He leaned forward, resting his hands on the window ledge, and looked around the sky. “I wish they’d clean these windows. Kind of a poor observing platform we have here… Oh.”

“What?”

“I think it’s Venus.”

She frowned. “Venus, the planet?”

He said heavily, “What other Venus? It’s right where Venus is supposed to be, tonight. And I don’t see any bright object nearby that could be Venus. So, it’s Venus.”

“But how can it suddenly become so bright?” She remembered an old science fiction story. “Oh. Venus is closer to the sun than Earth. What if the sun has flared? Or even gone nova? And the reflected light—”

“No.” He shook his head. “It’s near superior conjunction right now. Which means it’s on the far side of the sun, so showing us a full face. So if you think about it, by the time the increased sunlight reflected off Venus and crossed space to get here—”

“The sunlight would have reached us direct, already.” A suppressed sigh of relief. “So Venus itself must have gotten brighter.”

“Which is impossible.”

“Is it? Maybe it’s some kind of volcanic thing.”

“What kind of volcanic thing?

She was used to his sarcasm. “You’re the geologist. Think of something.”

He went to the back of the office, and came back with a scuffed pair of binoculars. He raised them and focused them briskly.

He whistled.

“What?”

He passed her the binoculars, leaving the strap around his neck, so she had to lean towards him to use them. She scanned around the sky, seeking the glare.

The binoculars resolved the distant, fixed stars to points. The glasses were too weak, she realized, to resolve Venus — on normal nights — to anything better than a minute disc, or crescent, at best.