“So he seems sympathetic?” I said.
“More than that.” She took a deep breath and sat down. She was still hyper after her presentation. “I think it went very well. He listened hard and he asked questions. I was only scheduled for ten minutes, and we took nearly twenty. Keep your fingers crossed.”
I did, as one by one the others went in. When they came out most of them echoed her optimism. Siclaro was the only questioning voice. He had described his system for kernel energy extraction, and Tallboy had given him the same attentive audience and nodded understandingly.
“But he asked me what I meant by `spin-up,’ ” Siclaro said to me as we stood together outside the main auditorium.
“That’s fair enough — you can’t expect him to be a specialist on this stuff.”
“I know that.” He shook his head in a worried fashion. “But that came at the end of the presentation. And all the time I was talking, he was nodding his head at me as though he understood everything — ideas a lot more advanced than simple spin-up and spin-down of a Kerr black hole. But if he didn’t know what I meant at the end, how could he have understood any of the rest of it?”
Before I had time to answer, my own turn arrived. I came last of all, and though I had prepared as hard as anyone I was not a central part of the show. If Tallboy had to leave early I would be cut. If he had time, I was to show him over the Hoatzin, and make it clear to him that we were all ready for a long trip, as soon as his office gave us permission.
His energy level was amazing. He was still cordial and enthusiastic after seven hours of briefing, with only one short food break. We took a pod, just the two of us, and zipped over to the Hoatzin. I gave him a ten-minute tour, showing how the living area was moved closer to the mass disk as the acceleration of the ship was increased, to provide a net one-gee environment for the crew. He asked numerous polite general questions: how many people could be accommodated in the ship, how old was it, why was it called the inertia-less drive? I boggled a little at the last one, because McAndrew had spent large parts of his life explaining impatiently to anyone who would listen that, damn it, it wasn’t inertia-less, that all it did was to balance off gravitational and inertial accelerations. But I went over it one more time, for Tallboy’s benefit.
He listened closely, nodded that deep-browed head, and watched attentively as I moved us a little closer to the mass disk, so that we could feel the net acceleration on us increase from one to one-and-a-half gees.
“One more question,” he said at last. “And then we must return to the Institute. You keep talking about accelerations, and making accelerations balance out. What does that have to do with us, with how heavy we feel?”
I stared at him. Was he joking? No, that fine-boned face was as serious as ever. He stood there politely waiting for my answer, and I felt that sinking feeling. I’m not sure what I told him, or what we talked about on the way back to the Institute. I handed him on to McAndrew for a quick look at the Control Center, while I hurried off to find Limperis. He was in his office, staring at a blank wall.
“I know, Jeanie,” he said. “Don’t tell me. I had to sit in on every briefing except yours.”
“The man’s an idiot,” I said. “I think he means well, but he’s a complete, boneheaded moron. He has no more idea than Wenig’s pet monkey what goes on here in the Institute.”
“I know. I know.” Limperis suddenly showed his age, and for the first time it occurred to me that he was long past official retirement. “I hoped at first that it was just my paranoia,” he said. “I wondered if I was seeing something that wasn’t there — some of the others were so impressed.”
“How could they be? Tallboy had no idea what was going on.”
“It’s his appearance. That sharp profile. He looks intelligent, so we assume he must be. But take the people here at the Institute. Wenig looks like a mortician, Gowers could pass as a dumb-blonde hooker, and Siclaro reminds me of a gorilla. And each of them a mind in a million. We accept it that way round easily enough, but not in reverse.”
He stood up slowly. “We’re like babies out here, Jeanie; each of us with our own playthings. If anybody seems to be interested in what we’re doing, and nods their head now and again, we assume they understand. At the Institute, you interrupt if you don’t follow an argument. But that’s not the way Earthside government runs. Nod, and smile, and don’t rock the boat — that’s the name of the game, and it will take you a long way. You’ve seen how well it works for Dr. Tallboy.”
“But if he doesn’t understand a thing, what will his report say? The whole future of the Institute depends on it.”
“It does. And God knows what will happen. I thought his background was physics or engineering, the way he kept nodding his head. Did you know his degree is in sociology and he has no hard scientific training at all? No calculus, no statistics, no complex variables, no dynamics. I bet the real quality of our work won’t make one scrap of difference to his decision. We’ve all wasted a week.” He sniffed, and muttered, “Well, come on. Tallboy will be leaving in a few minutes. We must play it to the end and hope he leaves with a positive impression.”
He was heading for the door with me right behind when McAndrew hurried in.
“I’ve been wondering where you two had gone,” he said. “Tallboy’s at the departure dock. What a show, eh? I told you we’d do it, we knocked him dead. Even without Wicklund’s work, we showed more new results today than he’ll have seen in the past ten years. Come on — he wants to thank us all for our efforts before he goes.”
He went bounding away along the corridor, full of enthusiasm, oblivious to the atmosphere in Limperis’ office. We followed slowly after him. For some reason we were both smiling.
“Don’t knock it,” said Limperis. “If Mac were a political animal he’d be that much less a scientist. He’s not the man to present your budget request, but do you know what Einstein wrote to Born just before he died? `Earning a living should have nothing to do with the search for knowledge.’ ”
“You should tell that to Mac.”
“He was the one who told it to me.”
There didn’t seem much point in hurrying as we made our way to the departure dock. Tallboy had seen the best that we could offer. And who could tell? — perhaps McAndrew’s enthusiasm would be more persuasive than a thousand hours of unintelligible briefings.
The mills of bureaucracy may or may not grind fine, but they certainly grind exceeding slow. Long before we had an official report from Tallboy’s office, the argument over Jan’s visit to Triton Station was over.
I had lost. She was on her way to Neptune. She had finagled a ride on a medium-acceleration supply ship, and anytime now we should have word of her arrival. And McAndrew couldn’t wait — Wicklund was still frustratingly coy about his new work.
By a second one of those coincidences that McAndrew insisted were inevitable, Tallboy’s pronunciamento on the future of the Penrose Institute zipped in to the Message Center at the same time as Jan’s first message from Triton Station. I didn’t know about her spacegram until later, but Limperis directed the Tallboy message for general Institute broadcast. I was outside at the time, working near the Hoatzin, and the news came as voice-only on my suit radio,
The summary: Siclaro’s work on kernel energy extraction would proceed, and at a higher level (no surprise there, with the pressure from the Food and Energy Council for more compact power sources); Gowers would have her budget reduced by forty percent, as would Macedo. They could continue, but with no new experimental work. McAndrew had his support chopped in half. And poor Wenig, it seemed, had fared worst of all. The budget for compressed matter research was down by eighty percent.