“For the expedition described in Professor McAndrew’s letter to you? But the mission and your role in it are not yet fully defined.”
“You can define that later. I’m here, and I’m ready to start.”
Dorian Jarver must have been surprised at both my arrival and my instant acceptance. “I’m delighted to hear that,” he said, though he didn’t sound it. “You come to us with the highest recommendations. And I have to admit that I’ve been a little worried about this proposed expedition. It could be dangerous, and Professor McAndrew is too valuable to risk. He’s one of our most priceless assets.”
No matter what else he didn’t know, he obviously understood McAndrew. It could be dangerous, because Mac would charge into Hell itself if he saw some intriguing scientific fact sitting in the innermost circle. He was too valuable to risk. But Jarver’s final word was disturbing to me. Not a scientist, not a human being. An asset.
“You have been to the Institute before?” added Jarver.
I nodded. I didn’t know what Mac had told him about me, but I suspected that the new director had no idea how close we were.
“Then you’ll have noticed the changes here. The Council had been worrying about the Institute for quite a while. When Director Limperis retired and I came in, the Council insisted that from now on operations would have to be organized rather differently.”
He talked about those changes for the next few minutes. Better equipment and facilities for the scientists. Bigger and cleaner offices. More attention by support staff to routine maintenance functions. Removal of the need for top scientists to waste their time on calls and letters and incoming requests for information, trivia that could be handled just as well by junior staff.
It all sounded terrific. But McAndrew’s strangely awkward letter stuck in my head. I wanted to see him, and make sure that he was all right.
With my mind on McAndrew as Jarver went on talking, I didn’t think that I was saying much in reply. But it must have been enough for the director, because after another few minutes he seemed to lose interest in the conversation, nodded, and said, “Now, Captain Roker, I’m sure you’ll be wanting to hear more about the expedition itself. Project Missing Matter will be testing some of the most fundamental ideas in cosmology; of course, you’ll get that better from McAndrew than you’ll ever get it from me.”
As we stood up I thought that I had Dorian Jarver pegged. I had seen him before, many times. Not the man himself, but the type. The upper levels of Terran government were full of them: competent, hard-working men and women, who started out as scientists, found that they were never going to be better than average, and at an early age substituted management and administration for research. Jarver had changed over the years from scientist to calculating bureaucrat.
Well, I’ve been wrong before. Let’s call that my first mistake on Project Missing Matter.
The director led me to an office down at the far end of the corridor and opened the door. It was big, far bigger than McAndrew’s old, cluttered den. It had the same antiseptic look as the rest of the new Institute. But even Jarver couldn’t do much about the appearance of the occupant.
McAndrew was lolling in an easy chair, staring vacantly at the wall. His shoes were off, his feet were bare and grubby. His thinning, sandy hair was standing up in little wispy spikes as though he had been running his hands through it, which he tended to do when he was thinking, and I could see from the redness of his finger and toe joints that he had been pulling them and cracking them, in the way that I hated.
He glanced up as we came in, swinging his chair casually in our direction.
“Jeanie Roker,” he said. He didn’t stand up, and he didn’t seem in the least surprised at my unexpected arrival. I glanced at Jarver out of the corner of my eye. If Mac wanted to convince the director that he hardly knew me, he should have acted quite differently.
“Professor McAndrew,” said Jarver to me. It could have been an introduction, or possibly an apology. “If you’ll excuse me, Captain Roker, I’ll leave the two of you to discuss the expedition. I’ll meet with you again later.”
As soon as he was gone I bent over and gave McAndrew a six-month separation hug. The hell with formal handshakes. He hugged me right back, then I flopped into the seat opposite and said, “Mac. What the hell is going on here?”
“You saw it already.” His face took on a gloomy, give-up expression that I didn’t like at all. “New offices, new procedures, all the other folderol. Now tell me, did I need a new office?”
“Does it matter that much? You can work as well in here as you could in your old place, and it’s nice to visit and sit on something softer than an optical scalar calibrator. And Jarver’s right, the Institute was getting a bit run-down. It looks good now. You’re becoming crabby in your old age.”
He glared at me. “If that were the whole of it, I might agree with you… but it’s not. You had that letter. Didn’t it make you wonder a bit?”
“Why d’you think I’m here?”
I don’t believe he heard me. “Due procedure,” he said, “that’s what they call it. But it’s beyond that. No messages or memos or papers or letters go out from here without stamps of official approval on them. You saw how my letter to you sounded after they’d done messing with it. All the incoming mail is opened, too — personal as well as professional — before we get to see it. Spoken messages are just as bad. Incoming and outgoing calls are all logged and recorded. Did you see that blasted bank of equipment in the front area, with administrative staff snooping on everything? I’m telling you, it’s like being in a bloody prison.”
“Mac, you’re overreacting. Jarver is used to running things Earth-style. They’re hot on procedure. It’ll take him a while to learn Institute ways. You and your buddies will sort him out.”
“Will we now?” McAndrew snorted. “Me and my buddies will sort him out, will we — when Emma Gowers and Wenig and Lucky Macedo have already resigned and left.”
That was a shocker. I knew all three, and there wasn’t one who didn’t make me feel, without their ever intending it, about as bright as a chimps’ tea-party drop-out.
“Mac, that proves my point. If Jarver’s losing high-caliber people like that, he must know that he won’t last another three months. Unless he’s too dumb even to realize what he’s driving away?”
I saw a change in McAndrew’s expression. He’s the system’s most honest man, even when it undermines his own arguments. Now he looked guilty.
“That’s maybe the worst of it,” he said. “Jarver’s not stupid at all. He got the job here, likely, because he’s a relative of Anna Griss. She’s no lover of the Institute after what I did to her. But Jarver didn’t come here wanting to destroy the place. He’s a good physicist, see, with a real sense for what’s important.”
“That’s not what I thought when I looked at his publication record. Not many papers to his credit, and all written a long time ago.”
“Jeanie.” McAndrew stared at me with the disappointed expression of a man whose dog has slipped back into non-housebroken ways. “How many times have I told you, a publication record tells you nothing. Any clod can spew out words and equations, year in and year out, and push them into print. Papers don’t count for anything, unless other people use ’em. You should have looked at the Citation Index, to see how often Jarver’s work is given as a reference by other people. If you’d done that, you’d have seen hundreds of them. He’s not publishing now, true enough, but when he did, he was good.”
Poor old McAndrew. I was beginning to see the real problem. Here was a new director who did everything that Mac disliked, a man whom he would love to hate and disparage. But he couldn’t do that. Jarver was a good physicist, and therefore almost beyond censure.