tence put together! A whole new planet, the size of Earth, in prospect as rich as Earth-and every micron, every milligram of it ours. I looked at my watch. About four, my date with Kathy was for seven. I just barely had time. I dialed Hester and had her get me space on the Washington jet while I put through a call to the name Fowler had given me. The name was Jack O’Shea; he was the only human being who had been to Venus-so far. His voice was young and cocky as he made a date to see me. We were five extra minutes in the landing pattern over Washington, and then there was a hassle at the ramp. Brink’s Express guards were swarming around our plane, and their lieutenant demanded identification from each emerging passenger. When it was my turn I asked what was going on. He looked at my low-number Social Security card thoughtfully and then saluted. “Sorry to bother you, Mr. Courtenay,” he apologized. “It’s the Consie bombing near Topeka. We got a tip that the man might be aboard the 4:05 New York jet. Seems to have been a lemon.” “What Consie bombing was this?” “Du Pont Raw Materials Division-we’re under contract for their plant protection, you know-was opening up a new coal vein under some cornland they own out there. They made a nice little ceremony of it, and just as the hydraulic mining machine started ramming through the topsoil somebody tossed a bomb from the crowd. Killed the machine operator, his helper, and a vice-president. Man slipped away in the crowd, but he was identified. We’ll get him one of these days.” “Good luck, Lieutenant,” I said, and hurried on to the jetport’s main refreshment lounge. O’Shea was waiting in a window seat, visibly annoyed, but he grinned when I apologized. “It could happen to anybody,” he said, and swinging his short legs shrilled at a waiter. When we had placed our orders he leaned back and said: “Well?” I looked down at him across the table and looked away through the window. Off to the south the gigantic pylon of the F.D.R. memorial blinked its marker signal; behind it lay the tiny, dulled dome of the old Capitol. I, a glib ad man, hardly knew where to start. And O’Shea was enjoying it. “Well?” he asked again, amusedly, and I knew he meant: “Now all of you have to come to me, and how do you like it for a change?”
I took the plunge. “What’s on Venus?” I asked. “Sand and smoke,” he said promptly. “Didn’t you read my report?” “Certainly. I want to know more.” “Everything’s in the report. Good Lord, they kept me in the interrogation room for three solid days when I got back. If I left anything out, it’s gone permanently.” I said: “That’s not what I mean, Jack. Who wants to spend his life reading reports? I have fifteen men in Research doing nothing but digesting reports for me so I don’t have to read them. I want to know something more. I want to get the feel of the planet. There’s only one place I can get it because only one man’s been there.” “And sometimes I wish I hadn’t,” O’Shea said wearily. “Well, where do I start? You know how they picked me-the only midget in the world with a pilot’s license. And you know all about the ship. And you saw the assay reports on the samples I brought back. Not that they mean much. I only touched down once, and five miles away the geology might be entirely different.” “I know all that. Look, Jack, put it this way. Suppose you wanted a lot of people to go to Venus. What would you tell them about it?” He laughed. “I’d tell them a lot of damn big lies. Start from scratch, won’t you? What’s the deal?” I gave him a fill-in on what Schocken Associates was up to, while his round little eyes stared at me from his round little face. There is an opaque quality, like porcelain, to the features of midgets: as though the destiny that had made them small at the same time made them more perfect and polished than ordinary men, to show that their lack of size did not mean lack of completion. He sipped his drink and I gulped mine between paragraphs. When my pitch was finished I still didn’t know whether he was on my side or not, and with him it mattered. He was no civil service puppet dancing to the strings that Fowler Schocken knew ways of pulling. Neither was he a civilian who could be bought with a tiny decimal of our appropriation. Fowler had helped him a little to capitalize on his fame via testimonials, books, and lectures, so he owed us a little gratitude . . . and no more. He said: “I wish I could help,” and that made things easier. “You can,” I told him. “That’s what I’m here for. Tell me what Venus has to offer.” “Damn little,” he said, with a small frown chiseling across his