This week with Arlene and Jeff:
...The others had been gone less than a minute when Arlene and Ann, following their Jeff finder, walked in. Two teams in their interceptors had been on a joint patrol of the inner planets. Even at speeds up to a half light between planets, the mission had taken twelve hours, much of the time spent, of course, searching for electronic and gravitational anomalies that might indicate an intelligent species spying on Earth.
“Who was with you?” Jeff asked after thoroughly kissing each wife, and the two having gotten hugs from Kayla.
“Maxwell and Cotton,” Ann answered. “Other than travel time, we spent a large part of our day in a careful electronic search of the inner planets of the solar system with Maxwell and Cotton assisting in their own interceptor. We would have been here an hour ago, but Cotton found a gravitational anomaly whose output was just above what our computer considered the norm. I had almost decided that it was just Venus and its weird atmosphere, but Cotton convinced me we should investigate anyway.
“As you are aware, Venus is… uh, different. It has volcanoes, and its volcanoes seem to have volcanoes,” she said, exaggerating only slightly. And then there are the seemingly ever-present sulfuric acid clouds while you steadily bake at 800 degrees F in more than 800 mile-per-hour carbon dioxide winds. I didn’t want to go down into that even with our shields protecting our interceptors. However, we did manage to do several low-level passes over the area, and if there are aliens in that boiling cauldron of the liquid rock of that massive volcano that the emissions were coming from, I would hate to meet them. Anyway we marked the location on our maps, and we’ll keep an eye on the gravity fluctuation there to see if it continues to exist. Otherwise, it was a very dull and repetitive day.”...
Have a goodun;
Roust