“I have every intention of opening up,” Dana said. “I know, practically word for word, how this interview is going to proceed, what information I’m going to give you, just when I’m going to give it to youand what you’re going to pay me for it. I knew all that many months ago. So there would be no point in my holding out on you.”
“What you’re saying, Miss Lje,” Thor Wald said in a re-signed voice, “is that the future is fixed, and that you can read it, in every essential detail.”
“Quite right. Dr. Wald. Both those things are true.”
There was a brief silence.
“All right,” Weinbaum said grimly. “Talk.”
“All right, Captain Weinbaum, pay me,” Dana said calmly.
Weinbaum snorted.
“But I’m quite serious,” she said. “You still don’t know what I know about the Dirac communicator. I won’t be forced to tell it, by threat of prison or by any other threat.
You see, I know for a fact that you aren’t going to send me to prison, or give me drugs, or do anything else of that kind.
I know for a fact, instead, that you are going to pay meso I’d be very foolish to say a word until you do. After all, it’s quite a secret you’re buying. Once I tell you what it is, you and the entire service will be able to read the future as I do, and then the information will be valueless to me.”
Weinbaum was completely speechless for a moment.
Finally he said, “Dana, you have a heart of purest brass, as well as a knee with an invisible gunsight on it. I say that I’m not going to give you my appropriation, regardless of what the future may or may not say about it. I’m not going to give it to you because the way my governmentand yours runs things makes such a price impossible. Or is that really your price?”