Runstead glowered at me. “All I said was that southern California isn’t the right test area. What’s the big difference between Venus and here? Heat! We need a test area with continental-average climate. A New Englander might be attracted by the heat on Venus; a Tijuana man, never. It’s too damn hot in Cal-Mex already.” “Um,” said Fowler Schocken. “Tell you what, Matt. This needs going into, and you’ll want to get busy on the A.I.G. thing. Pick out a good man to vice you on the Venus section while you’re out, and we’ll have it hashed over at the section meeting tomorrow afternoon. Meanwhile-” he glanced at his desk clock. “Senator Danton has been waiting for seven minutes. All right?” It was clearly not all right with Matt, and I felt cheered for the rest of the day. Things went well enough. Development came in with a report on what they’d gleaned from O’Shea’s tape and all the other available material. The prospects for manufacture were there. Quick, temporary ones like little souvenir globes of Venus manufactured from the organics floating around in what we laughingly call the “air” of Venus. Long-term ones-an assay had indicated pure iron: not nine-nines pure and not ninety-nine nines pure, but absolute iron that nobody would ever find or make on an oxygen planet like Earth. The labs would pay well for it. And Development had not developed but found a remarkable little thing called a high-speed Hilsch Tube. Using no power, it could refrigerate the pioneers’ homes by using the hot tornadoes of Venus. It was a simple thing that had been lying around since 1943. Nobody until us had any use for it because nobody until us had that kind of wind to play with. Tracy Collier, the Development liaison man with Venus Section, tried also to tell me about nitrogen-fixing catalysts. I nodded from time to time and gathered that sponge-platinum “sown” on Venus would, in conjunction with the continuous, terrific lightning, cause it to “snow” nitrates and “rain” hydrocarbons, purging the atmosphere of formaldehyde and ammonia. “Kind of expensive?” I asked cautiously. “Just as expensive as you want it to be,” he said. “The platinum doesn’t get used up, you know. Use one gram and take a million years or more. Use more platinum and take less time.” I didn’t really understand, but obviously it was good news. I patted him and sent him on his way. Industrial Anthropology gave me a setback. Ben Winston complained: “You can’t make people want to live in a steam-heated
sardine can. All our folkways are against it. Who’s going to travel sixty million miles for a chance to spend the rest of his life cooped up in a tin shack-when he can stay right here on Earth and have corridors, elevators, streets, roofs, all the wide-open space a man could want? It’s against human nature, Mitch!” I reasoned with him. It didn’t do much good. He went on telling me about the American way of life-walked to the window with me and pointed out at the hundreds of acres of rooftops where men and women could walk around in the open air, wearing simple soot-extractor nostril plugs instead of a bulky oxygen helmet. Finally I got mad. I said: “Somebody must want to go to Venus. Otherwise why would they buy Jack O’Shea’s book the way they do? Why would the voters stand still for a billion-and-up appropriation to build the rocket? God knows I shouldn’t have to lead you by the nose this way, but here’s what you are going to do: survey the bookbuyers, the repeat-viewers of O’Shea’s TV shows, the ones who come early to his lectures and stand around talking in the lobby afterwards. O’Shea is on the payroll-pump him for everything you can get. Find out about the Moon colony-find out what types they have there. And then we’ll know whom to aim our ads at. Any arguments, for God’s sake?” There weren’t. Hester had done wonders of scheduling that first day, and I made progress with every section head involved. But she couldn’t read my paperwork for me, and by quitting time I had six inches of it stacked by my right arm. Hester volunteered to stay with me, but there wasn’t really anything for her to do. I let her bring me sandwiches and another cup of coffee, and chased her home. It was after eleven by the time I was done. I stopped off in an all-night diner on the fifteenth floor before heading home, a window-less box of a place where the coffee smelled of the yeast it was made from and the ham in my sandwich bore the taint of soy. But it was only a minor annoyance and quickly out of my mind. For as I opened the door to my apartment there was a snick and an explosion, and something slammed into the doorframe by my head. I ducked and yelled. Outside the window a figure dangling from a rope ladder drifted away, a gun in its hand. I was stupid enough to run over to the window and gawk out at the helicopter-borne figure. I would have been a perfect target if it had been steady enough to shoot at me again, but it wasn’t.