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yourself—otherwise there’s a $2 service charge.
    Mitzi shrugged. “It’s their planet,” she said, determined to have a good time, and craned her neck to peer out the window. And that was another thing. So as not to spoil the looks from outside they had artfully hidden the windows in clefts in the rock. From outside it was maybe a good idea; but from inside you couldn’t see out without straining, and what’s the use of an observation window you can’t see out of?
    Grin and bear it! I was on my way out of this hellhole anyway. We ordered the white wine, obediently, and Mitzi commented, “Look, there’s an ambulance chopper by the path. I wonder if somebody got hurt.”
    “They probably keep it there for the people they swindle on the oxygen,” I joked, bending to look out. The chopper had been there a while, because the rotors were still. Two men were having some kind of an argument beside it. I was mildly surprised to see that one of them was the man with the traffic-light head from the tram. That wasn’t so surprising, because there are just so many Veenies and you can’t help running into the same ones over and over. But I was beginning to get a little tired of this particular one. “Drink up,” I said, dismissing him and paying the waiter at the same time. “A toast! To our good times together—past, present and future!”
    “Ah, Tenn,” said Mitzi, raising her glass, “I wish. But I’m still going to reup.”
    The wine was good and cold—well, no; it wasn’t all that good, but at least it was cold. Thinking about Mitzi wasting herself for another year and a half, at least, on this smelly cinder of a planet spoiled it for me. “They say if you spend too much time with the Veenies you’ll turn into one.” I was half-joking—half at the most. And immediately she got her defensive look.
    “My Agency has no reason for dissatisfaction with my work,” she said stiffly. “The Veenies aren’t so bad! A little misguided.”
    “A little.” I gazed around the lounge. The tables were bare plastic. There was no Muzak, no friendly advertising posters decorating the walls.
    “It’s just a different life-style,” she insisted. “Of course, compared to what we have on Earth it’s pathetic. But all they want from us, really, is just to be left alone.”
    The conversation was not going at all the way I wanted it to. Sometimes, when I was talking to Mitzi when she was off-duty and off-guard, I wondered if the old saying wasn’t true for her. She had been on Venus for eighteen months. She had covered the whole planet, just about, and she had dealt with its seamiest citizens, the turncoats. If there was anybody in the Embassy who should have been sick and disgusted with this primitive place it was Mitzi Ku. But she wasn’t. She was going to sign up for another hitch in the oven. She even, sometimes, acted as though she liked it here! There were even stories that sometimes she went shopping in the Veenie stores instead of the PX. I didn’t believe them, of course. But sometimes I wondered … And yet what she said was true. Her Agency, which was the same as my own, could certainly find nothing wrong with her record on Venus. Her official designation at the Embassy was “visa clerk,” but her real work was running a network of spies and saboteurs that stretched from Port Kathy to the Polar Penal Colony. She did it superbly. The computer analyses said the Veenie Gross Planetary Product was off a good 3 per cent just because of Mitzi’s work.
    And yet she said such strange things! Like, “Oh, Tenn, give them credit. They took a planet that an Arizona rattlesnake couldn’t stay alive on, and in less than thirty years they’ve made it livable—”
    “Livable!” I sneered, gazing meaningfully out the window.
    “Sure it’s livable! At least where they’ve covered it over. Naturally it’s not a South Seas paradise, but they’ve done a pretty good job, considering what they had to work with.”