Next shift, the Haven was settling into orbit around Rushima, and Illart was too busy preparing to negotiate for the Council with Rushima to answer Market’s questions. Markel wound up, as usual, perched on Johnny Greene’s cluttered worktable in the CaN, or Computation and Navigation.
“Hoa hasn’t actually been working much on the prediction model since that paper you first saw,” Johnny said, supporting Markel’s deductions of the shift before. “He’s a meteorologist by trade, not a mathematician, and he says what that model needs is some new mathematical insights-and he sure hasn’t got them.”
“Then why did he really want to leave Khang Kieaan? The original work has been out for over a year. Isn’t it a little late for him to worry about somebody misusing his research? Besides,” Markel added, as snidely as befitted somebody who’d been up for most of his sleep shift comparing a cleverly disguised “new model” with its virtually identical predecessor, “you can’t even use this one, let alone misuse it.”
“Oh, don’t underrate Hoa’s work,” Johnny said, “it’s the best weatherprediction model going, and even if it’s not long-range or perfect, it ought to be a considerable improvement on whatever the Rushimese are currently using.”
“I still don’t get why he had to be smuggled out in a sack of kava beans.”
Johnny sighed and touched his console with one finger to halt the program he was running. “And you’re not going to stop asking why until you get some answers, are you? Pestilential brat,” he added, but his voice was warm. “What you need is a walk in the Garden. Get some exercise. You’ve been staring at your data console all night again, haven’t you? You’ll addle your brains that way.”
“I’m not- ” Markel began. Johnny hushed him with a hand signal that dated back to the time of his first arrival on the Haven, when he’d spent hours playing Miners and Martians with a lonely kid whose father was wrapped up in Council business and in grieving for a mother Markel could barely remember. That waggle of the fingers, Markel remembered, meant, “Hush, we are observed.” And the slight crook in the thumb meant “Follow me silently.”
The “Garden” was actually the part of the Havens hydroponics unit that was open to general view: a network of narrow trails on the spongy damp flooring of the unit, past flowers and fruits and greens that had been carefully trained to drape over the edges of their ugly tubs. Markel had never seen the point of it, but the Starfarers of his father’s generation, who had actually wanted-wanted! he thought in amazement-to become dirt farmers, who remembered living dirtside in the inefficient alternation of light and darkness that didn’t fit human biorhythms, insisted they needed this gardenlike section to remind them of their past lives.
Today, though, there were no visitors other than Johnny and him. Probably everybody was too busy ‘preparing for the Rushima negotiations, or too anxious to hear the results, to take time for smelling the flowers.
“You’re not cleared for this information,” Johnny began abruptly once he had ascertained that there were no other visitors to the Garden. “I’m only telling you because I know how hard it is to stop you when you’ve got your teeth in a problem, so I know you’ll be worse trouble and probably uncover more stuff if I don’t give you a little now. But I’d hate to have to explain to the Council that I couldn’t head off a sixteen-year-old’s ‘ ‘satiable curiosity,’ so just keep it to yourself, will you. Elephant’s Child?”
The nickname came from an old story Johnny had once told Markel, about a baby elephant who got into terrible trouble and had its nose pulled until it became a trunk, all because it refused to stop asking annoying questions.
“You haven’t actually told me anything yet,” Markel pointed out, “except that there’s something to tell. Now that I know that, of course I’m going to be curious.” He grinned at Johnny.
“All right. I told you Hoa hasn’t been working on the weatherprediction model for over a year, and that’s true. This paper we’ve been given to read is just a rehash and slight improvement of his earlier stuff, put out to convince the heads of his research lab on Khang Kieaan that his more recent work has not been productive and that he is going back to the prediction model. The fact is that his experiments have been quite successful. Terribly successful,” Johnny added in somber tones. “He didn’t want them to fall into the hands of any of the three Khang Kieaan parties for fear that whichever party had it would use his work to destroy the other governments, and probably destroy the planet in the process. And there were too many people involved in the work to keep it secret indefinitely; even though he was the only one who knew all the parts of the project and could put it together, he was afraid some lab assistant or graduate student would let out enough to get the head of the lab interested. He had already converted his notes to a single datacube and erased all his working files, and he was prepared to blow up the datacube and himself if they came for him before he found a way off-planet. You can imagine that he was very glad to learn of the Haven’s visit.”