Crisis!

By CECIL CORWIN
When the Diplomacy Bureau at home is composed of hopeless incompetents, the Venusians are rattling the sabre, and it looks as if an utterly senseless war is going to result, a little screwball stuff can be forgiven—if it works!
If the Karfiness hadn't cut herself badly while she was trimming her chelae one morning the whole mess might never have happened. But fashion decreed that the ropy circle of tentacles about the neck of the female Martian would be worn short that year, and everybody in the Matriarchy, from Girl Guide to the Serene Karfiness herself, obeyed without question.
That was why her temper was short that morning, and why she snapped at the Venusian Plenipotentiary who had come to chat with her concerning the space-mining rights for the following year. The worthy lady glowered at the gentleman from Venus and whistled: By the Almighty, if you fish-faced baboons so much as try to lay a flipper on a single free electron between here and Venus I'll blow your water-logged planet out of space! And, unfortunately for the Venusians, she had the navy to do it with.
The principles of compensation operated almost immediately; the Plenipotentiary ethered back to Venus, and Venus severed diplomatic relations with Earth. Should you fail to grasp the train of events, stop worrying. Those are the facts; the Karfiness cut herself and Venus made warlike noises at Earth.
Earth was in a very peculiar situation. Only a century ago it had begun really intensive spacing, with freight-exchanges and mining. Venus and Mars and, in a smaller way, the Jovians, had been a space-culture for millennia. Earth did not have the elaborate machineries of Foreign Offices and Consulates, Embassies and Delegates and Envoys that the other planets maintained. Terra had gone into the complicated mess of astropolitics with her eyes serenely closed and the naive conviction that right would prevail.
To the cloistered Bureau of Protocol in Alaska came a message under diplomatic seal from the Ambassador to Venus, right into the office of Code Clerk Weems.