“Now you want me to play psychologist. That’s not my line, Les. I build nuclear drives for spaceships.”
“I’d still like to hear your take, anyhow.”
“Well . . .” Keene drew a long breath while he thought about it. “I guess it’s the old story of the in-club being threatened by a heresy that’s getting attention. You could lose your standing as the official church and all the gravy that comes with it, and then your disciples will desert to the other side. So you fight it with everything you’ve got.”
“Everything?” Urkin objected. “You mean scruples don’t matter? I thought there were supposed to be civilized rules of discourse and conduct.”
“Oh, those only apply between gentlemen who are in the club,” Keene explained. “They don’t count if you’re on the outside.”
“But we’ve got flagrant censorship going on. Suppression of facts. What happened to all this I heard about impartial weighing of evidence; seeking objective truth?”
Keene waved a hand. “Like with all religions: it was a nice thought in the early days. Then different people move in and take over, and in the end it’s the power dynamics that matter. The rest makes good reading for indoctrinating the initiates.”
Urkin looked across curiously. “But that’s not true with everyone, is it?” he said. “I mean, how about you? You still seem to care about those things.”
“Sure. And that’s why I run a five-person office that works with a maverick outfit somewhere in the south of Texas instead of handing out the contracts in Washington. But at least that gives me a reason. What’s yours?”
Urkin just shook his head in a way that gave up trying to understand it.
Keene knew he was drifting into being flippant again. It was his reflex defense mechanism while he absorbed the impact of what had happened to Salio and the other things he had heard. But underneath it, now, he could feel his anger rising, like the slow building up of wind before a storm. And he wasn’t going to accomplish anything to alleviate it here, or with people like Salio, or by talking to the Kronians, or flying stunts around the planet. The only place to take it was where the source of the problem lay.
Could Cavan have really seen this coming all along?
18
Keene arrived at Protonix the next morning with a mood that hung over the office like a temperature inversion. The girls got on with their tasks and stayed out of the way.
He was in the kind of situation that irked him the most: of not being in control of the things that affected him the most profoundly. His professional future was tied to the fortunes of Amspace, which hinged on decisions that would eventually come out of Washington, and he had done all he could do to influence the process that would determine those decisions. And the premonitions he was getting weren’t good. To make matters worse, the focus of priorities at Amspace had shifted for the time being from engineering matters that involved him to internal administrative details of getting Montemorelos ready to relaunch the shuttle that had landed there, giving him no ready outlet for his energies.
His approach to life had always been to suspect himself as the first candidate for blame when things went wrong—which put the capacity for learning something and doing whatever needed to be done squarely in his own hands. That was the first prerequisite to being in control of one’s life as opposed to a helpless victim of it. The Kronian affair was as far as he was prepared to go in knocking himself out, he decided. If this didn’t work out, then to hell with it. He would chuck it all in and go back with them when the Osiris departed.
He was still mulling over the thought when Vicki came into his office holding a blue folder and set it down open in front of him. One of the pages showed a contour map of rugged terrain with various locations marked by crosses, squares, and other shapes. The facing sheet had reproductions of what looked like a piece of pottery, a slab that could have been from the base of a statue, and a section of mural relief carving, all with lines of peculiar symbols inscribed, fragmented and obliterated in some parts, others tolerably clear.