Beautiful place. She had moved here to be close to her faculty, at the Center for Physics. She suspected she was going to have to move before long, though. She couldn’t see how she could stand to die here, to leave behind so much beauty. Everybody should die someplace ugly, where it wouldn’t matter so much…

On the other hand, maybe it was this beautiful place that was killing her. Up so high, poking out of Earth’s shielding blanket of air, Aspen received twice the sea-level dose of radiation.

There was a new star in the morning sky, bright as a piece of the sun.

It’s Venus, Alfred, on the telephone, was telling her. Venus.

It was casting shadows, long raking shadows, from the aspen tree stands.

The astrologers will be jumping up and down, she thought. We’re only a few years into the new millennium… and now this.

“Venus? How can it be?”

I’m afraid there’s no doubt. What you’re seeing is reflected light from the sun, with some intrinsic illumination from the planet itself.

“Reflected light?”

Monica, the atmosphere seems to have — blown off. The planet is surrounded by an expanding sphere of gases and other debris.

“Debris? You mean rock?”

Yes. Also fusion products. And the intrinsic illumination — Monica, something is happening on the surface, or maybe in deeper layers. Something very energetic.

Alfred had first gotten the call from his night assistant, a graduate student. It was the student’s job to control the big telescope Alfred was working on at Kitts Peak. Alfred, sitting in an office, confirmed whatever target star he wanted, and observations were made with spectroscopes and charged-couple detectors.

Nobody had been watching the planets, at Kitts Peak Observatory. It was just a casual glance out the window by the night assistant that had led to her noticing the change to Venus.

That was the way with modern astronomy, Monica thought wryly. Nobody looked through the big telescopes any more.

We were finishing up for the night. We were actually getting ready to park the telescope and —

“Tell me what you did.”

The first thing was to get on the IAU nets. The International Astronomy Union, the astronomers” jungle telegraph. There are ground-based observers working on this all over the planet already, Monica. Also the radio telescopes. I contacted NASA; they’re repositioning some of the satellites, for example the ultraviolet and X-ray and gamma ray observatories. We’re also speaking to the Europeans, Canadians and Japanese. The Space Station astronauts are doing some good work. NASA are sending up high-altitude experiments, by balloon and sounding rocket and aircraft. NASA are responding quickly, in fact.

“Well, NASA would,” she said drily. “They’re probably putting together a budget proposal for a new Venus probe as we speak.”