6: POLICY
Impatience and irritation were noticeable in the Planning Laboratory but so far no tempers had actually been lost. Ib Hoffman, back for less than two hours from a month-long errand to Earth and Dromm, had said practically nothing except to ask for information. Easy, sitting beside him, had said nothing at all so far, but she could see that something would have to be done shortly to turn the conversation into constructive channels. Changing the Project’s basic policy might be a good idea, it often was. But right now, it was futile for the people at this end of the table to spend time blaming each other for the present one. Still less useful was the scientists’ bickering at the other end. They were still wondering why a lake should freeze when the temperature had been rising. A useful answer might lead to some useful action but to Easy it seemed a question for the laboratory rather than for a conference room. If her husband didn’t take a hand in the other discussion soon, she would have to do something herself, she decided. “I’ve heard all about that side of it before, and I still don’t buy it!” snapped Mersereau. “Up to a point it’s good common sense, but I think we’re way past that point. I realize that the more complex the equipment, the fewer people you need to run it; but you also need more specialized apparatus and specially trained personnel to maintain and repair it. If the land-cruisers had been as fully automated as some people wanted, we could have gotten along with a hundred Mesklinites on Dhrawn instead of a couple of thousand at first; but the chances are that every one of these machines would be out by now because we couldn’t possibly have landed all the backup equipment and personnel they’d need. There aren’t enough technically trained Mesklinites in existence yet, for one thing. I agreed with that, Barlennan agreed with it; it was common sense, as I said. “But you, and for some reason Barlennan, went even farther. He was against including helicopters. I know there were some characters in the Project who assumed you could never teach a Mesklinite to fly, and maybe it was racial acrophobia that was motivating Barlennan; but at least he was able to realize that without air scouting the land-cruisers wouldn?t dare travel more than a few miles an hour over new ground, and it would take roughly forever to cover even Low Alpha at that rate. We did convince him on that basis. “But there was a lot of stuff we’d have been glad to provide, which would have been useful and have paid its way, which he talked us out of using. No weapons; I agree they’d probably have been futile. But no short-range radio equipment? No intercoms in the Settlement? It’s dithering nonsense for Dondragmer to have to call us, six million miles away, and ask us to relay his reports to Barlennan at the Settlement. It’s usually not critical, since Barl couldn’t help him physically and the time delay doesn’t mean much, but it’s silly at the best of times. It is critical now, though, when Don’s first mate has disappeared, presumably within a hundred miles of the Kwembly and possibly less than ten, and there’s no way in the galaxy to get in touch with him either from here or from the cruiser. Why was Barl against radios, Alan? And why are you?”
“The same reason you’ve just given,” Aucoin answered with just a trace of acerbity. “The maintenance problem.”
“You’re dithering. There isn’t any maintenance problem on a simple voice, or even a vision, communicator. There were four of them, as I understand it, being carried around on Mesklin with Barlennan’s first outside-sponsored trip fifty years or so ago, and not one of them gave the slightest trouble. There are sixty on Dhrawn right now, with not a blip of a problem from any of them in the year and a half they’ve been there. Barlennan must know that, and you certainly do. Furthermore, why do we relay what messages they do send by voice? We could do it automatically instead of having a batch of interpreters hashing things up (sorry, Easy) and you can’t tell me there’d be a maintenance problem for a relay unit in this station. Who’s trying to kid whom?” Easy stirred; this was perilously close to feud material. Her husband, however, sensed the motion and touched her arm in a gesture she understood. He would take care of it. However, he let Aucoin make his own answer. “Nobody’s trying to kid anyone. I don’t mean equipment maintenance, and I admit it was a poor choice of words. I should have said morale. The Mesklinites are a competent and highly self-reliant species, at least the representatives we’ve seen the most of. They sail over thousands of miles of ocean on these ridiculous groups of rafts, completely out of touch with home and help for months at a time, just as human beings did a few centuries ago. It was our opinion that making communication too easy would tend to undermine that self-confidence. I admit that this is not certain; Mesklinites are not human, though their minds resemble ours in many ways, and there’s one major factor whose effect we can’t evaluate and may never be able to. We don’t know their normal life spans, though they are clearly a good deal longer than ours. Still, Barlennan agreed with us about the radio question — as you said, it was he who brought it up — and he has never complained about the communication difficulty.”