And failed.
She remembered the first time that had happened, when she had fibbed about dipping into the cookie jar at age five. Her father had marched her into the bathroom, stood her on the sink, and forced her to look in the mirror as she repeated her childish lie. She hadn’t been able to do it then, and she couldn’t do it now. Of course this time she hadn’t lied. But she failed to do right—and that came to the same thing.
She turned and left her cabin, determined to make it up.
Five minutes later, she tapped at the door to Larry’s room, more than a little embarrassed, and quite unsure what she was there for. She had a guilty conscience, and Sondra had been brought up to believe in doing something about feeling guilty. Any action, any gesture to make amends, however pointless, was better than letting guilt feelings fester.
She should have spoken up at the meeting, and she hadn’t. She had to do something to fix that, even if she didn’t know what that something might be.
“Come in,” a muffled voice said through the thin door. She pushed the door open and stepped into the little compartment. Larry was sitting up on the bed, a portable notepack computer in his lap. He looked up in surprise. “Uh, hello, Dr. Berghoff.”
“Hello, Larry.”
He tossed the notepack to one side of the bed and stood up, not quite sure how to make his guest welcome.
“Um, let me pull a chair out for you.” He reached behind her and yanked a fold-out seat from the wall. Larry sat back down on the narrow single bed, and Sondra sat down opposite him. She had always thought of him as young, a wide-eyed kid. Probably that was true, even if it wasn’t fair. Sondra herself was twenty-six, and Larry couldn’t be more than a year or two younger. Sondra had unconsciously pegged him at about seventeen or so. That was patently impossible, now that she thought about it.
The station was the province of highly specialized researchers. High-energy physics was full of whiz kids— but not even a whiz kid could make it here earlier than twenty-four. It would take a certifiable genius, the sort who skipped every other grade all through his schooling, even to get here that young. Sondra herself had been the youngest-ever fellow at the station when she had arrived here two years ago. With a start, she realized Larry was just about the same age she had been at arrival.
Had she been this much of an innocent then?
She looked more closely at him. Certainly there was something about his face that made him look more youthful than he was. His wide, solemn eyes, his jet black hair trimmed in the station’s standard amateur bowl-over-the-head style, his smooth, unlined skin, the oversized coveralls added to the appearance of extreme youth. Sondra was willing to bet he didn’t need to shave more than once a week.
But there was more to it than that. Life had not yet put a line upon his face, or touched his expression, his eyes, his soul. There was no hint of incident, of tragedy, of pain’s lessons or sorrow’s teachings in his eyes.
She had no idea where he was from. He had a strong American accent to Sondra’s ear, for whatever that was worth. Was he born there, or did he merely learn English from an American tutor? So much she didn’t know.
And he was one of only 120 people within a billion kilometers of here! One of only twenty scientists who sat around that science staff table at the damned weekly meetings. How could she have lived in such a small community for so long and know so little about one of the people in it? Sondra thought for a moment about some of the other people at the station, and was stunned to realize she could not put names to several of the faces.
She had once been such a people person. Pluto had turned her into a sour recluse, even as it poisoned Raphael. But it didn’t seem to have touched Larry Chao at all. She looked at him and wondered what to say.
“I’m just trying to work up my usage figures for the Ring,” Larry said, trying to find something to fill up the silence. His voice sounded most unhappy. “It looks like I spent the planetary debt last night. I don’t know what the hell to do.”
“I’ll bet. Can I see your figures?” Sondra asked, grateful that Larry had given her something to talk about.
Larry shrugged. “Sure, I guess. I can’t get in any deeper than I am now.”
Sondra wrinkled her brow and looked at him oddly. “What do you mean by that?”
“Well, the director sent you, didn’t he? To check on me?”
Sondra opened her mouth in surprise, shut it and had to start over again before she was able to speak. “Send me! Raphael sending me! The only place he’d tell me to go is outside without a heater or a suit.”
It was Larry’s turn to look surprised. “I thought you were one of his favorites. You always sit so close to him at the meetings.”
Sondra grinned wickedly. “There are always plenty of seats at that end. Besides, if I sit close I can keep an eye on him. I’ve sort of made a hobby out of watching how he handles things.”
“He sure as hell handled me,” Larry said mournfully. “Now I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ll never be able to pay this back. It’s more than I’ll earn in my whole life. Hell, I still haven’t paid back all my loans to MIT.”
“Let me see how bad it is,” Sondra said gently. Larry handed the notepack over to Sondra. She took one look at the figures and gasped. “Five million BritPounds! How the hell could you possibly run up that high a tab? That’s more than the monthly budget for the whole station.”
Larry nodded miserably. “I know. It’s all down there.”
Sondra paged through the cost estimate and started to feel a little better. This guy might be a genius at what he did, but he obviously didn’t know from cost estimating. His price figures were astronomically high, even for an honest cost report—though Sondra did not intend Raphael to get an honest report. “This can’t be right. You’ve got yourself down for six full hours of Ring time.”
“That’s how long I was at it last night. Ring time is most of the cost. I checked the accounting records in the main computer. Ring time is billed at seven hundred thousand pounds an hour.”
“First off, that’s the figure we use when we bill to an external experimenter. Let me check the rate for staff experimenters.” Sondra worked the controls on the note-pack, powered up the radio link to query the main station computers, and pulled down the answer. “Thought so. Inside work is billed out at five hundred thousand. Besides, even that’s an artificial rate set up for accounting purposes. It’s got nothing to do with actual costs.”
“Great. That knocks one-point-two million off my tab,” Larry said. He flopped back on the bed and sighed. “I should be able to scrape up the other four-point-eight million from somewhere. Ha ha. Big laugh.”
Sondra looked up from her figures with a smile. The joke wasn’t funny, but the attempt to make it was promising. “Secondly,” she said, “you billed yourself for power and materials when those are supposed to be covered by the hourly rate. It’s not a big chunk, but we can subtract that out too. Third, six hours isn’t how long you were running the Ring, it’s how long you were in the control room, according to the logging report on the instruments. You couldn’t possibly have been operating the Ring for that six hours straight. You’d have gone through a month’s power allocation. I bet ninety-five percent of that time was in computer time and setting up the experiment, right?”