button and showed us a chart. He explained it carefully, item by item; he showed us tables and graphs and diagrams of the entire new department of Fowler Schocken Associates which would be set up to handle development and exploitation of the planet Venus. He covered the tedious lobbying and friendmaking in Congress, which had given us the exclusive right to levy tribute and collect from the planet-and I began to see how he could expect to get away with a nine-minute commercial. He explained how the government-it’s odd how we still think and talk of that clearinghouse for pressures as though it were an entity with a will of its own-how the government wanted Venus to be an American planet and how they had selected the peculiarly American talent of advertising to make it possible. As he spoke we all caught some of his fire. I envied the man who would head the Venus Section; any one of us would have been proud to take the job. He spoke of trouble with the Senator from Du Pont Chemicals with his forty-five votes, and of an easy triumph over the Senator from Nash-Kelvinator with his six. He spoke proudly of a faked Consie demonstration against Fowler Schocken, which had lined up the fanatically anti-Consie Secretary of the Interior. Visual Aids had done a beautiful job of briefing the information, but we were there nearly an hour looking at the charts and listening to Fowler’s achievements and plans. But finally he clicked off the projector and said: “There you have it. That’s our new campaign. And it starts right away-now. I have only one more announcement to make and then we can all get to work.” Fowler Schocken is a good showman. He took the time to find a slip of paper and read from it a sentence that the lowest of our copyboys could deliver off the cuff. “The chairman of the Venus Section,” he read, “will be Mitchell Courtenay.” And that was the biggest surprise of all, because Mitchell Courtenay is me.
two I lingered with Fowler for three or four minutes while the rest of the Board went back to their offices, and the elevator ride down from the Board room to my own office on the eighty-sixth floor took a few seconds. So Hester was already clearing out my desk when I arrived. “Congratulations, Mr. Courtenay,” she said. “You’re moving to the eighty-ninth now. Isn’t it wonderful? And I’ll have a private office too!” I thanked her and picked up the phone over the desk. The first thing I had to do was to get my staff in and turn over the reins of Production; Tom Gillespie was next in line. But the first thing I did was to dial Kathy’s apartment again. There was still no answer, so I called in the boys. They were properly sorry to see me go and properly delighted about everybody’s moving up a notch. And then it was lunch time, so I postponed the problem of the planet Venus until the afternoon. I made a phone call, ate quickly in the company cafeteria, took the elevator down to the shuttle, and the shuttle south for sixteen blocks. Coming out, I found myself in the open air for the first time that day, and reached for my antisoot plugs but didn’t put them in. It was raining lightly and the air had been a little cleared. It was summer, hot and sticky; the hordes of people crowding the sidewalks were as anxious as I to get back inside a building. I had to bulldoze my way across the street and into the lobby. The elevator took me up fourteen floors. It was an old building with imperfect air conditioning, and I felt a chill in my damp suit. It
occurred to me to use that fact instead of the story I had prepared, but I decided against it. A girl in a starched white uniform looked up as I walked into the office. I said: “My name is Silver. Walter P. Silver. I have an appointment.” “Yes, Mr. Silver,” she remembered. “Your heart-you said it was an emergency.” “That’s right. Of course it’s probably only some psychosomatic thing, but I felt-” “Of course.” She waved me to a chair. “Dr. Nevin will see you in just a moment.” It was ten minutes. A young woman came out of the doctor’s office, and a man who had been waiting in the reception room before me went in; then he came out and the nurse said: “Will you go into Dr. Nevin’s office now?” I went in. Kathy, very trim and handsome in her doctor’s smock, was putting a case chart in her desk. When she straightened up she said, “Oh, Mitch!” in a very annoyed tone. “I told only one lie,” I said. “I lied about my name. But it is an emergency. And my heart is involved.” There was a faint impulse toward a smile, but it didn’t quite reach the surface. “Not medically,” she said. “I told your girl it was probably psychosomatic. She said to come in anyhow.” “I’ll speak to her about that. Mitch, you know I can’t see you during working hours. Now please-” I sat down next to her desk. “You won’t see me any time, Kathy. What’s the trouble?” “Nothing’s the trouble. Please go away, Mitch. I’m a doctor; I have work to do.” “Nothing as important as this. Kathy, I tried to call you all last night and all morning.” She lit a cigarette without looking at me. “I wasn’t home,” she said. “No, you weren’t.” I leaned forward and took the cigarette from her and puffed on it. She hesitated, shrugged, and took out another. I said: “I don’t suppose I have the right to ask my wife where she spends her time?” Kathy flared: “Damn it, Mitch, you know-” Her phone rang. She screwed her eyes shut for a moment. Then she picked up the