“Beer can’t hurt you.”
“So? I’m still looking for the bloke who told me it was a soft drink. I’m going to beat him to a pulp with a stein. Pipe down.” So we picked soft drinks and he drank some horrible mixture he called a Martian shandy and we talked about Project Lebensraum. He knew more about it than we did even though no press release had been made until that day-I suppose the fact that he had been assigned to the Chief of Staff’s office had something to do with it, but he did not say.
Presently Pat looked worried and said, “See here, Uncle Steve, is there any chance that they will let us? Or should Tom and I just forget it?”
“Eh? Of course they are going to let you do it.”
“Huh? It didn’t look like it tonight. If I know Dad, he would skin us for rugs rather than make Mum unhappy.”
“No doubt. And a good idea. But believe me, boys, this is in the bag … provided you use the right arguments.”
“Which is?”
“Mmm … boys, being a staff rating, I’ve served with a lot of high brass. When you are right and a general is wrong, there is only one way to get him to change his mind. You shut up and don’t argue. You let the facts speak for themselves and give him time to figure out a logical reason for reversing himself.”
Pat looked unconvinced; Uncle Steve went on, “Believe me. Your pop is a reasonable man and, while your mother is not, she would rather be hurt herself than make anybody she loves unhappy. That contract is all in your favor and they can’t refuse-provided you give them time to adjust to the idea. But if you tease and bulldoze and argue the way you usually do, you’ll get them united against you.”
“Huh? But I never tease, I merely use logical-”
“Stow it, you make me tired. Pat, you were one of the most unlovable brats that ever squawled to get his own way … and, Tom, you weren’t any better. You haven’t mellowed with age; you’ve simply sharpened your techniques. Now you are being offered something free that I would give my right arm to have. I ought to stand aside and let you flub it. But I won’t. Keep your flapping mouths shut, play this easy, and it’s yours. Try your usual loathsome tactics and you lose.”
We would not take that sort of talk from most people. Anybody else and Pat would have given me the signal and he’d ‘ve hit him high while I hit him low. But you don’t argue that way with a man who wears the Ceres ribbon; you listen. Pat didn’t even mutter to me about it.
So we talked about Project Lebensraum itself. Twelve ships were to go out, radiating from Sol approximately in axes of a dodecahedron-but only approximately, as each ship’s mission would be, not to search a volume of space, but to visit as many Sol-type stars as possible in the shortest time. Uncle Steve explained how they worked out a “mini-max” search curve for each ship but I did not understand it; it involved a type of calculus we had not studied.. Not that it mattered; each ship was to spend as much time exploring and as little time making the jumps as possible.
But Pat could not keep from coming back to the idea of how to sell the deal to our parents. “Uncle Steve? Granting that you are right about playing it easy, here’s an argument that maybe they should hear? Maybe you could use it on them?”
“Um?”
“Well, if half a loaf is better than none, maybe they haven’t realized that this way one of us stays home.” I caught a phrase of what Pat had started to say, which was not “one of us stays home,” but “Tom stays home.” I started to object, then let it ride. He hadn’t said it. Pat went on, “They know we want to space. If they don’t let us do this, we’ll do it any way we can. If we joined your corps, we might come home on leave-but not often. If we emigrate, we might as well be dead; very few emigrants make enough to afford a trip back to Earth, not while their parents are still alive, at least. So if they keep us home now, as soon as we are of age they probably will never see us again. But if they agree, not only does one stay home, but they are always in touch with the other one-that’s the whole purpose in using us telepath pairs.” Pat looked anxiously at Uncle Steve.