details right now. How are you fixed?”
“Sounds like you might be trying to offer me a job,” Massey commented. While he
spoke he looked down to operate the terminal, and then back up again but
slightly to the side, apparently reading something in an inset area of his
screen. “Pretty busy just about every day for a while,” he murmured. “Any reason
why we couldn’t make it an evening? How would you like to come round here again?
We could make it a dinner, and maybe go to that Italian place you like.”
“Sounds good,” Conlon said.
“How about tomorrow?”
“Even better. Oh—and I’ll be bringing Pat Whittaker with me. He’s involved with
it too.”
“Why not? I haven’t seen him for a while.” Patrick Whittaker was a production
executive with Global Communications Networking, a major provider of TV and
dataservices. Massey’s features contorted into a bemused frown. “Say, what the
hell is this all about, Walt? Are you sure you don’t want to give me a clue
even?”
Conlon grinned crookedly. “Get Vernon to tell you via ESP. No, really, I’d
rather leave that side until tomorrow. We’ll see you at about what, six-thirty?”
“That’ll do fine. Okay, we’ll see you then.”
Conlon returned his attention to his desk and allowed his eyes to stray over it
while he reviewed what he planned to do next. His gaze came to rest on the
folder from the Project Executive Review Committee containing the final
appraisal, specification of goals, and departmental assignments for the Mars
project. Lying next to it was a copy of that day’s Washington Post, folded by
someone in the department and marked at an item reporting Karl Zambendorf’s
return to the U.S.A. The hue of Conlon’s face deepened, and his mouth compressed
itself into a tight downturn.
“Psychics!” he muttered to himself sourly.
3
“LOOK, WE HAVE TO DO A TV SHOW THAT’S GOING OUT LIVE AT seven-thirty,” Drew West
shouted through the partition at the cab driver. “There’s an extra twenty if we
make it on time.”
Grumbling under his breath, the cabbie backed up to within inches of the car
behind, U-tumed across the oncoming traffic stream amid blares of horns and
squeals of brakes, and exited off Varick into an alley to negotiate a way round
the perpetual traffic snarl at the Manhattan end of the Holland Tunnel. On one
side the streets were blacked out for seven blocks beneath the immense, ugly
canopy of aluminum panels and steel-lattice supports that made up the ill-fated
Lower West Side Solar Power Demonstration Project, which was supposed to have
proved the feasibility of supplying city electricity from solar. Before the
harebrained scheme was abandoned, it had cost the city $200 million to teach
politicians what power engineers had known all along. But it kept the streets
dry in rainy weather and a thriving antique, art, and flea market had come into
being in the covered arcades created below.
“I’m certain there’s more to it. Drew,” Zambendorf resumed as West sat back in
his seat. “Lang and Snell were only being polite to avoid embarrassing
Hendridge. They were classical corporation men—hard-nosed, pragmatic,
no-nonsense—and not a grain of imagination between the two of them. They weren’t
at lunch because of interest in paranormal powers. They were there on GSEC
business.”
West nodded. “I agree. And what’s more my gut-feel tells me they’re
representative of official thinking inside GSEC’s Board, which says that GSEC
isn’t interested in psychic experiments on Mars. That’s just for public
consumption. But if that’s so, what’s the real reason they want to send us
along, Karl?”
The cab slowed to a halt at the intersection with Broadway. From the seat on
Zambendorf’s other side, Joe Fellburg kept a watchful eye on a group of unkempt
youths lounging outside a corner store smoking something that was being passed
round. “Maybe someone in the corporation somewhere decided it’s time that space
arrived for the people,” he offered.
Zambendorf frowned and looked at West. West shrugged. “What do you mean?”
Zambendorf asked, looking at Fellburg.
Fellburg relaxed as the cab began moving again, turned his head from the window,
and opened a pair of black ham-fists. “Well, things like space and space bases