It was hard work, standing up. Every time she moved we lurched against the rail or drifted off the floor entirely; only a standby jet was operating and we were otherwise beyond any consideration. We sat down. After a while, we talked. I stretched and looked around me. “Lovely place you have here,” I said. “Now that that’s taken care of, I have something else on my mind. Questions: two of them.” I told her what the questions were. I explained about Runstead’s lousing up San Diego and Venus Project. And about Hester’s murder. “Oh, Mitch,” she said. “Where do I begin? How’d you ever get to be star class?” “Went to night school,” I said. “I’m still listening.” “Well, you should be able to figure it out. Sure, we Consies wanted space travel. The human race needs Venus. It needs an unspoiled, unwrecked, unexploited, unlooted, un-” “Oh,” I said. “-unpirated, undevastated-well, you see. Sure we wanted a ship to go to Venus. But we didn’t want Fowler Schocken on Venus. Or Mitchell Courtenay, either. Not as long as Mitchell Courtenay was the kind of guy who would gut Venus for an extra megabuck’s billing. There aren’t too many planets around that the race can expand into, Mitch. We couldn’t have Fowler Schocken’s Venus Project succeed.” “Um,” I said, digesting. “And Hester?” Kathy shook her head. “You figure that one out,” she said. “You don’t know the answer?” “I do know the answer. It isn’t hard.” I coaxed, but she wouldn’t play. So I kissed her for a while again, until some interfering character with a ship’s-officer rosette on his shoulder came grinning in. “Care to look at the stars, folks?” he asked, in a tourist-guide way that I detested. It didn’t pay to pull rank on him, of course; ships’ officers always act a cut above their class, and it would have been ungraceful, at least, to brace him for it. Besides- Besides. The thought stopped me for a moment: I was used to being star class by now. It wasn’t going to be fun, being one of the boys. I gave my Consie theory a quick mental runthrough. No, there was nothing
in it that indicated I would have a show-dog’s chance of being sirred and catered to any more. Hello, Kathy. Good-by, Schocken Tower. Anyway, we went up to the forward observation port. All the faces were strange to me. There isn’t a window to be found on the Moon ships; radar-eyed, GCA-tentacled, they sacrifice the esthetic but useless spectacle of the stars for the greater strength of steel. I had never seen the stars in space before. Outside the port was white night. Brilliant stars shining against a background of star particles scattered over a dust of stars. There wasn’t a breadth of space the size of my thumbnail where there was blackness; it was all light, all fiery pastels. A rim of fire around the side of the port showed the direction of the sun. We turned away from the port. “Where’s Matt Runstead?” I asked. Kathy giggled. “Back in Schocken Tower, living on wake-up pills, trying to untangle the mess. Somebody had to stay behind, Mitch. Fortunately, Matt can vote your proxies. We didn’t have much time to talk in Washington; he’s going to have a lot of questions to ask, and nobody around with the answers.” I stared. “What in the world was Runstead doing in Washington?” “Getting you off the spot, Mitch! After poor little Jack O’Shea broke-” “After what?” “Oh, good Lord. Look, let’s take it in order. O’Shea broke. He got drunk one night too often, and he couldn’t find a clear spot in his arm for the needle, and he picked out the wrong girl to break apart in front of. They had him sewed up tight. All about you, and all about me, and the rocket, and everything.” “Who did?” “Your great and good friend, B. J. Taunton.” Kathy struck a match for her cigarette viciously. I could read her mind a little, too. Little Jack O’Shea, sixty pounds of jellied porcelain and melted wax, thirty-five inches of twisted guts and blubber. There had been times in the past weeks when I had not liked Jack. I canceled them all, paid in full, when I thought of that destructible tiny man in the hands of Taunton’s anthropoids. “Taunton got it all, Mitch,” Kathy said. “All