"What about Lazarus's?"

"Once."

"Recently?"

"I bet you could guess when."

"So you've read some of my email. Just not from my end."

"Sure."

[Augh,] says Lazarus, very calmly.

"Yes we have."

"You could have just written Lazarus, or had Chris write him, and asked him for his assessment of my likelihood of blowing up the world," Bella says.

"I don't think Lazarus is a good enough judge of character to accurately tell."

"You wound up having to talk to me in person after all anyway," Bella points out. "What did your espionage net you?"

"Maybe it didn't. Maybe it was a bad idea."

"So you've seen the error of your ways, or you've decided I'm never going to drop the 'spying' thing and you should switch to 'lying' if you want to be friends, or you just think this exact instance was not worthwhile but your general policies are decently sound?"

"I'm open to considering that this exact instance might not have been worthwhile. I have a lot more faith in my general policies."

"Mm." Bella sighs. "It's lucky that I've been assuming someone could and might read my email for a while now."

"Of course you have."

"Yes. And I keep turning out to have been inadequately paranoid - Bridget being the best example - so I probably still need to dial that up."

"And yet, I note that your main complaint about me is that I am much too paranoid."

"My paranoia leads me to take defensive measures. Your paranoia leads you to take liberties with things that do not belong to you."

"We're defending different things," she says. "On very different scales."

"You don't exhaust less liberty-taking avenues before you do what you do, or I might round down to that being the only difference."

"What kinds of less liberty-taking avenues would you suggest?"

"You could have contacted me directly instead of sending Bridget and told me that I showed up on your Global Mint Radar and asked if I wanted to chat. You could even have done it from behind security like I have in case I flipped out. And if I did flip out, you could try something like Bridget covertly, and if I did not, you could have just interacted with me like a normal person. You could have told me about not using the heavy-duty coins much earlier, too, and if you'd like tests on those done on Mars? That seems like something you want mints to be told about at once, not months later."

"Doing any of those things involves assuming you are not already hostile," says Libby. "That's not a safe assumption to make."