“I didn’t notice you hanging back at the threshold.” “Okay, I enjoy a holiday too. But—”

“Why aren’t you down in Brazil? That’s what those types are going to do, isn’t it?—use grunt labor from Brazil to beef up—you’ll excuse the phrase?—American computers? Why not go down there and work with the poor people on the spot, in some little dimple of a burg?”

“This is my home,” Shirley said stiffly. “The people I love are here.”

“So they are. And you have wondrous thighs, Shirley, but they can’t encompass all the world’s teeming troubles.”

“Sarcasm won’t—”

“Listen.” Nigel cocked his head. “Alexandria’s coming in from her walk. I don’t want a chuffup over this, Shirley. I want no bother before we go off. Right?”

She nodded, her mouth twisted slightly as though under pressure.

Nigel saw that the mood in the room would be detectable when Alexandria came in, so he leaned back, yawned elaborately and began in a heavy Welsh accent,

He and Alexandria lifted three days later. They had booked well in advance to get a flight over the poles; they reentered the atmosphere as a flaring pink line scratched across the sky of the north Atlantic.

Matters were a bit better in England than during their last visit several years before. There were only a few shambling beggars at the baggage checkout, and they seemed to have valid licenses. Most of the terminal was lighted, though not heated. Their helicopter to the southlands lifted free with a clatter into the chilling winds. Coal smoke blotted out the London sprawl.

They reached their destination easily: a well-preserved English inn about three hundred and fifty years old, well run and securely guarded. They spent Christmas there, snug in the battering winds. The next day they hired a guard and a limousine and visited Stonehenge.

Nigel found the experience oddly moving. In spirit he was scarcely an Englishman anymore after the welfare state had turned into the farewell state. These massive thrusting columns, though, spoke to him of a different England. The heel stone was so marvelously aligned, the celestial computer so accurate, he felt a kinship with the men who had made it. They had thrust these gray measuring fingers at a clockwork sky, to understand it. The New Sons had long since played up the pantheistic side of the Druids, popularly thought to be the builders of this stone heap, never mentioning the rest—that these were not men who followed others’ ideas senselessly.

Nigel looked out at the road where a gang of altered chimps was repairing wash damage. They cradled their special shovels and flicked mud thirty meters in one toss. Alexandria stood beside him, biting absently at a fingernail: evolutionary remnant of animal claws. He shivered and took her back to the inn.

Paris was depressing. The second day of freezing in a darkened hotel ended with a shutdown of water pressure throughout the city for the rest of the week.

The pleasure domes of the Saudis were thronged. Cloud sculptors flitted over the desert, carving erotic white giants that coiled ponderously into vast orgasms.

Over South Africa the display was more modest. At evening the swollen elders appeared, wrinkled financial barons, and enjoyed an orchestrated weatherscape as they dined. Nigel and Alexandria watched a vibrating rainbow that framed purple thunderheads, clouds moving with the stately grace of Victorian royalty.

In Brazil, in a restaurant, Alexandria pointed: “Look. That’s one of the men we’re negotiating with for the airline.”

“Which one?”

“The stocky man. Tiltlens glasses. A sway shirt. The briefcut jacket with highlighted trim. Khaki—”

“Right, I see.”

She looked back at Nigel. “Why are you smiling?” “I’ve missed that eye for clothes you have. I never see those things, really.” He reached out to take her hand. “I’ve got you back again.”

A lot of the planet they couldn’t see. In the large areas without resources or industry a white man was an automatic enemy, a child-starver, a thief; the politics of the past thirty years had seen to that. In Sri Lanka they went a block from the hotel to eat. Partway through their curry the muttering in the restaurant and a gathering tension drove them into the sinking street. A passing cab took them back, and then to the airport, and then to Australia.

They were baking on Polynesian sands when his pager buzzed. It was Lubkin. Ichino had relayed the radar search idea to him. They had a blip. It was bigger than two klicks, and spinning. It would rendezvous with Venus inside eleven days if it didn’t accelerate. Lubkin asked if Nigel would return early to run the Main Bay team. Nigel told him he would think about it.

Outside Kyoto, walking a country lane, Alexandria suddenly threw up into a ditch. A two-day biopsy showed no change in her condition from three months before. Her organic systems seemed stable.

Her pocket telltale hadn’t made a sound. Nigel checked his skull set. It was active. It beeped on command. Alexandria simply hadn’t been ill enough to trigger it.

The next day she felt better. The day after that she was eating well. They went on a hike. As she slept, afterward, Nigel called ahead and cancelled the rest of their reservations. He fluxed through to Hufman; the man’s face showed on the screen as a wobbling mask. Hufman thought Alexandria needed a rest near home.

They took the next jet to California, arcing high over the pale Pacific.

The Main Bay: a crescent of consoles, each sprinkled with input boards like a prickly frosting. Men sitting in roller chairs were stationed at each console, watching the green/yellow screens flicker with a blur of information. The Bay was sealed; only staff members directly involved in the J-27 project were present.

“Arecibo has acquisition,” Nigel said.

The knot of men around his chair buzzed with exclamations. Nigel listened to his headphones. “They say the Doppler confirms a flyby orbit.”

“You check with Arecibo?” Evers said at Nigel’s elbow.

Nigel shook his head. “Our satellite, Venus Monitor, can’t get a radar fix. This is all we have.” He tapped in programming instructions on his keyboard.

“Spectrographic reading,” Lubkin explained. A telemetered photo was being drawn on the screen line by line. At the top edge of the screen was a tiny point of light, scarcely more than a few bright dots on the picture tube.

“Spectral intensity shows it’s hot. Must be a pretty fiendish fusion torch.” Nigel looked up at the men from NASA, Defense and the UN. Most of them clearly couldn’t make sense of the wavelength plot being displayed; they scowled in the fluorescent glow of the Main Bay, looking out of place in their stylish green suits.

“If it is on a flyby course it will almost certainly come here next,” Evers said to the other men.

“Possibly,” Nigel said.

“It may attempt to land, bringing unknown diseases with it,” Evers went on smoothly. “The military will have to be able to stop such an eventuality.”

“How?” Nigel said, ignoring a raised finger from Lubkin that plainly told him to remain silent.

“Well, ah, perhaps a warning shot.” Evers’s expression pinched slightly. “Yes,” he said more brusquely, looking at Nigel. “I’m afraid we will have to determine that for ourselves.”

The group broke into conversation.

Lubkin tapped Evers’s arm. “I think we should try to signal again.”

Evers nodded. “Yes, there is that. The ExComm will work out the message. We have some hours left to discuss it, don’t we?” He turned to Nigel.