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Luckily she was in the kitchen corner with her back turned when I said that,
and either missed it or could afford to pretend she did. We'd had a terrific
four-hour battle over that very point, complete with epithets like
"baby-poisoner" and "crackpot reformer" and a few others that were shorter and
nastier.
The coffee was served and quenched O'Shea's mild glow. Dinner was marvelous.
Afterward, we all felt more relaxed.
"You've been to the Moon, I suppose?" Kathy asked O'Shea.
"Not yet. One of these days."
"There's nothing there," I said. "It's a waste of time. One of our dullest,
deadest accounts. I suppose we only kept it for
the experience we'd get, looking ahead to Venus. A few thousand people
mining that's the whole story."
"Excuse me," O'Shea said, and retired.
I grabbed the chance. "Kathy, darling," I said, "it was very sweet of you to
ask me over. Does it mean anything?"
She rubbed her right thumb and index finger together, and I knew that whatever
she would say after that would be a lie. "It might, Mitch," she lied gently.
"You'll have to give me time."
I threw away my secret weapon. "You're lying," I said disgustedly. "You always
do this before you lie to me I don't know about other people." I showed her,
and she let out a short laugh.
"Fair's fair," she said with bitter amusement. "You always catch your breath
and look right into my eyes when you lie to me I don't know about your clients
and fellow employees."
O'Shea returned and felt the tension at once. "I ought to be going," he said.
"Mitch, do we leave together?"
Kathy nodded, and I said: "Yes."
There were the usual politenesses at the door, and Kathy kissed me good night.
It was a long, warm, clinging kiss;
altogether the kind of kiss that should start the evening rather than end it.
It set her own pulse going I felt that! but she coolly closed the door on us.
"You thought about a bodyguard again?" O'Shea asked.
"It was a mistake," I said stubbornly.
"Let's stop by your place for a drink," he said ingenuously.
The situation was almost pathetic. Sixty-pound Jack O'Shea was bodyguarding
me. "Sure," I said. We got on the shuttle.
He went into the room first and turned on the light, and nothing happened.
While sipping a very weak whisky and soda, he drifted around the place
checking window locks, hinges, and the like. "This chair would look better
over there," he said.
"Over there," of course, was out of the line of fire from the window. I moved
it.
"Take care of yourself, Mitch," he said when he left. "That lovely wife and
your friends would miss you if anything happened."
The only thing that happened was that I barked my shin setting up the bed, and
that was happening all the time. Even
Kathy, with a surgeon's neat, economical movements, bore the battle scars of
life in a city apartment. You set up the bed at night, you took it down in the
morning, you set up the table for breakfast, you took it down to get to the
door. No wonder some shortsighted people sighed for the spacious old days, I
thought, settling myself luxuriously for the night.
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five
Things were rolling within a week. With Runstead out of my hair and at work on
the PregNot-A.I.G. hassle, I could really grip the reins.
Tildy's girls and boys were putting out the copy temperamental kids, sometimes
doing a line a day with anguish;
sometimes rolling out page after page effortlessly, with shining eyes, as
though possessed. She directed and edited their stuff and passed the best of
the best to me: nine-minute commercial scripts, pix cutlines, articles for
planting, news stories, page ads, whispering campaign cuelines, endorsements,
jokes-limericks-and-puns (clean and dirty) to float through the country.
Visual was hot. The airbrush and camera people were having fun sculpturing a
planet. It was the ultimate in "Before and After" advertising, and they were
caught by the sense of history.
Development kept pulling rabbits out of hats. Collier once explained to me
when I hinted that he might be overoptimistic: "It's energy, Mr. Courtenay.
Venus has got energy.
It's closer to the sun. The sun pours all that energy into the planet in the
form of heat and molecular bonds and fast particles. Here on Earth we don't
have that level of tappable energy. We use windmills to tap the kinetic energy
of the atmosphere. On Venus we'll use turbines.
If we want electricity on Venus we'll just build an accumulator, put up a
lightning rod and jump back. It's an entirely different level."
Market Research-Industrial Anthropology was at work in San Diego sampling the
Cal-Mex area, trying Tildy's copy, Visual's layouts and films and
extrapolating and interpolating. I had a direct wire to the desk of Ham
Harris, Runstead's vice, in San Diego.
A typical day began with a Venus Section meeting: pep talk by me, reports of
progress by all hands, critique and cross-
department suggestions. Harris, on the wire, might advise Tildy that "serene
atmosphere" wasn't going well as a cue phrase in his sampling and that she
should submit a list of alternatives. Tildy might ask Collier whether it would
be okay to say "topaz sands" in a planted article which would hint that Venus
was crawling with uncut precious and semiprecious stones. Collier might tell
Visual that they'd have to make the atmosphere redder in a "Before" panorama.
And I might tell
Collier to lay off because it was permissible license.
After adjournment everybody would go into production and I'd spend my day
breaking ties, co-ordinating, and interpreting my directives from above down
to the operational level. Before close of day we'd hold another meeting, which
I
would keep to some specific topic, such as: integration of Starrzelius
products into the Venus economy, or income-level of
prospective Venus colonists for optimum purchasing power twenty years after
landing.
And then came the best part of the day. Kathy and I were going steady again.
We were still under separate cover, but I was buoyantly , certain that it
wouldn't be long now. Sometimes she dated me, sometimes I dated her. We just
went out and had fun eating well, drinking well, dressing well, and feeling
that we were two good-looking people enjoying life. There wasn't much serious
talk. She didn't encourage it and I didn't press it. I thought that time was
on my side. Jack O'Shea made the rounds with us once before he had to leave
for a lecture in Miami, and that made me feel good too. A couple of well-
dressed, good-looking people who were so high-up they could entertain the
world's number one celebrity. Life was good.
After a week of solid, satisfying progress on the job I told Kathy it was time
for me to visit the outlying installations the rocket site in Arizona and
sampling headquarters in San Diego.
"Fine," she said. "Can I come along?"
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I was silly-happy about it; it wouldn't be long now.
The rocket visit was routine. I had a couple of people there as liaison with
Armed Forces, Republic Aviation, Bell
Telephone Labs, and U.S. Steel. They showed Kathy and me through the monster,
glib as tourist guides: "... vast steel shell . . . more cubage than the
average New York office building . . . closed-cycle food and water and air
regeneration
. . . one-third drive, one-third freight, one-third living space . . . heroic
pioneers . . . insulation . . . housekeeping power . . . sunside-darkside heat
pumps
. . . unprecedented industrial effort . . . national sacrifice . . . national
security ..."
Oddly, the most impressive thing about it to me was not the rocket itself but
the wide swathe around it. For a full mile the land was cleared: no houses, no
greenhouse decks, no food tanks, no sun traps. Partly security, partly
radiation.
The gleaming sand cut by irrigation pipes looked strange. There probably [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]