She tried, again unsuccessfully, to reach der Heer. First the man turns up everywhere in the Argus facility, like a bad penny. He moves in with you in your apartment. You’re sure, for the first time in years, you’re in love. The next minute you can’t even get him to answer the phone. She decided to attend the meeting, if only to see Ken face to face.
Kitz was enthusiastically for building the Machine, Drumlin cautiously in favor, der Heer and Honicutt at least outwardly uncommitted, and Peter Valerian in an agony of indecision. Kitz and Drumlin were even talking about where to build the thing. Freightage costs alone made manufacture or even assembly on the far side of the Moon prohibitively expensive, as Xi had guessed.
“If we use aerodynamic braking, it’s cheaper to send a kilogram to Phobos or Deimos than to the far side of the Moon,” Bobby Bui volunteered.
“Where the bell is Fobuserdeemus?” Kitz wanted to know.
`The moons of Mars. I was talking about aerodynamic braking in the Martian atmosphere.”
“And how long does it take to get to Phobos or Deimos?” Drumlin was stirring his cup of coffee.
“Maybe a year, but once we have a fleet of interplanetary transfer vehicles and the pipeline is full–”
“Compared with three days to the Moon?” sputtered Drumlin. “Bui, stop wasting our time.”
“It’s only a suggestion,” he protested. “You know, just something to think about.”
Der Heer seemed impatient, distracted. He was clearly under great pressure–alternately avoiding her eyes and, she thought, making some unspoken appeal. She took it as a hopeful sign.
“If you want to worry about Doomsday Machines,” Drumlin was saying, “you have to worry about energy supplies. If it doesn’t have access to an enormous amount of energy, it can’t be a Doomsday Machine. So as long as the instructions don’t ask for a gigawatt nuclear reactor, I don’t think we have to worry about Doomsday Machines.”
“Why are you guys in such a hurry to commit to construction?” she asked Kitz and Drumlin collectively. They were sitting next to each other with a plate of croissants between them.
Kitz looked from Honicutt to der Heer before answering: “This is a classified meeting,” he began. “We all know you won’t pass anything said here on to your Russian friends. It’s like this: We don’t know what the Machine will do, but it’s clear from Dave Drumlin’s analysis that there’s new technology in it, probably new industries. Constructing the Machine is bound to have economic value–1 mean, think of what we’d learn.
And it might have military value. At least that’s what the Russians are thinking. See, the Russians are in a box. Here’s a whole new area of technology they’re going to have to keep up with the U.S. on. Maybe there’s instructions for some decisive weapon in the Message, or some economic advantage. They can’t be sure. They’ll have to bust their economy trying. Did you notice how Baruda kept referring to what was cost effective? If all this Message stuff went away–burn the data, destroy the telescopes–then the Russians could maintain military parity. That’s why they’re so cautious. So, of course, that’s why we’re gung ho for it.” He smiled.
Temperamentally, Kitz was bloodless, she thought; but he was far from stupid. When he was cold and withdrawn, people tended not to like him. So he had developed an occasional veneer of urbane amiability. In Ellie’s view, it was a molecular monolayer thick.
“Now let me ask you a question,” he continued. “Did you catch Baruda’s remark about withholding some of the data? Is there any missing data?”
“Only from very early on,” she replied. “Only from the first few weeks, I’d guess. There were a few holes in the Chinese coverage a little after that. There’s still a small amount of data that hasn’t been exchanged, on all sides. But I don’t see any signs of serious holding back. Anyway, we’ll pick up any missing data swatches after the Message recycles.”
“If the Message recycles,” Drumlin growled. Der Heer moderated a discussion on contingency planning: what to do when the primer was received; which American, German, and Japanese industries to notify early about possible major development projects; how to identify key scientists and engineers for constructing the Machine, if the decision was made to go ahead; and, briefly, the need to build enthusiasm for the project in Congress and with the American public. Der Heer hastened to add that these would be contingency plans only, that no final decision was being made, and that no doubt Soviet concerns about a Trojan Horse were at least partly genuine. Kitz asked about the composition of “the crew.”
“They’re asking us to put people in five upholstered chairs. Which people? How do we decide? It’ll probably have to be an international crew. How many Americans? How many Russians? Anybody else? We don’t know what happens to those five people when they sit down in those chairs, but we want to have the best men for the job.”
Ellie did not rise to the bait, and he continued. “Now a major question is going to be who pays for what, who builds what, who’s in charge of overall systems integration. I think we can do some real horse trading on this, in exchange for significant American representation in the crew.”
“But we still want to send the best possible people,” der Heer noted, a little obviously.
“Sure,” returned Kitz, “but what do we mean by `best’? Scientists? People with military intelligence backgrounds? Physical strength and endurance? Patriotism? (That’s not a dirty word, you know.) And then” — he looked up from buttering another croissant to glance directly at Ellie — “there’s the question of sex. Sexes, I mean. Do we send only men? If it’s men and women, there has to be more of one sex than the other. There’s five places, an odd number. Are all the crew members going to work together okay? If we go ahead with this project, there’s gonna be a lot of tough negotiation.”
“This doesn’t sound right to me,” said Ellie. “This isn’t some ambassadorship you buy with a campaign contribution. This is serious business. Also, do you want some muscle bound moron up there, some kid in his twenties who knows nothing about how the world works–just how to run a respectable hundred yard dash and how to obey orders? Or some political hack? That can’t be what this trip is about.”
“No, you’re right.” Kitz smiled. “I think we’ll find people who satisfy all our criteria.”
Der Heer, the bags under his eyes making him look almost haggard, adjourned the meeting. He managed to give Ellie a small private smile, but it was all lips, no teeth. The Embassy limousines were waiting to take them back to the Elysée Palace.
“I’ll tell you why it would be better to send Russians,” Vaygay was saying. “When you Americans were opening up your country–pioneers, trappers, indian scouts, all that–you were unopposed, at least by anyone at your level of technology. You raced across your continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific. After a while, you expected everything would be easy. Our situation was different. We were conquered by the Mongols. Their horse technology was much superior to ours. When we expanded eastward we were careful. We never crossed the wilderness and expected it would be easy. We’re more adjusted to adversity than you are. Also, Americans are used to being ahead technologically. We’re used to catching up technologically. Now, everybody on Earth is a Russian–you understand, I mean in our historical position. This mission needs Soviets more than it needs Americans.”
Merely meeting with her alone entailed certain risks for Vaygay–and for her as well, as Kitz had gone out of his way to remind her. Sometimes, during a scientific meeting in America or Europe, Vaygay would be permitted to spend an afternoon with her. More often he was accompanied by colleagues or a RGB babysitter–who would be described as a translator, even when his English was clearly inferior to Vaygay’s; or as a scientist from the secretariat of this or that Academy commission, except that his knowledge of the scientific matters often proved superficial. Vaygay would shake his head when asked about them. But by and large, he considered the babysitters a part of the game, the price you must pay when they let you visit the West, and more than once she thought she detected a note of affection in Vaygay’s voice when he talked to the babysitter: To go to a foreign country and pretend to be expert in a subject you know poorly must be filled with anxiety. Perhaps, in their heart of hearts, the babysitters detested their assignment as much as Vaygay did.
They were seated at the same window table at Chez Dieux. A distinct chill was in the air, a premonition of winter, and a young man wearing a long blue scarf as his only concession to the cold strode briskly past the tubs of chilled oysters outside the window. From Lunacharsky’s continuing (and uncharacteristically) guarded remarks, she deduced disarray in the Soviet delegation. The Soviets were concerned that the Machine might somehow redound to the strategic advantage of the United States in the five-decade-old global competition. Vaygay had in fact been shocked by Baruda’s question about burning the data and destroying the radio telescopes. He had had no advance knowledge of Baruda’s position. The Soviets had played a vital role in gathering the Message, with the largest longitude coverage of any nation, Vaygay stressed, and they had the only serious oceangoing radio telescopes. They would expect a major role in whatever came next. Ellie assured him that, as far as she was concerned, they should have such a role.