Clifford’s heart sank. It was a brush-off—polite, but a brush-off. He exhaled in one, long, hopeless breath all the tension that had built up inside him during the last few minutes.
“Okay, ask him to call,” he said dejectedly. “You’ll have the callback code logged.” With that he cut off the screen.
Clifford got up, swore, and pounded the back of an armchair with his fist. “The bastards!” he grated, his breath coming heavily. “They’ve got everything taped up. I knew it . . . I knew it all along.” The other two remained staring at the lifeless screen.
“Well, we did say we’d be no worse off,” Sarah reminded him after a while. She tried to sound soothing but could not hide the disappointment in her voice. “At least it was worth a try.”
“One hell of a letdown all the same.” Even Aub sounded bitter.
“He might call . . .” Sarah said, but the words trailed away.
“And pigs might swim the Pacific.” Clifford paced over to the far side of the room. “The bastards!”
Sarah and Aub remained silent. There was nothing more to say.
They finished off another pot of coffee and began discussing without very much enthusiasm plans for the future. Clifford thought of teaching somewhere in South America; Aub had always wanted to spend some time in the Antarctic. Sarah again changed her mind about the local vacancies and thought that taking them wouldn’t be too bad as a short-term measure after all. By late afternoon they had all cheered up somewhat and were swapping stories of days gone by.
Then the Infonet chime sounded.
Clifford still retained a secret shred of hope deep inside, which he would not admit to the others and which he only partly admitted to himself. His inner psychological defenses were shielded from the possibility of further disappointment by refusing to allow him to acknowledge that he really expected anything to happen at all. He had resolved inwardly, therefore, that in the event of any incoming calls, he would react without any display of emotion or excitement. In that way, anything he felt as a consequence would at least be private. Even so, before he realized it, he found that he was the first to reach the screen, his hand shooting out instinctively toward the Accept key.
Sarah and Aub were close behind.
A dignified countenance, topped by a crown of elegant silver hair, looked out at him.
“Dr. Clifford?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, good. It is a pleasure to see you at last. I am Heinrich Zimmermann. I do apologize for not being available earlier; we were right in the middle of some extremely critical observations. May I congratulate you on your astonishing contribution to science. I was fascinated to read your paper, and delighted that you should think to bring it to my attention.
“Now, Dr. Clifford, what can I do for you?”
Chapter 10
The meeting in the Main Conference Room at ACRE had been in session for over two hours. About two dozen people were present, seated around the long rectangular table that stood in the center. Representatives from the Technical Coordination Bureau and some officials from various other federal departments were arrayed along one side of the table, facing a row of scientific personnel, many of them from ACRE itself, lined up on the other. Sitting at one end, Jarrit, flanked by Edwards and Corrigan, was presiding over the meeting. The atmosphere was tense and humorless. Dr. Dennis Senchino, a nuclear physicist from Brookhaven, was remonstrating from a place roughly in the center of the scientific side.
“I’m sorry, but I can’t accept that,” he said. “What you’re asking is, if I might put it bluntly, naive. We are talking about a whole new range of physical phenomena that nobody even understands yet. It’s completely new uncharted territory that we’ve only just come to realize exists at all. It’s true that in time concrete applications of some kind may come out of it, but there’s simply no way that anybody can tell how long that might take. The only thing we can do is pursue further research on an open-ended basis and wait and see what happens. You can’t just produce new discoveries to order against some kind of timetable, as if . . . as if you were planning to put up a building or something.”