“Ladies and gentlemen, we hope you have enjoyed spending time with us on the H.M.S. Aphrodite’s Arrow, a British SuperAeroliner 66 that provides express service to Venus. On behalf of all your hosts and hostesses here on the Arrow, we have enjoyed serving you and hope to see you again soon to meet your interplanetary transportation needs.

“On the door to your cabin, you should find a card with a map of the ship showing the route to your landing shuttle. Please take the card with you for reference as you bring yourselves, your traveling companions, and your things to the shuttle docking bay. If your reference map card is missing from your door for some reason, please don’t hesitate to ask one of our hosts or hostesses for a new one. We hope you have enjoyed spending time with us on the H.M.S. Aphrodite’s Arrow, long live the queen.”

Dixie finished tying the laces of a pair of sturdy boots to the handle of one of her heavy suitcases. She knew that although International City was just as modern as any city on Earth, where she was going to settle on the Venusian surface would be much more rugged. Pa had purchased those boots himself from a leather-worker friend of his. They were steel-toed and even had places on the bottom to fasten a set of cleats that rode in a bag packed in the suitcase itself.

Dixie paused to glance out her cabin window viewport one more time. The swirling miasma of Venusian clouds was positively hypnotic. They dominated the entire viewport. Although Dixie knew they were in orbit, and not in the planet’s atmosphere, her cabin’s side of Aphrodite’s Arrow must be facing the planet.

Dixie imagined herself answering the questions that her young students would have in her classroom. It boggled her mind to think that some of her soon-to-be students, the younger ones at least, had been born on Venus, and had never seen Earth except in art or photos. She would mention that Aphrodite was the Greek name of the Roman Venus deity, thus naming the ship Aphrodite’s Arrow was a reference to it being a one-stop flight to the Clouded World.

Thinking of her students got her mind to break the hypnotic spell of the clouds. She straightened her hat, made sure it was tied under her chin, and grabbed the handles of both of her suitcases. They were heavy, but Dixie had hauled bags of feed and bales of hay around on Pa’s farm for years. Although, to outward appearances, she looked completely the part of a proper lady traveling abroad (or, in this case, interplanet) conforming to the fashions and sensibilities of the times, the days of the reign of Queen Victoria, underneath her dress, her form was wiry for a girl, toned and muscled by years of chores on an Iowa farm.

She opened the door to her cabin, pushing it to the side. She couldn’t believe her luck. There, right in front of her door, was an aerolyth luggage cart. It was amazing. It hovered two feet over the floor. There were no wheels. One simply pushed it along using one of the beautiful brass knobbed handlebars on either end of the cart. That marvel of turn of the Century technology would make her two suitcases literally weightless.

Before she heaved her luggage up onto the cart, however, she looked up and down the hall to see if the cart was already being used by any of her neighbors from the nearby cabins. She had come to know them well over many shared meals in the Arrow’s vast dining room and in many evenings sharing music, games, and other entertainment together in a nearby lounge: Aki Akihito the Japanese businessman looking to invest in Venus, Hans von Werner the Prussian explorer, and Samantha and Sabrina the British twins who were hoping to hit it off with the British expatriate community in International City. After two months together, the five of them had become close enough that they had all exchanged contact information the night before at their last meal together. The other travelers’ doors were all closed. The landing shuttle reference cards had all been taken from the doors’ document pockets. Dixie seemed to be the last passenger leaving from that grouping of cabins.

This made it all the more lucky that someone had left a luggage cart here. She would have thought that they were all needed right then with hundreds of guests all attempting to leave the giant passenger space liner all at the same time. How had it gotten here? It was probably inertia, she thought. A luggage cart on wheels, if pushed and left on its own, would eventually stop from the forces of friction, but an aerolyth anti-gravity cart was another matter. Perhaps it had been bumped or pushed and then scooted down the larger, main hallway nearby until it had ricocheted into the smaller side hallway with Dixie’s cabin.

Dixie was enough of a science teacher, though, to wonder why it had stopped exactly in front of her door unless someone had stopped it there on purpose. If it had just been sliding down the hall on its own, it would have continued until it hit the end of the hallway in front of Sabrina and Samantha’s cabin, crashing into the small decorative end table with its vase of flowers that brought a spot of color and depth to that liminal space.

Since she was in a hurry to make sure she didn’t miss her shuttle, Dixie would have pushed these thoughts from her mind then and there if it weren’t for the small, black briefcase on the cart. The handle had a band tied to it for a luggage claim ticket, as did Dixie’s luggage, but unlike hers, the ticket had been prematurely torn off the band, leaving the briefcase’s proper owner unidentified. Dixie would simply give it to one of the Arrow’s hosts or hostesses to turn it into Lost & Found as she left.

The ownerless briefcase lay flat on the cart. Dixie reached down to pick it up by its handle to set it upright instead so that the cart would have enough room for her two large suitcases as well. As she touched the briefcase she was shocked with an electric jolt. It stung like static electricity in the wintertime on Earth, but much more intensely, right through the insulation that she should have had from such shocks from the traveler’s gloves she wore.

“Ouch!”

The voice on the ship’s speakers returned. “The first wave of landing shuttles is leaving now. The second wave is now ready to board.”

Dixie grabbed her cabin’s shuttle reference card from the outside of her door. It said that she was to board the third wave of landing shuttles. Good. But, she’d still better get moving faster. No more time to ponder about carts and stranger’s briefcases. Time to move.

A new life on Venus awaited.