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to—thinks he owns me!”
    I kept my face bland and sympathetic, but inside I was grinning the top of my head off. “So about tomorrow?”
    “Well, why not? Maybe we’ll—I don’t know —go out to Russian Hills maybe. Something, anyway.” She leaned forward and pecked my cheek. “If I’m going to take tomorrow off I’ve got a heavy day today, Tenny—so clear out, will you?” But she said it fondly.
    To my surprise, she was serious about making us visit the old Russian Venera rocket. I humored her. I suppose, in a way, it would have been missing something for me to leave Venus without taking a look at one of its most famous artifacts. We ducked out of the Embassy early and took an electrohack to the tram station before the streets were really crowded.
    Around the major cities the Veenies have managed to grow some grass and weeds and even a few spindly things they call trees—of course, they’re specially engineered genetically, somehow or other, but they do show some green now and then. Russian Hills, though, hasn’t been changed at all. On purpose.
    Do you want to know what kind of crackpots the Venusians are? All right, let me tell you one simple anecdote. You see, they’ve got that huge planet—five times as much land area as the whole planet Earth, you know, because there aren’t any oceans yet. In order to make it into something decent, they’ve been busting their backs for forty years and more trying to make green things grow. But that’s hellishly difficult, because of the kind of planet Venus is. Plants have a tough time. One, there’s not really enough light; two, there’s damn near no water at all; three, it’s way too hot. So to make anything grow at all takes all kinds of technological wizardry and enormous effort. First they had to nuke some tectonic faults to set off volcanos—that’s to bring whatever water vapor there is up out of the core (that’s the way the Earth got its water billions of years ago, they say). Second, they had to cap the volcanos to catch the water vapor. Third, they had to provide something cold enough to condense the vapor to a liquid; that’s the cold end of the Hilsch tubes—you see them on mountaintops all over Venus, big things like one-hole piccolos, with the hot end blasting gases out through the atmosphere to get lost in space and the cold end providing cooling for the cities—and generating a little electricity while they do it. Fourth, they have to pipe that trickle of water to where things are planted, and they have to do it underground so it won’t boil away in the first ten feet. Fifth, they have to have special, genetically tailored plants that can whisk that water up through their stems and leaves before letting it boil away— it’s a miracle they got any of this done, especially considering they don’t have much work force to spare for big projects. There are only about eight hundred thousand Veenies all in all.
    And yet—here’s the funny thing—if you take the tram out to Russian Hills, the first thing you see in the park itself is a six-man crew working all around the clock, climbing those ugly sharp rocks with hundred-pound backpacks of plant killer, zapping every green thing they see!
    Crazy? Of course it’s crazy. It’s the insanity of Conservationism carried to its lunatic conclusion: the Conservationists want to keep the Venera setting just the way it was when the probe landed. But the lunacy isn’t really surprising. “If Veenies weren’t crazy they would have stayed on the Earth in the first place,” I told Mitzi as we rattled along the tramline. “Look at the dumps they live in!” We were passing through roofed-over suburbs. They were supposed to be high-class residential areas, and yet they were filled with scraggly weeds and pressed-plastic tenements; they didn’t even have Astro-Turf!
    It occurred to me that I might be talking a little too loudly. The other passengers, all Veenies, were turning around to look at me.