line would not only pick up revenue from transporting the colonists to Venus but it would also pick up some profitable freight business. In the long run, they foresaw a very happy increase in traffic.

One joker they ran into right from the start was that nobody but a damned fool wanted to go to Venus and argue with six-eyed apes like Shad Brisbee over the rights to their dancing grounds. Also, nobody wanted to put up with the fog flies and the flying snakes and the what-nots.

Cooper knew how to change all that. "We'll make films, write books, publish pamphlets—all of them emphasizing the good points of Venus. We'll make this planet look and sound like a seed catalogue. We'll soon have thousands, maybe millions of people, coming here. Build Venus up. Make people see Venus maybe not quite as good as heaven but at least as wonderful as Eden!"

This was where Wilkerson and Molock and Rita Morgan and yours truly, Sam Crane got into the act. Rita, who was the apple of Cooper's eye, got the assignment of taking the three dimensional movies in full color and full sound that would make Venus attractive. Of course, on the sound side we had Cooper's permission to dub out the screams of any Venusian getting swallowed by a forty-foot boa constrictor. Wilkerson, Molock, and I were included to fly the ship and help Rita.

In other words, it was our job to dig up the raw material that the publicity department could use to sell a bill of goods to suckers back on Earth who could be flim-flammed into making the big hop to Venus.

In getting these pictures of Eden in the Sky, we had hunted up the tamest of all tame Venusians, Shad Brisbee. We knew him, he knew us. To my mind, the fact that he knew us was not to our advantage. In some ways, I would have preferred taking our pictures among some of the wilder tribes, who didn't know us. But Know-All George Cooper had decided that the tame Shad Brisbee was just the lad for us. He had loaded the ship with trade goods and had told us where to go. All of this might have worked out fine, if we had not damaged the drive and had to make a forced landing right in the middle of Shad Brisbee's tribal dancing ground.

You may not know it, but these Venusians are funny about dancing. They don't go in for cultural amusements, there isn't a ball park or a library on the planet, a pin ball machine, a golf course, or anything else that might make life more cultivated. But every Venusian has his private dancing ground and every tribe has a big one. For amusement, the Venusians dance. They dance in the morning and in the afternoon. They dance to celebrate the beginning of a spell of wet weather and the end of it. The male Venusians dance as their squaws go out in the morning to gather fruits and vegetables, they dance in the afternoon when the squaws come home. At night, the squaws join in and everybody, big and little, old and young, dances.

They hold elaborate contests to determine who is the best tribal dancer. He's the chief, the big shot, the boss. They hold contests between tribes, everybody gets drunk, everybody dances. Personally, I'll say one thing for the Venusians, it always seemed to me that dancing contests were a better way to settle personal and tribal problems than war, but the Venusians are just benighted, ignorant natives with no knowledge of the finer things of life. This doesn't mean they can't and won't fight—they fight alligators and flying snakes and blue tigers—but they just don't fight each other. Any personal or private quarrels they settle by dancing it out.

I've heard learned professors from Earth lecture on the vast satisfaction to be derived from expressing the kinesthetic sense, the rapture that goes with movements of the body, the sweet pure flame of mood expressed by body movement and gesture. All of this may mean something, to the professors. So far as I'm concerned, the Venusians just like to dance.

If you want to start a ruckus—and but good—just suggest to one of the males that things would be a lot better