The camera swiveled in a 180° arc. They were looking up the hill now--looking up to where the hill tore itself loose from the green-fog level, rising for perhaps half a mile, then disappearing in the white ocean overhead. Halfway up the hill was a cluster of flare trees, their purple-brown leaves drooping in the ammonia-soaked air, and underneath the trees, a house--not the blister-type oxygen tents used by the military, or the thatched hovels of the chowls, but a real earth-style house with a peaked roof and pillar supported porch. Abruptly, the picture widened into a sharp closeup, revealing an open doorway. A man--an earthman--stood framed in the threshold. He was a clean-shaven man, probably in his early twenties. Two other men slightly older, lolled in a pair of rustic chairs set on the open veranda. Apparently none of the men were aware of the camera that recorded their every move.
Carl was aware of his hands gripping the chair arms. Except for the weird backdrop of flare trees and raton vines that flanked the house, he might have been looking at a peaceful summer resort in the Canadian Rockies. But it wasn't an earth picture. These men were on Venus lolling about in their shirt sleeves and breathing in the atmosphere of chlorine and ammonia that was sure to kill a man in thirty seconds!
It was trick photography. It had to be. Quickly, he flicked a look at Dr. Hamlin, then looked back at the screen. One of the men was elbowing himself out of the chair now. He walked to the edge of the porch railing and stared directly into the camera. There was something vaguely familiar about the man--about all the men.
Suddenly, Carl tensed forward on the edge of the chair, conscious of a cold icicle of movement that snaked the length of his spine. The picture on the screen flicked out, abruptly. The room lights were on again, and Stewart Ferguson was studying him with detached insolence.
Carl ignored him, and turned to Norman Hamlin. "Did I see what I think I saw?" he asked.
Carl swallowed, hard. The highball he'd had three hours before churned up in his throat. "Of course I recognize them," he said thickly. "They've been commemorated on postage stamps and cut in stone at every spaceport in the country. But they're dead! Been dead for forty years!"