It had happened before. There was a flaw in Earth’s mantle here, a great plume of magma which had welled up steadily for a hundred million years. It had generated Oahu; right now the Big Island was over the plume, and was being pushed towards the sky by that lithic fountain. But the relentless sliding of the tectonic plates beneath the Pacific would eventually, in a few million years, take the Big Island away from the plume. The volcano at its heart would die, and the island would be abandoned to the forces of erosion.

Thus there was a chain of dying islands tailing off to the northwest, Oahu and Kauai and Niihau, and beyond that a trail of corpses, nameless undersea mountains, each of which had once been a paradise of forests and beaches, just like this one.

Somehow it seemed an appropriate place to come to talk about the death of Venus.

Alfred returned, bearing two immense cones of ice cream. He was wearing a broad, floppy hat, a garish shirt, and shorts that made his legs look as if he had spent ten years in space.

They found a seat, and ate up the ice cream companionably.

Small talk: How are Garry and your grandkids? Fine, Alfred, when I get to see them… he’s flying out of Edwards now… I don’t think Jenine is enjoying life as an Air Force wife…

She let her attention drift. A part of her mind was already composing the report she would have to pass up to the Administration.

She wondered about telling the President about the funny physics results. Was it appropriate to include something so exotic, something nobody yet understood, something it wasn’t even possible yet to check?

On the other hand, she thought bleakly, suppose Alfred’s wilder speculations have some bearing on reality. If there is something loose in the Solar System, something transforming, something powerful enough to destroy a planet like Venus — won’t it be seen immediately in terms of a threat to the Earth?

And if it was a threat, how could they possibly deal with it, even recognize it?

“You know,” Alfred was saying around his ice cream, “no matter what the other implications of this event, one thing’s for sure.”

“What?”

“We’ve lost Venus. Forever. Although I suppose the truth is we lost it a long time ago, when the first space probes got there. I’m old enough to remember—”

“You’re younger than me, Alfred.”

“ — when Arrhenius’s theory was still the paradigm. He thought the clouds were water droplets. The land was choked by swamps.

A hothouse, with amphibians and dinosaurs and cave men. Even later, when it became clear from the spectroscopic evidence there was no water in the cloud tops, we still thought there might be a loophole. Maybe a world-spanning ocean of Perrier water. Or seas of oil. Why the hell not?