point—we have to know what to prepare for.”
Abaquaan crushed the can he was holding and tossed it into a waste-basket.
Thelma leaned back in her chair and looked across at Zambendorf. “True,” she
agreed. “But how are we supposed to find that out? NASO’s hardly likely to make
a public statement about it.”
Zambendorf didn’t reply at once, but drew on his cigar and gazed distantly
across the pool. After a while, Abaquaan mused, half to himself, “Do the NASO
people just want to send a psychologist, or are they determined to send Massey?
If we knew the answer to that, it would tell us something. … In fact it would
tell us a hell of a lot.”
Another short silence ensued. Then Thelma said, “Suppose somebody came up with
some good reasons why Massey should be dropped from the mission and replaced by
someone else. …”
“What reasons?” Abaquaan asked.
Thelma shrugged. “I don’t know offhand, but that’s a technicality. Since we
couldn’t afford to be seen originating a demand like that, it would have to come
from GSEC—they’ve got enough lawyers and corporate politicians to think of
something.”
“Even if they did, can you see NASO dropping Massey if that is what he’s there
for?” Abaquaan sounded dubious.
“No, but that’s the whole point,” Thelma replied. “The way they react might tell
us what we want to know.”
Abaquaan looked at Thelma curiously, seemed about to object for a moment, and
then turned his head away again to consider the idea further. A mischievous
twinkle had crept into Zambendorf’s eyes as he lay back and savored the thought.
“Yes, why not, indeed?” he murmured. “Instead of being passive, we can lob a
little bomb of our own right into the middle of them, maybe … As Thelma says,
it probably won’t blow Massey overboard, but it might singe his beard a bit. So
we have to get the message across to GSEC somehow.” Zambendorf took off his
sunglasses and began wiping them while he thought about ways of achieving that.
Thelma stretched out a leg and studied her toes. “One way might be through
Osmond,” she suggested after a few seconds. “We could tell him, oh … that in a
first-time situation like this, it would be advisable to keep disruptive
influences and other unknowns to a minimum until Karl’s gained more experience
in the extraterrestrial environment . . . something like that?”
“And he’d persuade Hendridge, who’d take it to the GSEC Board,” Abaquaan
completed. He sounded dubious. Zambendorf looked at him, and then over at
Thelma. They all shook their heads. None of them liked it. If the team wanted
its relationship with GSEC to be a partnership and not a dependency, it needed
to dissociate from Hendridge, not shelter behind him.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, it’s obvious!” Zambendorf sat up and leaned across to
stub his cigar butt in the ashtray on the table. “We talk to Caspar Lang and
tell him that we both have a problem with Massey, and why. We’ve already agreed
that Lang’s under no delusions concerning the true situation anyway. And if he’s
going to Mars as GSEC’s senior representative on the mission, then the sooner he
and we can start talking frankly and get to know each other, the better.”
Two weeks passed before Walter Conlon received an internal notification through
NASO that GSEC had expressed concern over Massey’s nomination for the Meridian!
Sinus mission. Specifically, GSEC was calling attention to Massey’s record as a
skeptic and debunker of claims concerning paranormal phenomena, and to the fact
that Karl Zambendorf was accompanying the mission to test abilities of precisely
that nature. Although Massey’s capacity was described as that of psychologist,
appointing someone with his known predispositions, GSEC suggested, would be
inviting the risk of his allowing personal interests to take precedence over
official duties, with detrimental consequences to the job he was being sent to
do. In view of these observations, therefore, would NASO like to reconsider its
choice?
Conlon dashed off a terse reply stating that Massey’s function was to assess and
report objectively the behavior, attitudes, emotional stresses, and other
psychological effects observed among the experimental community. If Zambendorf