Hamlin turned up his palms. "You saw the pictures," he said evenly.
"Possibly the military has been deceiving us for forty years," Ferguson drawled. "Maybe they only made up that story about the poisonous atmosphere."
Keating felt a hot flush rise to the back of his neck. "That's not true," he said with obvious restraint. "I was there--for two long years I was on Venus, and it's bad, every bit as bad as the army says it is. You'd have to smell the stuff yourself to know what I really mean. It's so bad that even after you drop your jumper in the airlock and shower, the stuff follows you inside and stinks the ship up from here to Pluto and back again. The army's not lying. Not about that they're not!"
"How do you account for the photos then?"
"I don't know," Carl said wearily. "All I know is that for forty years, no man...." He stopped suddenly, as all at once the full enormity of the situation dawned on him. Those men on the screen. He'd recognized them of course from their pictures. But how about those pictures? The pictures he'd seen of Edgerton, Mitchell, and Rhind, were old pictures.... Pictures taken almost forty years ago!
As if from far away, Hamlin's voice was droning in his ears. "Perhaps it's not quite as ridiculous as you may think, Mr. Keating. There's a widely recognized theory that the very air which gives us life, also gives us death. In fact, one of the chief reasons for the high migration to Mars is the fact that man's life expectancy on that planet is almost thirty percent greater than on our own. Now let's suppose that the three men who deserted the first Venus expedition had in some way found a way to breathe the air of that planet. Is it so inconceivable that the atmospheric content might be conducive to extremely high longevity--perhaps even immortality?"
Carl wanted to say something--anything. "When--when were these pictures taken?" he finally managed.
The voice had an oddly nostalgic ring to it. Carl turned. The man had apparently entered the room unnoticed. He was a big block-shouldered man, with brown eyes and a mat of inky-black hair that all but covered a low sloping forehead. He could have passed for a cargo hand at the Montauk Spaceport, except that Carl knew different.