* * *
“Next Thursday, I’m afraid,” Peter Hughes said to Morelli as they were walking across the grounds of the Institute away from the GRASER building. “They really didn’t leave me any choice.”
“Thursday?” Morelli looked dubious. “Brad will be pretty mad about that. He was planning to devote the whole of Thursday to checking out the BIAC interface to Mark II.”
“He’ll have to postpone that, then,” Hughes said. “Sorry, Al, but our friends in Washington were adamant.”
“But hell . . .” Morelli protested. “Why a progress review meeting . . . and all day at that? The team is perfectly capable of reviewing its own progress, and they can do it in half an hour. Brad and Aub spent four hours last week preparing that progress report for Washington. Wasn’t it good enough for them or something?”
Hughes threw his arms wide open in front of him as he walked and sighed. “I don’t know, Al. They said it wasn’t detailed enough. They say they need to send some of their people here to go right through the whole project . . . from top to bottom. As I said—I didn’t have much choice about it.”
Morelli shook his head apprehensively.
“Brad’ll be pretty mad,” he repeated.
* * *
“Aub’s not bothered about it,” Clifford told Sarah later on that night. “He’s only interested in getting his Mark II up and running and keeping the funds flowing in to do it. He said we shouldn’t waste time on any of that nonsense but should just keep feeding back whatever fiction’s needed to shut them up.”
“That’s not your way though, is it,” Sarah said, stating the fact rather than asking the question. He shook his head slowly, looking deeply worried for the first time in months.
“No, it’s not,” he said. “I don’t like deception. But there’s something more than that. It’s ACRE closing in all over again . . . I can feel it.”
Chapter 18
“No, I’m serious, Aub. One of the doctors at the hospital was telling me yesterday—first aid, casualty evacuation, and precautions against fallout and radiation hazards. They’re working out the details of the courses now. Within three months they’ll be compulsory in every school in the state and in every company that employs more than twenty people in one place. You wait and see.” Sarah spoke as she set three places on the dining-room table. Aub, perched precariously on a stool at the breakfast counter and sipping from a can of Coke, watched her from the kitchen.
“Back to the Boy Scouts, eh,” he said. “Reckon we’ll get badges to put on our shirts too?”
“I don’t think it’s funny. It proves things must be getting bad. I heard on the news this afternoon that somebody exploded a tactical nuke in an arms factory somewhere just outside Calcutta. Nearly two thousand dead. What kind of people do things like that?”
“Yeah, I heard about it. Head cases. Seems to be the in-thing.”
Sarah placed the napkins and glanced at the clock. “Six twenty-five. I’d have thought Brad would be back by now. What was it you said he was doing?”
“He got tied up with Al and a coupla guys from Washington who are trying to hustle things. I managed to duck out of it.”
“Oh, dear. That probably means he’ll be in a bad mood again.” She stepped back to survey her handiwork, then walked round into the kitchen to inspect the bubbling pan of beef stroganoff. “He seems to get awfully moody these days, Aub. Are things really getting so bad?”
Aub pivoted round on the stool to face her, his mouth jerking momentarily downward at the corners beneath his beard.
“Yeah, he gets pretty upset about it, I guess. He’s into some theoretical thing with Zim’s people that he wants to spend all of his time on, especially now we’ve got the Mark II machine running. Trouble is, the brass is getting impatient for its ironmongery. They figure that since they paid the check for most of it, they oughta be getting a bigger slice of the action.”
“And that doesn’t bother you?”
“Me?” Aub shrugged. “I guess I can just ride along with it. If I have to come up with a few ideas here and there to keep things smooth, that’s okay. I’ll get in enough of my own thing too. Brad’s problem is he’s too much of a purist. He has to have it all his own way or nothing. Y’see, he’s got these principles he feels strongly about . . . whether science dictates politics or the other way round. If it looks like things are going in what he figures is the wrong way, he won’t have any part of it.” Aub shrugged again and sighed. “He oughta remember the ice ball.”