“Well, I’ve no doubt that you’ll both end up doing something interesting,” Kieran said. “There’s enough in the kitty to keep you comfortable for a while, anyhow. Just watch the deals out there. If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.”
“I don’t know how to thank you enough for what you did,” Elaine said. “June, I’m so glad that you picked a man who’s curious about everything.”
“It can have its moments,” June answered dryly.
“Our commission more than covered the costs,” Kieran said. “So, you see, I’m just as brazen and commercial as the rest, really.”
Sarda shook his head. “No, not like the rest. Never. You’re something else . . . `Knight.’ ”
“And how’s Guinness?” Elaine asked.
“Fed, content, and at peace with the limited part of the world that interests him.”
“We were thinking you should have called him Sirius,” Elaine said. “The Dog Star. Get it? He is one.”
Kieran smiled. “That’s good. I wish I’d thought of it.”
Sarda moved the spectacles a fraction to look around. “Well, it looks as if we’re going to have to be moving. It’s all been a rush here at the last minute, but I’m glad we had a moment to call. Thanks again from me too. It goes without saying that if there’s ever anything we can do . . .”
“I’ll want to know what you get into next,” Kieran said. “So you’d better stay in touch from time to time. You’ve always got the number on the card.”
“You can count on it,” Sarda promised. “So . . . take care for now.”
The two figures on the screen waved; then Sarda pressed a button on the unit he was holding, and the image vanished.
“And a happy-looking couple they make, doubtless destined to live so forever after, wherever they end up,” Kieran pronounced. “A pity that people will still have to be shut up inside tin cans for weeks or more to get to places, though—for a while yet, anyhow. With Sarda-the-First walking around not knowing what day it is, the word’s probably going around the business already that the process is fatally flawed somewhere. No one’s going to be interested in touching it now. There simply isn’t a marketable technology anymore.”
“And it’s probably just as well—until somebody comes up with a way of doing it right,” June said. “They thought they could pull a fast one, and it backfired. Let’s face it, Kieran, the world and beyond isn’t ready for something like TX yet, and probably won’t be for . . . I don’t know, maybe a century. Look at the mess it got into with just one, carefully designed experiment. Even the guy who practically invented it ended up not being convinced. Look what it did to him.” She shook her head. “You couldn’t turn something like that loose on the public. Can you imagine it going on everywhere at the rate of millions a day? The whole Solar System would be turned into an insane asylum within a week.”
“And that’s not even part of it,” Kieran said.
“What do you mean?” June asked.
“Something I’ve been thinking about on and off ever since Elaine and I talked about it in the park. We don’t know that the deal Balmer was setting up was with another of the trans-system carriers at all. It could have been with interests having totally different aims.”
“Other than a light-speed teleporter?”
“Exactly.”
“Such as what?”
“How about what you told me it was in the first place?” Kieran suggested. “A people-duplicator. Think of all the things you could do with that. Your life insurance company keeps the record on file. If anything happens to the original, they can provide a replacement. Or if the talents of rare genius are priceless, then why not enrich the condition of the human race thousandsfolds by mass-producing them? Come to that, why expend effort selecting and training lots of near-good experts like sports stars, élite military, and so on, when you can concentrate on getting just a few right and then copy them? What kind of crazy social dynamics might result from people making two of themselves to share the load—or three, or four. . . . See—there’s no end to it. That would make what you’re talking about seem as sober as a convention of judges.”