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some real traumatic times, parties that came aboard drunk and steadily got drunker, couples that fought every waking minute and got together only to hassle me. This one didn’t look bad at all, apart from the fact that it was going to save my life for me.

    There’s not much to flying an airbody, at least as far as making it move the way you want it to is concerned. In Venus’s atmosphere there’s lift to spare. You don’t worry about things like stalling out; and anyway the autonomic controls do most of your thinking for you.
    Cochenour learned fast. It turned out he had flown everything that moved on Earth and operated one-man submersibles as well. He understood as soon as I mentioned it to him that the hard part of pilotage was selecting the right flying level and anticipating when you’d have to change it, but he also understood that he wasn’t going to learn that in one day. Or even in three weeks. “What the hell, Walthers,” he said cheerfully enough. “At least I can make it go where I have to, in case you get caught in a tunnel or shot by a jealous husband.”
    I gave him the smile his pleasantry was worth, which wasn’t much. “The other thing I can do,” he said, “is cook. Unless you’re really good at it? No, I thought not. Well, I paid too much for this stomach to fill it with hash, so I’ll make the meals. That’s a little skill Dorrie never got around to learning. Same with her grandmother. Most beautiful woman in the world, but had the idea that was all there was to it.”
    I put that aside to sort out later; he was full of little unexpected things, this ninety years old young athlete. He said, “All right, now while Dorrie’s using up all the water in the shower—”
    “Not to worry; it all recycles.”
    “Anyway. While she’s cleaning up, finish your little lecture on where we’re going.”
    “Right.” I spun the virtual globe a little. The bright spot that was us had moved a dozen degrees already. “See that cluster where our track intersects those grid marks?”
    “Yeah. Five big mascons close together, and no diggings indicated. Is that where we’re going?”
    “In a general sense, yes.”
    “Why in a general sense?”
    “Well,” I said, “there’s one little thing I didn’t tell you. I’m assuming you won’t jump salty over it, because then I’ll have to get salty too and tell you you should have taken the trouble to learn more about Venus before you decided to explore it.”
    He studied me appraisingly for a moment. Dorrie came quietly out of the shower in a long robe, her hair in a towel, and stood near him, watching. “It depends on what you didn’t tell me,” he said.
    “There’s a no-trespassing sign on most of those mascons,” I said. I activated the pilotage chart overlay, and bright cherry-red warning lines sprang up all around the cluster.
    “That’s the south polar security area,” I said. “That’s where the Defense boys keep the missile range and the biggest part of their weapons development areas. And we’re not allowed to enter.”
    He said harshly, “But there’s only a little piece of one mascon that isn’t off-limits.”
    “And that’s where we’re going,” I said.
    6
    For a man more than ninety years old, Boyce Cochenour was spry. I don’t mean just healthy looking. Full Medical will do that for you, because you just replace whatever wears out or begins to look shopworn and tatty. You cannot, however, very well replace
the brain, so what you usually see in the very rich old ones is a bronzed, strong body that shakes and hesitates and drops things and stumbles. About that Cochenour had been very lucky.
    He was going to be wearing company for three weeks. He’d insisted I show him how to pilot the airbody. When I decided to use a little flight time to give the cooling system a somewhat premature thousand-hour check, he helped me pull the covers, check the refrigerant levels and clean the filters. Then he decided to cook us