“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Okay, how long was the Ring itself powered up, actually taken out of standby mode and cooking?”
Larry thought for a second. “Seven, maybe eight minutes. I’d have to check the experiment log file.”
“We’ll check it in a second, but let’s assume we’re talking eight minutes. At the internal experimenter’s rate of five hundred thousand pounds an hour, that comes to sixty-six thousand, six hundred sixty-six BritPounds.”
“That’s still two years’ pay for me!” Larry protested.
“So we fudge together a ten-year garnisheeing plan and submit that,” Sondra said. “You pay the first month’s installment like a good little boy—and by the second month the whole Institute shuts down. If the station shuts down, how can it dock your pay—especially when it isn’t paying you anymore? And while we’re at it, we arrange to have it paid off in Israeli shekels. That’s the convertible currency with the highest inflation rate right now. The debt will lose half its value in a year.”
Larry thought about it for a moment and frowned. “It doesn’t sound exactly honest to me.”
Sondra muttered a curse under her breath. “It’s bad enough that Raphael wants to penalize you for showing initiative and being inspired. Why the hell do you have to cooperate with him when he does it?”
“But he’s got a point. I wasn’t authorized to run the test. I didn’t get it scheduled.”
People want authority to be just, Sondra thought. “Three-quarters of the experiments here aren’t scheduled. That rule is on the books to prevent people from doing side jobs for commercial labs. We’re supposed to be working in the public interest and our data is public domain. Without a rule to cover moonlighting, private companies could hit a researcher up for secret experiment runs. The rule wasn’t meant to punish you for thinking, and Raphael is wrong to use it against you. We couldn’t get anywhere complaining directly to him, so we have to find backdoor ways around the rule. Give me a chance and I bet I can whittle the charges down even further.”
Larry thought for a minute. “Hell, there’s no way I’m going to be able to pay anything more anyway. All right; I’ll do it your way.”
“Great. Glad to hear it.” Sondra set the notepack to one side. “The real reason I came in was to apologize for not sticking up for you today. Let me fudge the figures for you, just to make it up.”
“Why should you have done anything today? You barely know me.”
“Yeah, but by this time, I should know you. The old-timer is supposed to show the new kid around. Besides, every one of us around that table should have spoken up, and none of us did. We’re all too browbeaten by Raphael.”
Larry sat up again. “That much I can believe. He reminds of my Uncle Tal. Tal always managed to find a way to let me know I wasn’t sufficiently grateful to my parents. Nothing I did was ever enough. I don’t know how many times I wanted to face up to him, but I never worked up the nerve. And Dr. Raphael is a hundred times worse.”
Sondra felt a twinge of guilt, a legitimate one this time. Much as she hated to admit it, there was a part of her that admired Raphael’s cussedness, that felt some sympathy for him. “Don’t be too hard on him. He hasn’t had it easy. He’s spent practically his whole life being an old man in a young person’s game. It took him a few extra years to get his doctorate for some reason. He fell behind the current theories and research, and never really got caught up. That was twenty-five years ago. He’s lived all that time watching boy and girl wonders like us make all the big strides.
“Imagine what a whole life like that would be—always a little bit behind the curve, forever condemned to be a bright man in a field where the average worker is a genius. No wonder he gets frustrated.” She paused, and shrugged. “Even so, he shouldn’t take it out on the rest of us.”
“And we shouldn’t let him get away with it,” Larry said with surprising firmness. “If we didn’t cooperate, he couldn’t push us around.”
“I’ve been telling myself that for a long time,” Sondra agreed. “But if we’re going to close up shop in a month, it’s a little late to stage a revolt.”
A shy, tentative smile played over Larry’s face. “There’s still my results. They might be worth something.”
Sondra smiled indulgently. It would take miracle numbers to do any good. Mere refinement, another tweakup in performance wouldn’t help. But she wasn’t going to say that to Larry. What good could it do to dash all his hopes? “Yeah, you’re right. They might be something.”
“Wanna see them?” Larry asked eagerly. He bounded off the bed without waiting for an answer, shot over Sondra’s head and caromed off the ceiling, much to her startlement. He made a perfect landing in front of his desk and wrapped his legs around the chair legs. Obviously he had practiced a lot moving in Pluto’s weak gravity. He dug through the papers clipped to the desktop, and pulled a single sheet out of the thick sheaf. “This is the summary,” he said. “I’ve got a preliminary detail report, but the computer is still doing some number crunching.”
Sondra took the paper without looking at it. “Why so long to run the calculations?” she asked.
Larry shrugged. “I didn’t have a chance to start it running until after the meeting, and it’s a complicated problem that’ll suck up a lot of processing time. Too big for a remote terminal. I’ve got the Ring control computer slipstreaming pieces of my job in between legitimate work, in small enough hunks that it won’t get flagged on the accounting system. I don’t want Raphael nailing me for sucking up computer time too.” He grinned shyly.
Sondra laughed. “You’re learning,” she said, and glanced casually at the summary sheet. Then she blinked, and looked at it again, more carefully. She had to read it twice more before she was certain she had read the numbers correctly. They couldn’t be right. They couldn’t be. “This has got to be wrong,” she objected. “You can’t have gotten that kind of gee field. Even if we knew how to do it, we don’t have the power to generate even one percent that much force.”
“The numbers are right,” Larry said. “And I didn’t generate that gravity force—I focused and amplified an existing gravity field. Charon’s gravity field.”
Sondra looked at him. His voice was calm, steady. There was nothing defensive in his tone, and he looked her straight in the eye. He believed in the figures. She looked at the page again and checked the time stamp on the experiment. Hours before Raphael had dropped his bombshell. No, Larry could not have faked the numbers in some sort of mad attempt to cancel the closing with a spectacular success. Besides, these numbers were too spectacular. They were too good for anyone to try to fake them. No one would believe it. They had to be real.
She realized that she had been staring blankly at the summary sheet. She put it down and took a good hard look at Larry. He was not the sort to make a good liar. If he had been trying to put something over, he would have blushed and stammered, his eyes would have shifted away from hers. Either the data were right, or Larry had made a spectacular error.
He believed. But no one else would.
“Has Raphael seen this?” she asked, tapping a finger on the sum sheet.
“I haven’t worked up the nerve to send the data to his terminal yet. I was going to present it at the meeting, but I didn’t,” Larry admitted unhappily.
“Damn it.” If Larry had sent them in before the meeting, they would have had at least some credibility. “Send it right now. Not just to his terminal. Copy to every researcher on the station. Now.”