disinfluenced a lot of people down there today. If you'd
prepared your speech on the machine I'd have fixed it up for you."

"Which is exactly why I prepared it in my hot little head," Lindsay told
her. "I wanted to knock some sense into them."

Nina got out of her chair and snuffed out her cigarette in the disposal
tray, then sat on the edge of the desk and poked at the untidy
dark-blonde hair she wore in a knot on top of her head. She said, "Night
soil! You'll never knock any sense into that mob."

Lindsay, who had been thinking wistfully that if Nina would only do
something about that hair, the thickness of her middle, and her bilious
complexion, she might be fairly good looking, blinked. He said, "Why in
hell do you work for them then?"

She shrugged disinterested shoulders, told him, "It's a job." She
yawned, unabashed, added irrelevantly, "You know, boss, the trouble with
you is you look like a gladiator. They won't take you seriously unless
you wear specs and a harness."

"Over my dead body," he told her. "What's wrong with athletes anyway? I
play damned good tennis when I get time to practice."

"Athletes are lousy lovers," she said. "Your correspondence is on your
desk." She nodded toward it. "Get it signed, will you? I've got a dinner
date."

Lindsay restrained an impulse to ask her with what and signed the
letters dutifully.

Nina was a spy, of course, or she wouldn't have the job. In view of his
own assignment and the delicacy of Terro-Martian relations at the
moment, she must be a good one.

He handed her the letters, noted the slight sway of her thick body as
she walked toward the dispatch-chute. A pity, he thought, that the rest
of her failed to match the long perfect legs she had so unexpectedly put
on display.

"Oh, Miss Beckwith'" he called after her. "You don't have to list my
appointments on the teleprompter when I'm making a speech after this."

She stopped, cast him an oblique glance over one shoulder and said
without much interest, "I didn't know whether you'd get back here or
not--and it wouldn't do to forget the Secretary General."

"All right," he said in resignation. When she had gone he wondered if he
should have told her what du Fresne had said about his possible
assassination, decided it was just as well he had kept mum. He went up
on the roof for a copter.

* * * * *

The dinner was informal. Lindsay and Fernando Anderson, the flamboyant
ju