seventeen’s lid and fished around in it for a flat box that opened into a makeup kit. “Hold still.” I yelped as a razor raked across the top of my right eyebrow. “Hold-still!” R-R-R-R-ip! It cut a swathe across my left eyebrow. Briskly she touched my face here and there with mysterious brushes. “Flup!” I said as she turned up my upper lip and tucked a pledget of plastic under it. Two gummy wads pasted my ears against my head and she said: “There,” and showed me the mirror. “Good,” I told her. “I got out of here once in the morning rush. I think we can do it again.” “There go the barriers,” she said tensely, hearing some preliminary noise that was lost on my inexperienced ear. The barriers clanged down. We were the only night-dwellers left on the thirty-fifth floor. But we were not alone. B. J. Taunton and two of his boys stood there. Taunton was swaying a little on his feet, red-faced and grinning. Each of his boys had a machine pistol trained on me. Taunton hiccuped and said: “This was a hell of an unfortunate place for you to go chippy-chasing, Courtenay, ol’ man. We have a photo-register for gate-crashers like you. Girlie, if you will kindly step aside-” She didn’t step aside. She stepped right into Taunton’s arms, jammed her gun against his navel. His red face went the color of putty. “You know what to do,” she said grimly. “Boys,” he said faintly, “drop the guns. For God’s sake, drop them!” They exchanged looks. “Drop them!” he begged. They took an eternity to lay down their machine pistols, but they did. Taunton began to sob. “Turn your backs,” I told them, “and lie down.” I had my borrowed UHV out. It felt wonderful. The elevator could too easily have been flooded with gas. We walked down the stairs. It was a long, slow, careful business, though all night-dwellers had been cleared hours ago for B. J.’s coup. He sobbed and babbled all the way. At the tenth-floor landing he wailed: “I’ve got to have a drink, Courtenay. I’m really dying. There’s a bar right here, you can keep that gun on me-” Kathy laughed humorlessly at the idea, and we continued our slow step-by-step progress. At the night-dweller exit I draped my coat over Kathy’s gun hand
in spite of the winter outside. “It’s all right!” B. J. called quaveringly to an astounded lobby guard who started our way. “These people are friends of mine. It’s quite all right!” We walked with him to the shuttlemouth and dived in, leaving him, gray-faced and sweating, in the street. It was safety in numbers. The only way he could get at us was by blowing up the entire shuttle, and he wasn’t equipped for it. We zigzagged for an hour, and I called my office from a station phone. A plant protection detail rendezvoused with us at another station, and we were in the Schocken Tower fifteen minutes later. A morning paper gave us our only laugh so far that day. It said, among other things, that a coolant leak had been detected at 0300 today in the stairwell of the Taunton Building. B. J. Taunton himself, at the risk of his life, had supervised the evacuation of the Taunton Building night-dwellers in record time and without casualties. Over a tray breakfast on my desk I told Kathy: “Your hair looks like hell. Does that stuff wash out?” “Enough of this lovemaking,” she said. “You told me I could have Venus. Mitch, I meant it. And Venus by-God belongs to us. We’re the only people who know what to do with it and also we landed the first man there. O’Shea is one of us, Mitch.” “Since when?” “Since his mother and father found he wasn’t growing, that’s since when. They knew the W.C.A. was going to need spacepilots soon-and the smaller the better. Earth didn’t discover Venus. The W.C.A. did. And we demand the right to settle it. Can you deliver?” “Sure,” I said. “God, it’s going to be a headache. We have our rosters filled now-eager suckers itching to get to Venus and be exploited by and for the Earth and Fowler Schocken. Well, I’ll backtrack.” I thought for a minute and then said to Kathy: “Can you bring Runstead back to life for me? I don’t know where the W.C.A. has been holding him, but we need him here. This is going to be a job. A copysmith’s highest art is to convince people without letting them know that they’re being convinced. What I’ve got to do is make my copysmiths unconvince people without letting either the copysmiths or the people know what I’m doing to them. I can use some high^ grade help that I can talk freely to.”