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lunch.
    The girl took over as my helper while I restowed some of the supplies to get the autosonic probes out. At the steady noise level of the inside of an airbody our normal conversational voices wouldn’t carry to Cochenour, less than three meters away, and I thought of pumping her about him. I decided against it. What I didn’t know was just curiosity. I knew he was paying me the price of a new liver already. I didn’t need to know what he and the girl thought about when they thought about each other.
    So our conversation was along the lines of how the probes would fire charges and time the echoes, and what the chances were of finding something really good (“Well, what are the chances of winning a sweepstake? Bad for any individual who buys a ticket—but there’s always one winner somewhere!”), and what had made me come to Venus in the first place. I mentioned my father’s name, but she’d never heard of him. Too young, for one thing, no doubt. And she was born and bred in Southern Ohio, where Cochenour had worked as a kid and to which he’d returned as a billionaire. He’d been building a new processing center there and it had been a lot of headaches—trouble with the unions, trouble with the banks, trouble, bad trouble, with the government—so he’d decided to take a few months off and loaf. I looked over to where he was stirring up a sauce and said, “He loafs harder than anybody else I ever saw.”
    “He’s a work addict. I imagine that’s how he got rich in the first place.” The airbody lurched, and I dropped everything to jump for the controls. I heard Cochenour howl behind me, but I was busy locating the right transit level. By the time I had climbed a thousand meters and reset the autopilot, he was rubbing his wrist and glowering at me.
    “Sorry,” I said.
    He said dourly, “I don’t mind your scalding the skin off my arm, I can always buy more skin, but you nearly made me spill the gravy.”
    I checked the virtual globe. The bright marker was two-thirds of the way to our destination. “Is it about ready?” I asked. “We’ll be there in an hour.”
    For the first time he looked startled. “So soon? I thought you said this thing was subsonic.”
    “I did. You’re on Venus, Mr. Cochenour. At this level the speed of sound is maybe five thousand kilometers an hour.”
    He looked thoughtful, but all he said was, “Well, we can eat any minute.” Later he said, while we were finishing up, “I think maybe I don’t know as much about this planet as I might. If you want to give us the usual guide’s lecture, we’ll listen.”
    I said, “Well, you pretty much know the outlines. Say, you’re a great cook, Mr. Cochenour. I packed all these provisions, but I don’t even know what this is I’m eating.”
    “If you come to my office in Cincinnati,” he said, “you can ask for Mr. Cochenour, but while we’re living in each other’s armpits you might as well call me Boyce. And if you like it, why aren’t you eating it?”
    The answer was, because it might kill me, but I didn’t want to get into a discussion
that might lead to why I needed his fee so badly. I said, “Doctor’s orders, have to lay off the fats pretty much for a while. I think he thinks I’m putting on too much weight.”
    Cochenour looked at me appraisingly, but only said, “The lecture?”
    “Well, let’s start with the most important part,” I said, carefully pouring coffee. “While we’re in the airbody you can do what you like, walk around, eat, drink, smoke if you got ’em, whatever. The cooling system is built for more than three times as many people, plus their cooking and appliance loads, with a safety factor of two. Air and water, more than we’d need for two months. Fuel, enough for three round-trips and some maneuvering. If anything went wrong we’d yell for help and somebody would come and get us in a couple of hours at most—probably it would be the Defense boys, and they have super sonic