“It was a mistake,” I said stubbornly. “Let’s stop by your place for a drink,” he said ingenuously. The situation was almost pathetic. Sixty-pound Jack O’Shea was bodyguarding me. “Sure,” I said. We got on the shuttle. He went into the room first and turned on the light, and nothing happened. While sipping a very weak whisky and soda, he drifted around the place checking window locks, hinges, and the like. “This chair would look better over there,” he said. “Over there,” of course, was out of the line of fire from the window. I moved it. “Take care of yourself, Mitch,” he said when he left. “That lovely wife and your friends would miss you if anything happened.” The only thing that happened was that I barked my shin setting up the bed, and that was happening all the time. Even Kathy, with a surgeon’s neat, economical movements, bore the battle scars of life in a city apartment. You set up the bed at night, you took it down in the morning, you set up the table for breakfast, you took it down to get to the door. No wonder some shortsighted people sighed for the spacious old days, I thought, settling myself luxuriously for the night.
five Things were rolling within a week. With Runstead out of my hair and at work on the PregNot-A.I.G. hassle, I could really grip the reins. Tildy’s girls and boys were putting out the copy-temperamental kids, sometimes doing a line a day with anguish; sometimes rolling out page after page effortlessly, with shining eyes, as though possessed. She directed and edited their stuff and passed the best of the best to me: nine-minute commercial scripts, pix cutlines, articles for planting, news stories, page ads, whispering campaign cuelines, endorsements, jokes-limericks-and-puns (clean and dirty) to float through the country. Visual was hot. The airbrush and camera people were having fun sculpturing a planet. It was the ultimate in “Before and After” advertising, and they were caught by the sense of history. Development kept pulling rabbits out of hats. Collier once explained to me when I hinted that he might be overoptimistic: “It’s energy, Mr. Courtenay. Venus has got energy. It’s closer to the sun. The sun pours all that energy into the planet in the form of heat and molecular bonds and fast particles. Here on Earth we don’t have that level of tappable energy. We use windmills to tap the kinetic energy of the atmosphere. On Venus we’ll use turbines. If we want electricity on Venus we’ll just build an accumulator, put up a lightning rod and jump back. It’s an entirely different level.” Market Research-Industrial Anthropology was at work in San Diego sampling the Cal-Mex area, trying Tildy’s copy, Visual’s layouts and films and extrapolating and interpolating. I had a direct wire to the desk of Ham Harris, Runstead’s vice, in San Diego.
A typical day began with a Venus Section meeting: pep talk by me, reports of progress by all hands, critique and cross-department suggestions. Harris, on the wire, might advise Tildy that “serene atmosphere” wasn’t going well as a cue phrase in his sampling and that she should submit a list of alternatives. Tildy might ask Collier whether it would be okay to say “topaz sands” in a planted article which would hint that Venus was crawling with uncut precious and semiprecious stones. Collier might tell Visual that they’d have to make the atmosphere redder in a “Before” panorama. And I might tell Collier to lay off because it was permissible license. After adjournment everybody would go into production and I’d spend my day breaking ties, co-ordinating, and interpreting my directives from above down to the operational level. Before close of day we’d hold another meeting, which I would keep to some specific topic, such as: integration of Starrzelius products into the Venus economy, or income-level of prospective Venus colonists for optimum purchasing power twenty years after landing. And then came the best part of the day. Kathy and I were going steady again. We were still under separate cover, but I was buoyantly , certain that it wouldn’t be long now. Sometimes she dated me, sometimes I dated her. We just went out and had fun eating well, drinking well, dressing well, and feeling that we were two good-looking people enjoying life. There wasn’t much serious talk. She didn’t encourage it and I didn’t press it. I thought that time was on my side. Jack O’Shea made the rounds with us once before he had to leave for a lecture in Miami, and that made me feel good too. A couple of well-dressed, good-looking people who were so high-up they could entertain the world’s number one celebrity. Life was good. After a week of solid, satisfying progress on the job I told Kathy it was time for me to visit the outlying installations-the rocket site in Arizona and sampling headquarters in San Diego. “Fine,” she said. “Can I come along?” I was silly-happy about it; it wouldn’t be long now. The rocket visit was routine. I had a couple of people there as liaison with Armed Forces, Republic Aviation, Bell Telephone Labs, and U.S. Steel. They showed Kathy and me through the monster, glib as tourist guides: “… vast steel shell . . . more cubage than the average New York office building . . . closed-cycle food and water and air regeneration . . . one-third drive, one-third freight,