Michael weighed his options. He could stall, he could lie, or he could be straight with them. He didn't really like any of the choices. At last, he said, "I don't know."

"Was it Dr. Failia?"

"What?" The word jerked Michael out of his slump. Angela didn't bat an eye; neither did Philip.

"She has complete control of Venera's financial records," said Phil. "The base is her whole life, and it was about to die. People around here worship her. They'd start a war if she asked them to. It would not be hard for her to funnel the necessary money down to the Cusmanos brothers so they could do the deed."

"No," said Michael.

"No, you know she didn't do it, or no, you don't want to be-lieve she would?" Philip looked down his nose at Michael. "You're a v-baby, aren't you?"

Anger rushed through Michael's veins. He clamped his jaw shut around the words that wanted to tumble out.When he was certain he had control of his voice, he said, "There are some things Helen wouldn't do, even for Venera."

"Are there?" whispered Angela. "There are two dead men next door to us, Mr. Lum. Who else on this base would people kill or die for?"

They were trying to anger him, trying to get him to doubt what he knew. It was a good tactic, and they played it out like the pros they were.

But a tactic was all it was, a game, a way to try to turn him against Helen and Venera. That was all.

"The Cusmanoses died of food poisoning," lied Michael, slowly, reasonably. "We found a whole batch with the same contamination and have closed the brewery. It was bad luck."

"It was dead convenient," said Philip. "And you're being de-liberately obtuse."

Michael just smiled a little. "And you two are completely ob-jective and did not get sent up here with any agenda at all. The C.A.C. just wants what's best for the planets. Am I right?"

"Come on, Michael." Angela rolled her eyes. "You're too smart for this."

Michael nodded again. "You're right. I am."

He left them there and made his way back to the main cor-ridor and joined the flow of life that swirled through Venera, all day, every day. This was his home, his place, his life. He knew its upside, and its underside. He knew what the people shel-tered here would and would not do.

The yewners were used to chaos. They were used to look-ing for rebellion and conspiracy and greed. They weren't used to people being happy. They didn't understand. This was an-other world. His world. He would not let them turn him against it.

He would not.

After Michael stormed out, Philip got up out of his chair and closed the cubicle door."Well," Angela said mildly. "I don't think he's going to be able to kid himself for more than three days, maybe four, tops."

Philip shook his head and returned to his seat. "Less than that. He's good people, at bottom. He knows where his own lines are, and they've been crossed."

"They've been erased." Angie fell back on her pillows. "If we're right."

"You've got to be kidding? How could we be wrong?"

"We could always be wrong." She let her head flop toward him. God, it felt good to have those earphones off. "We've got more simulations than direct evidence. One good lawyer, and we're suspended for negligent harassment and God knows what else."

"Won't stay that way." Phil picked a spot at the tip of her fin-gers that didn't have any tubes sticking out and patted it. "I just wish we could have got to him before the Cusmanoses had to die."

"Yeah," Angela coughed. Phil practically jumped to hand her the water.

She smiled as she took it. "Thanks."

She drank. It tasted good. It felt good going down. The pain was almost gone. She couldn't believe how good it felt, just to move an arm under the sheets and not have it feel like hot sandpaper. To be able to turn her neck freely, to not have every sound screaming straight through to her brain. "I wish we could have told him we know about the C.A.C. accusations. That might have pushed him over."

"Now, now, we don't want him to know how many of his landmines we did get around." Phil looked at the door thoughtfully and fingered his beard. "We might be wrong about how long it takes him to come around. I want a back-up plan, just in case."

"Let's get to it." Angela pushed herself up a little higher on her pillows.

Work felt good. Working was easier than thinking about what was waiting outside the walls. Aliens. Living crea-tures, intelligent creatures right here, right next door to Mother Earth, and they'd saved her life. Saved all their lives.

And Helen Failia might have known about them for years. She mighthave defrauded to keep her secret. She might have killed. She was definitely in contempt of committee.

And right now this woman, this maybe-murderer, was controlling all human contact with these new people. That could not be allowed to continue.

Chapter Sixteen.

"This is ridiculous." Vee shoved her briefcase back on the scarab's kitchen nook table. "Why don't we just fly over there? We know where they are."

"Maybe because we've been told to stay here?" suggested Josh.

"We haven't been told anything lately." Vee glanced toward the main window. The perches and the holobubble sat there in the gray twilight, unattended. Naturally, they'd been out to take a look at it all, and they had good measurements and great pictures, but they had completely failed to elicit any response out of the nobby "cortex box" at its base that functioned as translator.

"Not to mention that if we left," Josh went on, "we wouldn't be able to talk to any of the People we met." He waved his hand at the plans for the modified survey drone they had been hashing out on the briefcase screen.

"This is a long way from finished."

Vee and Josh were working up simulations for a mobile communications drone which used parts scavenged from sur-vey drones and his lab. The problem was, of course, that while the drones had all kinds of recording equipment attached to them, they had zilch in the way of projection equipment.

Vee found herself wishing she could talk to Derek Cusmanos. He'd done such a job on the laser in the Discovery, they could use him now. She shook her head, a little sad, a lit-tle angry, a little confused. First he'd blown his talents on a fraud, then he got caught, then he went and diedfrom a bad batch of yeast.

How did you even start to deal with something like that? Es-pecially when you were the one who helped catch him in the first place? Guilt, cold and unfamiliar, took hold, and she set it aside with difficulty.

"We don't need to talk to them; we just need to let them know we're still here." Vee chewed her lip thoughtfully. "T'sha said they have politics.

Maybe the local bureaucracy is having a hard time deciding on a replacement for her. If we showed ourselves, it might be a motivator."

"It might be seen as a sign of aggression. We really don't know that much about them, Vee." Josh was trying to be rea-sonable. He was even succeeding, but Vee wasn't in the mood for reason right now.

"We know a little. We know they're ready to talk." She pressed her fingertips against the tabletop. "We know they have a hierarchical social infrastructure, and we know they really want to settle this planet because their own is in trouble." She met his gaze. "Personally, I think it'd be a bad idea for all concerned to let them talk too much about that in private."

Josh watched her thoughtfully for a long moment. "Plus, you're bored, right?"

She smiled her patented number-fourteen vapid smile. "You know me so well."

"Mmmph," snorted Josh, exaggeratedly unimpressed. "Un-fortunately, I'm not the one you have to convince. Adrian!" he called up the corridor to the pilot's compartment. "You hearing any of this?"

"I'm trying not to," Adrian called back.

"All I'm suggesting"-Vee stepped into the aisle where she could see Josh at the table and Adrian crouched in front of the pilot's chair, checking the inventory in one of the storage cup-boards-"is that we fly in, showing that we are in fact still here, and come back. It's just to start things up again." God knew they weren't having any luck appealing to Venera. Supposedly Helen was talking to the C.A.C. today, but no one upstairs seemed to be willing to tell them how that was going, if it had happened yet. That, even more than the empty perches out-side, was making Vee nervous."Look," Adrian straightened up. "I'm not sure I want things to start up again, all right? I'm even less sure I want to have to explain to the governing board that I helped start them."

"Dr. Failia's last orders to us were keep them talking," Vee pointed out.

"We're currently failing in that assignment."

From his face, Vee could tell she'd scored a hit. "I don't think going into their camp was part of what she had in mind," said Adrian.

"Keep them talking," repeated Vee. "Which we currently are not doing."

She folded her arms. "If the U.N. wants to know what our current status is, what are we going to tell them?"

Adrian's shoulders sagged. He looked past Vee to Josh. Josh shrugged.

"I almost hate to say this, but she's right. If we have to give an update, it's going to be lean."

Adrian turned away and carefully slotted his inventory roll into its rack.

When he faced them again, his expression was grim. He was remembering the crash, Vee was sure. He was re-membering the aliens carrying away the body of copilot Bailey Heathe. They still didn't know why. Vee had been reluctant to ask the question. Okay, Vee had been afraid to ask the ques-tion. She wanted the aliens to be... good people, understand-able people. She'd been unwilling to compromise the image she was building in her mind.

Going to have to get over that and fast, Vee, she told herself. Or you are going to be no good to anybody.

"If we do this," Adrian said, laying the emphasis heavily on the first word, "we do this quickly. We go in, we fly a couple of circles to let them know we're still around, and we come back. That's it. Okay?"

Vee nodded soberly, covering her private triumph. Finally! Something to do besides sitting around and watching the world blow by.

"I'll go inform Sheila of our new assignment." Adrian slid past Vee, heading for the rear of the scarab. Sheila had proba-bly heard every word and decided to keep out of it, something she was very good at. Vee hadn't been able to get more than two words out of the woman since they'd dropped down. Vee suspected she was withdrawing from the utterstrangeness of what was happening around her, which Vee could understand intellectually but not emotionally. How could you not want to know everything there was about the People? How could you not want to find a way to make friends?

Especially since it sounded like they were determined to be neighbors.

Had anybody else thought about that? Everyone had seen the transcripts of all the conversations, but had they really thought about it?

The People were coming. No, they were here, and they were here to stay.

They planned to transform Venus. Had anybody really thought about what that meant?

Adrian came back up the aisle followed by Sheila, her mouth pressed into a thin, straight line. Another thing she wasn't happy about. Vee turned to Josh, who just shrugged again, as if to say, "It was your idea."

I'll buy her a coffee when we get back. It seemed to be the official beverage of Venera.

"If you two could strap down please," said Adrian as he set-tled into the pilot's chair.

"Right." Vee patted Josh's hand. "Come on, back to the co-coons."

Josh didn't say a word until they were both strapped in and their couches' indicator lights all shone green. Then he turned his head toward her.

"What if they say no?"

"What?" She lifted her head just a little so she could see his whole face over the edge of the couch.

"When we show up, indicating we want to talk some more. What if the People say no?"

"Then we'll know." Vee let her head drop and focused on the view screen. "Anything's better than not knowing."

Through the intercom, she could hear Adrian and Sheila run-ning through the preflight checks. The tourist-guide banter had completelyvanished, and Vee found herself missing it. It had made her feel they really were a united team, that they all agreed this was something worth doing.

Maybe she'd been kidding herself, but that was how it felt.

"I hope you're right," said Josh as the scarab lifted off the ground. The soft hum of the flight engines crept through the walls. On the screen, the twilight landscape of Venus sped by under the scarab.

"Are you afraid?" she asked.

Josh was silent for a moment. Then he said, "Yes. I wish I weren't, but I am. I mean, I was there. I saw them rescue Scarab Fourteen too. I've sat here and talked with T'sha, and she's civilized and curious, and incredible, and I'm scared to death of her and everything she represents." He licked his lips. "They might be stronger than we are . If they decide they don't want us here, there might not be anything we can do. But at the same time, I don't want anybody else thinking that way, because I'm afraid somebody down at the U.N. is going to do something really stupid, like decide we don't want them here under any circumstances."

"Oh, good." Vee gave him a watery smile. "I thought it was just me."

They lapsed into the silence of their individual thoughts. Venus continued to slip by underneath them, twilight deepen-ing into darkness.

The wind rocked the scarab gently, just to make sure they didn't forget it was out there. Vee knew where they were going. They had detailed satellite images of the por-tal now. But what would they find when they got there?

Was T'sha there, or was she still with her sick city? Vee thought that was likely. If T'sha had come back, she'd surely have returned to talk with them. Unless something or someone had pre-vented her...

No, there was no reason to believe that. Except that the Peo-ple had politics too. Politics made human people do strange things. Who knew what it made aliens do?

"God and Mother Creation," came Sheila's stunned voice through the intercom. "They're everywhere."

Vee's gaze jerked to her view screen. It showed nothing but the Venusian surface, glowing brightly in the darkness. She unsnapped her straps and struggled to her feet."You're not..." Josh stopped himself and undid his owns straps.

Swaying with the rocking motion of the scarab, they both made their way out into the main corridor. When Vee could see what lay outside the main window, she stopped dead in her tracks.

The people soared and wheeled in the night like birds, but they had none of the random motion or simple, obvious pur-pose of birds, and they glowed. Each one of them was a shim-mering, living flame. Those flames rode the winds surrounded by clouds of their shining jellyfish. They tied new, big, shim-mering white bubbles to their established base. They launched silver-scaled dirigibles into the air. They hovered, staying still relative to their base in knots of twos and threes, probably talk-ing earnestly. They lit the night with their very presence, and Vee knew deep inside she'd never forget the pure beauty and wonder of this one moment, no matter what happened next.

What happened next was that they were spotted.

A trio of People broke away from the others and dived to-ward the scarab. Sheila's hands convulsed on the wheel.

"Wait for it," said Adrian, gesturing to her to relax.

The People pulled up sharply in front of the main window, close enough that Vee had to squint against the light they radi-ated until her eyes adjusted. She could see their muzzles open-ing and closing and their flexible lips covering teeth that looked like a forest of tightly packed toothpicks. Their shining wings rippled minutely in the wind, each centimeter of skin ad-justing itself to keep them from being blown away.

Their jewel-colored crests spread wide. What were they for? Stabilizers?

Sensory organs? She hadn't asked. It seemed like she hadn't re-membered to ask anything important.