Nina removed her smoke, sighed and made a move to stand up and let her coverall fall back over the exposed limbs. Lindsay said, "Not on my account--_please_! Those are the first good looking legs I've seen since leaving Mars." "Watch yourself, boss," said Nina and indulged in a slow half-smile. Then, putting her feet back on the floor, "You certainly lost a lot of friends and 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. * * * * *