But on Kronia it worked. Since possessions in themselves didn’t signify anything that was especially valued, acquisitiveness taken too far was not only pointless but the equivalent of passing counterfeit bills. For by the principles of appretiare, the act of choosing a particular offering in preference to available alternatives was to acknowledge the value of the provider, thereby constituting payment. People produced—or served, or taught, or advised, or entertained—for the satisfaction of doing worthwhile work. Few greater ignominies were feared than putting one’s best into an effort and having no takers—equivalent to bankruptcy, and a sign that one’s calling lay somewhere else. But taking what wasn’t needed or valued for itself was to tender appreciation that was not sincere and, hence, tantamount to paying in worthless currency.
A short walk along one of the galleries brought them to the front entrance of the Tesla Center. After crossing a reception foyer, they followed a corridor past some offices and then passed through a double-door fire dam and bulkhead lock to emerge on a walkway overlooking a different world of power engineering. The air smelt of hot oil and ozone, and thrummed to the vibration of heavy machinery. Two rotary housings twenty feet or more high stood on concrete plinths in the space below, surrounded by pumps, switch banks, and transformers wreathed in color-coded pipework and cabling. High-voltage insulator stacks stood beyond the supporting columns at the rear, with bus bars ascending to unseen regions above. They followed the walkway for a short distance and then descended a railed stairway to the floor below, crossing beneath a bridge of ducting and lagged steam pipes topped by a catwalk to a passage leading to doors through another double-wall bulkhead.
The surroundings on the far side were different again: more like a lobby, with some concession to color and pattern in the decor, elevator doors to one side, and glass-walled stairs going up to corridors leading away left and right on two levels. Ahead, a concertina drop-screen shut off a work zone where construction was in progress. This was a new extension of the Center, eventually to have its own tube terminal and access shaft to the surface. Pang-Yarbat and his group were just some of many relatively recent arrivals. The administrators took pride in finding room for everyone as their way of contributing to the Center’s work, and ultimately, of keeping alive the population that would exist in years to come. Even a laborer with a shovel could watch the spectacle of a fusion-driven interplanetary lifting out of orbit and say, “I helped build the place where the engines for that ship were designed.” Appretiare.
Pang-Yarbat’s office with its lab space behind was roughly halfway along one of the upper corridors. They found him draped in the chair pushed back from his L-shaped desk with its usual litter of hand-scrawled calculations and papers, facing a screen showing some of the group’s earlier work. The man seated in a chair drawn up behind him had to be Jansinick Wernstecki. The shelves around them were cluttered with tools, workshop materials, and pieces of equipment in various stages of disassembly. In the area to the rear, Reyd Orne and Merlin Friet were working amid a tangle of instrumentation wiring sprouting from where the outer metal cladding had been removed from the original Valkyrie array—about the size of a regular door but thicker, mounted horizontally in a steel frame wreathed in tubes and power cabling.
“Ah, Lan!” Pang beamed, getting up. “So welcome back from your shot-in-the-arm vacation. We were starting to wonder if you were transferring up there permanently.” It was one of Pang’s puns. The Security “Arm,” who among other things operated the LORIN stations, was the nearest Kronia had to a military force, while “shot” had doubtless been an allusion to X-ray laser bombs.
Pang was from somewhere in eastern Asia, brought to Kronia at an early age. He was short and chubby, with rich hair cropped short, and deep, alive eyes made more intense by ancient silver-framed spectacles which he refused to change for surgical correction. He had a broad, flat nose, fleshy chin to match, and a rubbery face that could take on an infinite variety of expressions and spoke its own language. His joviality and penchant for puns and expressing himself in riddles masked one of the most agile scientific minds that Keene had ever encountered—or maybe they were an irrepressible byproduct of it. Pang’s father and an uncle had played key roles in the Kronian development of fusion energy after hostile politics quashed the chances of any concerted program on Earth, and Pang had followed in the same general field. In earlier years he had directed the design of the drives for the Osiris spacecraft that had brought Keene and others from Earth, so Keene’s grasp of nuclear-propulsion physics had not been lost on him when it came to his attention. Inviting Keene into his group had been the result—not a bad salary offer at all for somebody relatively new in from Earth at the time.