Larry stared down into the blazing fury of the old man’s eyes, and then turned and left the director’s office without another word, without looking back for Raphael’s reaction. Anger, real anger, cold hard adult anger gripped him, for the first time in his life.
He realized he was angry not at Raphael’s baseless accusations, but angry at the man’s stupidity, his rigidity.
It was the man’s assault against truth, against the discoveries they had all been sent here to make, that infuriated Larry. Larry had the computer records, the numbers, the readings that could prove he was right. But all those would be cold comfort back on Earth, billions of kilometers away from the Ring. Cold comfort when the Ring was mothballed for a generation, and there was no other facility available that could possibly follow up on the results.
That was what angered Larry—the blind and needless waste, the opportunity being thrown away!
If Larry’s test results were accepted and confirmed, it would be impossible to shut down the Ring. Even with the recession back on Earth, the funding board would have to come up with some sort of operating budget. Maybe even the Settlements on Mars and the outer satellites would finally contribute. Hell, that was too timid a thought. Everyone would throw money at the Ring, in the hope of sharing in the fruits of the research. What might not be possible if artificial gravity were real? Whole new avenues of research would open up on every side, now that the initial problem had been cracked. A lifetime of work, of exciting new challenges and discoveries, would lie open in front of Larry.
And all that stood between him and that bright future was one cranky old man’s bruised ego. It was not to be tolerated.
He had a strong impulse to find Sondra and ask her what he should do. But letting her call the shots would be as bad as letting Raphael roll over him. He would have to decide for himself. Once he had chosen a course of action he could ask her advice, her guidance, as to how to do it. But Larry knew he would have to decide what to do for himself, if he was going to go on respecting himself!
Without realizing where he was headed, he found himself back at the door of his own cabin. He shoved open the door, went in, and locked the door behind him. He needed some calm and quiet time alone. Time to think. Time to play the damned games, all of them.
Larry needed another experiment, a rush experiment not only to get some science done, but for career reasons, publicity reasons. Something that might make a big enough splash to prevent the shutdown.
Failing that, he had his own career to think of. The million-gee Ring run was spectacular, but it would be as discounted by the U.N. Astrophysics Foundation on Earth as it was here. Earth would listen to Raphael over Larry.
If things broke the wrong way, if Raphael did manage to cause trouble, Larry could not afford to have that one unreplicated run be his only claim to fame. He needed something further to publish, something he could bring home to Earth and base further research on. Hell, he needed an experiment that would get him a job. He scowled unhappily. Politics.
Acting the good pure little scientist, interested only in the Truth, would ensure that his discovery would be thrown away. Only by getting bogged down in politics and gamesmanship could he truly serve Truth. This situation called for scheming, not naive idealism.
Everyone gets caught justifying the means to their ends sometimes, Larry told himself, a bit uncomfortably.
Okay, then. He had a goal and a fallback goaclass="underline" saving the station and/or his career. Now how to go about reaching one of both of those?
He needed to know the state of play. Had all the tests of his results had been canceled? He had a hard time believing that the entire research staff would meekly go along with the cease-work order. On the other hand, Raphael undoubtedly expected some of the staff to try to circumvent the ruling. So anyone trying for a test would have to disguise the run as something else.
Larry used his notepack computer to check the Ring experiment schedule. It was certainly much heavier than usual, with experiments scheduled around the clock. Of course, that could be explained by the planned closing, and people rushing to get their runs made before the shutdown came—but perhaps some of that scheduled time was actually intended to test Larry’s theory.
People working on the Chao Effect would have the sense to hide their work from Raphael. And a lot of people might well be doing that very thing. But who?
There was only one name he could be sure of. One of those covert experimenters was going to be, had to be, Sondra Berghoff. Maybe there would be other malcontents willing to do more than mouth off, actually willing to wade in and break some rules. But Sondra was the only one Larry knew who would take the chances involved.
Larry worked over the experiment roster, looking for experiments in which Sondra was involved.
There were three, only one of which listed her as primary researcher. That was likewise the only one of the three that had been scheduled after Larry had shown her his test results. He rejected it as too obvious. Raphael would certainly monitor that experiment closely. Besides, it wasn’t due to be run for another week. He couldn’t afford to wait that long.
One of the others seemed perfect. It had been scheduled weeks ago, and was supposed to run on the graveyard shift, 0200 GMT tonight. Sondra was listed as the technical operator, not an experimenter.
Better still, Larry noted that Dr. Jane Webling was the primary investigator. Webling, nominally the science chief of the station, was getting on in years, to put it charitably. Probably she would go to bed before the experiment ran, and simply check with her “assistant” the next morning. In all likelihood, therefore, Sondra would be on the board by herself.
So. If Sondra were going to pull something, that would be her moment. Okay, but what was the purpose of the run? Larry checked the title of the experiment: “Test of a Revised Procedure for Gravitic Collimation.” Just the sort of pompous name people learned to hang on a test when Raphael was running things, Larry thought.
Gravitic collimation. He had seen an earlier paper by Webling on the subject—in fact, he had gotten a few ideas from it. Webling had been working for some time on developing a focused beam of gravity waves—a “graser.” Like light, gravity was usually radiated in all directions from its source. But, like light, it could be manipulated, focused down into a one-dimensional beam. Larry’s own techniques of gravity focusing relied on similar techniques.
A laser was a perfectly collimated light beam. Webling’s graser project sought to develop a focused beam of gravity, albeit of microscopic power, and beam it at detectors on the other planets. Strange thought, Larry told himself, since gravity could be defined as a curve in space. A beam of curved space.
Actually, the basic technique produced two beams, pointed one hundred eighty degrees apart from each other-one aimed at the target, the other outgoing in exactly the opposite direction. Webling’s greatest success was in creating a “push-pull” beam by warping the outgoing beam around, changing its direction of travel without affecting its direction of attraction. In effect, the outgoing beam signal became a repulser. Merged with the targeted beam, it had exactly zero net attractive power, because the two beams canceled each other out. The beam should be detectable, but effectively powerless.
But suppose, Larry thought, he boosted the power rating a bit? Say, by a factor of one million? It still would be self-canceling, and thus not have any effect on the target worlds—but it would sure prove Larry was on to something. Hell, it would melt the readouts right off the gravity detectors.