IT WAS A BUSY TIME, for me especially, those next ninety-six hours. I was soon enabled to calculate, at least roughly, that Vulcan was a world of some eight hundred miles diameter, with an orbit approximately eighteen million miles from the Sun.
“It has an atmosphere?” Jan murmured anxiously.
“Yes, I think so.” We kept away from the Sun for a time; and then at last we were able to head directly for Vulcan.
The atmosphere presently was visible. No need for us to use the pressure-suits. I envisaged at first that upon such a little world gravity would be very slight. But now the heavy, metallic quality of its rock-surface was apparent. A world, doubtless much denser than igneous Earth.
It was my plan to land on the side away from the Sun.
We rounded Vulcan at some two million miles out.
