“You want to build another machine,” Hughes finished for them.
Morelli and Aub glanced at each other.
“Yes,” they said both together. Hughes sat back in his chair and nodded slowly as if his worst suspicions had just been confirmed.
“I knew it was more money,” he told them. He thought for a few seconds. “Tell you what I’ll do. You get your heads together and produce a preliminary cost breakdown of what you think you’ll need. After that, if you convince me, I’ll talk to ISF headquarters in Geneva about it. Fair enough?”
Morelli opened the folder that he had been resting on his knees, extracted a wad of typewritten sheets of columns and figures, turned them around, and slid them on to Hughes’s desk.
“Funny you should mention that, Pete,” he said, keeping an absolutely straight face. Hughes stared disbelievingly down at the papers and then back up at the two earnest faces confronting him from the other side of his desk.
“Okay,” he sighed, resigned. “Let’s go through it now.”
A week later, Hughes and Morelli flew to Geneva. The week after that, three directors from ISF headquarters came to Sudbury to obtain firsthand background information on what had been going on and what the possibilities for the future were. A few days after the matter had been discussed in Geneva, Peter Hughes called Morelli and gave him the good news. “I’ve just had Maurice on the line from Geneva. You’d better tell the team right away—we’re going ahead with Mark II.”
The first thing to do was place orders for a long list of equipment needed for the construction of Mark II. Hughes and Morelli had decided that, however gifted with talents for the unorthodox Aub might be, the new instrument would be designed and built according to accepted practices. That way it would be easy to expand, modify, and trouble-shoot; parts would be readily replaceable; and regular maintenance by suppliers would be feasible, enabling Aub and the other scientists at Sudbury to concentrate on the jobs they were there to do. It would take longer to get off the ground that way, but thereafter progress would be faster. Besides that, they had Mark I to occupy them in the meantime; without doubt it still had enormous potential for improvement that they were only beginning to appreciate.
But at about that time the first signs started to appear that on other fronts things were not running normally.
* * *
“Yes, Professor Morelli?” The face of the official from the State Department local office in Boston stared impassively out of the screen.
“I want to know about this inquiry you’ve sent us,” Morelli replied from his Sudbury office. “And the questionnaire that you’ve attached to the back of it. What’s it all about?”
“Purely a routine formality, Professor,” the official replied smoothly. “A matter of keeping records up-to-date, you understand.”
Morelli waved the paper in front of him. “But what is the purpose of all these questions?” he demanded. “Personnel working here and a list of the projects they’re working on . . . declaration of capital equipment and the use that’s being made of it . . . major research projects funded during the last two years . . . What in hell’s going on? I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
“Perhaps we have been a little more lax in the past than we should have been,” the face replied. “I assure you that such information is pertinent to our duties and that we are empowered to request it.”
“Empowered by whom?” Morelli asked angrily. The man’s manner was beginning to irritate him.
“That I can’t disclose, I’m sorry. I can only give you my assurance.”
“Damn your assurance! It’s either hogwash or you don’t know what you’re talking about. Let me talk to your boss.”
“Really . . . I can hardly accept the necessity of . . .”
“Put me through to your boss,” Morelli stormed.
“I’m afraid that Mr. Carson is unavailable at the moment. However, I . . .”
“Then tell him to call me,” Morelli said and flipped off the screen.
Morelli glowered at the blank display screen for a long time while he tried in his mind to fit some kind of pattern to it. That had been the third such probing inquiry in two weeks. All kinds of obscure officials in obscure places were, it seemed, suddenly taking a lot of interest in Sudbury and what was going on there. He didn’t like it.