left old Venera 5 behind me, following the beep-beep of the return ship’s beacon, hoping it was working okay and I was heading in the right direction. Can there be an electronic mirage? I mean, could I be wandering off into the oven-hot wilderness, chasing a signal that got warped somehow and is leading me away from the return vehicle?

Is there a return vehicle at all? I started to wonder. Maybe this is Hal’s way of getting rid of me. Get the competition out of the way. Then it’s him and Angel without any complications. No, that doesn’t make any sense, I told myself. You’re getting paranoid in this heat, going crazy.

I pushed on, one booted foot in front of the other. Wasn’t making footprints, though; hot though it may be, the surface of Venus is solid rock. At least it is here. Solid and scorching hot. Over on the nightside, from what I’d heard, you can see the ground glowing red-hot.

“. . . get through?” crackled in my earphones. “Do you copy?”

“I hear you!” I shouted, my throat so dry that my voice cracked. The storm, the electrical interference, must have ended. Or moved off.

Nothing but hissing static came through. Then the director’s voice, “. . . signal’s weak . . .up gain?” His message was breaking up. There was still a lot of interference between the orbiter and me.

“Am I on the right track?” I asked. “According to my radar plot I’m still five klicks from the ship. Please confirm.”

Hal’s voice crackled in my earphones, “. . . enera five! Great video, pal!”

Terrific. The video got through but our voice link is chopped up all to hell and back.

Then it hit me. If the video link is working, switch the voice communications to that channel. I told them what I was doing while I made the change on the comm panel.

“Can you hear me better now?” I asked, my voice still cracked and dry as dehydrated dust.

No answer. Crap, I thought, it isn’t working.

Then, “We hear you. Weak but clear. Are you okay?”

I can’t tell you how much better I felt with a solid link back to the orbiter. It didn’t really change things. I was just as tired and hot and far from safety as before. But I wasn’t alone anymore.

“According to the signals from your beacon and the return vehicle’s,” the director said, as calmly professional as ever, “you are less than five klicks from the ship.”

“Five klicks, copy.”

“That distance holds good if there’s no atmospheric distortions warping the signals,” he added.

“Thanks a lot,” I groused.

Hal came on again and talked to me nonstop, trying to buck me up, keep me going. At first I wondered why he was doing the pep-talk routine, then I realized that I must be dragging along pretty damned slowly. I put my life-support graph on the helmet screen. Yeah, air was low, water lower, and I was almost out of the heat-absorbing alloy.

I turned around three-sixty degrees and saw the ragged trail of molten alloy I was leaving behind me, like a robot with diarrhea. The alloy was shiny, new-looking against the cracked, worn, old rocks. And there were lines curving along the ground, converging on the trail every few meters.

Snakes! I realized. They like metals. I turned back toward the distant rescue vehicle and made tracks as fast as I could.

Which wasn’t all that fast. Inside the cumbersome suit I felt like Frankenstein’s monster trying to play basketball, lumbering along, painfully slow.

I must have been describing all this into my helmet mike, talking nonstop. Hal kept talking, too.

And then the servo on my right knee seized up. The knee just froze, half bent, and I toppled over on my face with a thump that whacked my nose against the helmet’s faceplate. Good thing, in a way. The pain kept me from blacking out. Blood spattered over my readout screens and the lower half of the faceplate. I must’ve screamed every obscenity I’d ever heard.

Hal and the controller were both yelling at me at once. “What happened? What’s wrong?”

Through the pain of my broken nose I told them while I tried to get back on my feet. No go. My right leg was frozen in the half-bent position; there was no way I could walk. Blood was gushing down my throat.

So I crawled. Coughing, choking on my own blood, I crawled on my hands and knees, scraping along the blazing hot rocks with those damned snakes slithering behind me, feasting on the metal alloy trail I was leaving.

The radio crapped out again. Nothing but mumbles and hisses, with an occasional crackle so loud that I figured it must be from lightning. I couldn’t look up to see if the clouds were flickering with light, but I saw a strange, sullen glow off on the horizon to my left.

“. . . volcano . . .” came through the earphones.

Just what I needed. A volcanic eruption. It was too far away to be a direct threat, but in that undersea-thick atmosphere down on Venus’s surface, volcanic eruptions can cause something like tidal waves, huge pressure waves that can push giant boulders for hundreds of kilometers.

Or knock over a flimsy rocket vehicle that’s sitting on the plain waiting for me to reach it.

I’m not going to make it, I told myself.

“The hell you’re not!” Hal snapped. I hadn’t realized I’d spoken the words out loud.

“I can’t go much farther,” I said, glad that at least the radio link was back. “Running out of air, water, everything . . .”

“Hang tight, pal,” he insisted. “Don’t give up.”

I muttered something about snake food. I rolled over on my side, completely exhausted, and saw that the snakes were gobbling up my alloy trail, getting closer to the source of the metal—me—all the time.

And then suddenly they all disappeared, reeled back into their holes so fast my eyes couldn’t follow it.