Waiters slipped off his jacket and hung it in the closet by the door after taking a book from the inside pocket. Fallows frowned but made no comment.
“Logging on early,” Waiters replied. “Merrick wants to talk to you for a minute before you go off duty. He told me to tell you to stop by the ECD. You can take off now and see him on the company’s time.” He moved over to the console and nodded at the array of screens. “How are we doing? Lots of wild and exciting things happening?”
“Five-sub-three primary’s starting to play up again, you’ll be happy to hear. Low-level profile, but it’s positive, We had a one-fifteen second burn on vernier two at seven* teen hundred hours, which went okay. The main burn is behaving itself fine and correcting for trim as programmed …. ‘ He shrugged. “That’s about it.”
Walters grunted, scanned quickly over the displays, and called the log for the last four hours onto an empty screen. “Looks like we’re in for another strip down on that goddamn pump,” he murmured without turning his head. “Looks like it,” Fallows agreed with a sigh.
“Not worth screwing around with,” Walters declared. “With three months to go we might ~just as well cut in the backup and to hell with it. Fix the thing after we get there, when the main drive’s not running. Why lose pounds sweating in trog-suits?’
“Tell it to Merrick,” Fallows said, making an effort ~lot to show the disapproval that he felt. Talking that way betrayed a sloppy attitude toward engineering. Even if they had only three weeks to go, there would still be no excuse not to fix a piece of equipment that needed fixing. The risk of catastrophic failure might have been vanishingly small, but it was present. Good practice lay with reducing possibilities like that to zero. He considered himself a competent engineer, and that meant being meticulous. Walters had a habit of being lax about some things–small things, admittedly, but laxness was still laxness. To be ranked equally irked Fallows. “Log change of watch duty, Horace,” he said to the grille on the console. “Officer Fallows
standing down. Officer Waiters taking over.” “Acknowledged,” Horace replied.
Fallows stood up and stepped aside, and Waiters eased himself into the ‘subcenter supervisor’s chair. “You’re off
on a forty-eight, that right?” Waiters asked. “Uh-huh.” “Any plans?”
“Not really. Jay’s playing on one of the teams in the Bowl tomorrow. I’ll probably go and watch that. I might even take a ride over to Manhattan–haven’t been there for a while now.”
“Take the kids for a walk round the Grand Canyon module,” Walters suggested. “It’s being resculpted again-lots of trees and rocks, with plenty of water.! Should be pretty.”
Fallows appeared surprised. “I thought it was closed off for another two days. Isn’t the Army having an exercise in there or something?”
“They wound it up early. Anyhow, Bud told me it’ll be open again tomorrow. Check it out and give it a try.”
“I might just do that,” Fallows said, nodding slowly. “Yeah …. I could use being out and about for a few hours. Thanks for the tip.”
“Anytime. Take care.”
Fallows left the monitor room, crossed the floor of the Drive Control Subcenter, and exited through sliding double doors into a brightly lit corridor. An elevator took him up two levels to another corridor, and minutes later he was being shown into an office that opened onto one side of the Engineering Command Deck. Inside, Leighton Merrick, the Assistant Deputy Director of Engineering, was contemplating something on one of the reference screens built into the panel angled across the left comer of the desk at which he was sitting.
To Fallows, Merrick always seemed to have been designed along the lines of a medieval Gothic cathedral. His long, narrow frame gave the same feeling of austere perpendicularity as aloof columns of gaunt, gray stone, and his sloping shoulders, downturned facial lines, diagonal eyebrows, and receding hairline angling upward in the middle to accentuate his pointed head, formed a ‘composition of arches soaring piously toward the heavens and away from the mundane world of mortal affairs. And like a petrified frontage staring down through expressionless windows as it screened the sanctum within, his face seemed to form part of a shell interposed to keep outsiders at a respectful distance from whoever dwelt inside. Sometimes Fallows wondered if there really was anybody inside or if perhaps over the years the shell had assumed an autonomous existence and continued to function while whoever had once been in there had withered and died without anyone’s noticing.