long, swelling sea. I hate the Pile Cities-as I’ve said, I suffer from motion sickness. This Consie suspect turned out to be a professional criminal. He had tried a smash-and-grab raid on a jewelry store, intending to snatch a trayful of oak and mahogany pins, leaving behind a lurid note all about Consie vengeance and beware of the coming storm when the Consies take over and kill all the rich guys. It was intended to throw off suspicion. He was very stupid. It was a Burns-protected city, and I had a careful chat with their resident manager. He admitted first that most of their Consie arrests during the past month or so had been like that, and then admitted that all their Consie arrests for the past month or so had been like that. Formerly they had broken up authentic Consie cells at the rate of maybe one a week. He thought maybe it was a seasonal phenomenon. From there we went back to New York, where another Consie had been picked up. I saw him and listened to him rant for a few minutes. He was posted on Consie theory and could quote you Vogt and Osborne by the page. He also asserted that God had chosen him to wipe the wastrels from the face of Mother Earth. He said of course he was in the regular Consie organization, but he would die before he gave up any of its secrets. And I knew he certainly would, because he didn’t know any. The Consies wouldn’t have accepted anybody that unstable if they were down to three members with one sinking fast. We went back to Schocken Tower at sunset, and my guard changed. It had been a lousy day. It had been, as far as results were concerned, a carbon copy of all the days I had spent since I inherited the agency. There was a meeting scheduled. I didn’t want to go, but my conscience troubled me when I thought of the pride and confidence Fowler Schocken must have felt in me when he made me his heir. Before I dragged myself to the Board room I checked with a special detail I had set up in the Business Espionage section. “Nothing, sir,” my man said. “No leads whatsoever on your-on Dr. Nevin. The tracer we had on the Chlorella personnel man petered out. Uh, shall we keep trying-?” “Keep trying,” I said. “If you need a bigger appropriation or more investigators, don’t hesitate. Do me a real job.”
He swore loyalty and hung up, probably thinking that the boss was an old fool, mooning over a wife-not even permanently married to him-who had decided to slip out of the picture. What he made out of the others I had asked him to trace, I didn’t know. All I knew was that they had vanished, all my few contacts with the Con-sies picked up in Costa Rica, the sewers of New York, and on the Moon. Kathy had never come back to her apartment or the hospital, Warren Astron had never returned to his sucker-trap on Shopping One, my Chlorella cellmates had vanished into the jungle-and so it went, all down the line. Board meeting. “Sorry to be late, gentlemen. I’ll dispense with opening remarks. Charlie, how’s Research and Development doing on the Venus question?” He got up. “Mr. Courtenay, gentlemen, in my humble way I think I can say, informally, that R. and D. is in there punching and that my boys are a credit to Fowler Schocken Associates. Specifically, we’ve tested out the Hilsch tube in a nine-hundred-degree wind tunnel and got eleven hundred degrees separation. The experiment confirmed the predictions of our physics and thermodynamics sections based on theory and math. What that means is that, at ambient wind velocities on any of a hundred mountain ranges on Venus, we can put these scaled-up Hilsch tubes at the top of a hill and let the wind blow through them, and out of the low-temperature valve we can get liquid nitrogen. Of course, we don’t want liquid nitrogen. But we can adjust the apertures and get volumes of gas at that temperature or any higher one we want, with increasing volumes available as the temperature rises. The Hilsch tube, as you know, relies on the vortex generated within the tube by the passage of air to separate the hot from the cold air molecules, in the manner of the so-called Maxwell’s demon-” I said, “Charlie. Are you saying you can get enough cooling to make a dwelling on Venus habitable?” “Absolutely, Mr. Courtenay! That’s exactly what I’m saying! And you can take power off the hot end to make electricity!” “How certain?” “Quite certain, Mr. Courtenay,” he said, hardly able to suppress the you-couldn’t-be-expected-to-understand smile that technical people give you. “The O’Shea reports corroborate satellite, lander and telemetry data, and Gibbs phase-rule analysis clearly shows-“