A whole phalanx of scientists attended. The meeting was crowded. Children were welcomed. Their tammies had to be left behind.
Dreiser began speaking without preamble. ‘We have a confusion of opinions here. You have every right to hear them. In some cases they amount to serious disputes between us.
‘The fact is that, over the last week, we have observed no less than twenty-seven glitches in the superfluid of the ring. The interpretation of these phenomena is unclear as yet. When examined closely, the build-up to these glitches has a curious and complicated structure. Most of us have therefore reached the conclusion that the glitches are not caused by HIGMOs after all.
‘The question then is: What does cause them?
‘I am going to ask Jon Thorgeson to give his point of view.’
Thorgeson rose. As when he had spoken in public before, he began nervously but soon got into his stride.
‘I don’t really expect you non-scientists to understand all the nuances of the situation. Maybe you’ve heard before that there is something going wrong in the ring. There may be stray vortices in the superfluid which lead to spurious effects. I believe that to be the case. It is the obvious explanation.
‘Before we go any further, or develop any crazy ideas, we have to turn off the refrigeration units so that the superfluid can return to its normal fluid state. Okay, so then we examine the tube thoroughly and clean it. That is a meticulous job. Then we switch the refrigeration on again, turning it up very very slowly, so that no vortices can develop.
‘It’s just lousy luck that this procedure will take about a year. By that time the ships will be back, I don’t doubt – and their vibrations would spoil everything. We have to take that chance.
‘To be honest, I have a suspicion that the irresponsible excavations of your Lower Ground may be the cause of everything…’
He sat down and folded his arms across his chest.
While he was talking I noticed Kathi shaking her head in mute disagreement, but it was Charles Bondi who spoke next, in flat denial of the last speaker.
‘I’m sorry, but that’s all arrant nonsense. Vortices in the superfluid are well understood. They would produce quite different effects from the patterns we have observed. You need only simple calculations to see that it is so.
‘Besides which, we have no spare year to play around in. We must find a solution for today. Leo Anstruther made the plea for White Mars, but somehow he was ruled out as Administrator of the UN Department for the Preservation of Mars. When the ships return they will probably be obsessed once more with the idea of terraforming Mars. It makes our situation an urgent one.’
A YEA technician rose and said, ‘We don’t want to let a plea of urgency destroy understanding. I’d say we should haul off and wait to see what comes next. I mean, what the ring comes up with. Seems we have run out of HIGMOs this week. We should keep watch on next week.’
Georges Souto spoke next. ‘I’m largely in agreement with the last speaker. For one thing, we don’t know what exactly is going on Downstairs. Maybe they’ve turned their back on the whole notion of matrix travel. Maybe they’re never coming back. Think of that!’
That the audience was thinking of it was apparent from the general exclamation that went up at Souto’s words.
Souto continued. ‘It could be that the conventional hypothesis that HIGMOs were distributed randomly and uniformly throughout the universe is just plain wrong. Our findings imply that the distribution of HIGMO encounters with the ring may be extremely clumped. The explanation for seeing all these HIGMOs together in such a short space of time is simply that we’re passing through a HIGMO shower, okay?’
Even as he spread wide his hands in explanation, someone shouted out that he was talking nonsense.
Suung Saybin spoke from the audience. ‘Could all these glitches that you’re worrying about be caused by one and the same HIGMO being trapped in Mars’s gravitational field, so that it oscillates back and forth in the ring?’