Ranjit and Myra looked at each other. “Where’s Pasadena?” he asked.
“In California, I’m pretty sure,” she said. “Do you suppose that’s where you’d be based? If you took this job, I mean.”
He gave her an exasperated grin. “You know what? Maybe we should ask Gamini’s father about all this.”
Which they did, or at least left a query at his office. They didn’t get an answer right away, though. They didn’t get an answer at all until they had made the short hop from New York (LaGuardia) to Washington National (Reagan) and were already welcomed by the people from the Triple-A-S and booked into their new hotel, in sight of the Capitol and walking distance from the Mall. And all Dr. Bandara’s communication said was “Gamini assures me this person he wants you to see can be of great help to you.” But it didn’t say great help in doing what, or why Gamini cared in the first place, and so Ranjit sighed and gave up. Which actually was not a great disappointment, because Washington turned out to be full of things that interested him more than some unspecified job to be offered by some still unmet person named Orion Bledsoe.
The first thing—with Ranjit and Myra escorted there by enthusiastic volunteers from the AAAS—was the famous (which, actually, Ranjit had never heard of before coming to Washington) cluster of museums collectively known as the Smithsonian Institution. London’s British Museum and New York’s American Museum of Natural History had delighted him; this Smithsonian, not just one fabulous structure but a whole row of the things, staggered his imagination. All he could make time for was the Air and Space Museum and a quick peek into one or two of the others, but the space collection had, among countless other things, an actual working model (though not to scale) of the Artsutanov space elevator, which was even now beginning to be spun out in the skies above Sri Lanka. And then he had his own keynote speech to give the Triple-A-S convention, and (that having been done, and once again declared a triumph) he had their whole damn convention to pick and choose among. Bear in mind that this celebrated genius among Earth’s most honored scientific minds, world famous and already possessed of three actual doctoral degrees given by three of the world’s most prestigious schools (although in fact he had never quite achieved even a bachelor’s degree for himself)—this modern Fermat or even Newton had never in his not very long life been lucky enough to sit in on a single scientific convention of any kind, except ones for which he was the principal speaker. He had no idea so much could be learned on so many subjects. His own chores attended to, he had the freedom of the convention, and he used it, attending sessions on cosmology and Martian (and Venusian and Europan) tectonics and something called “Machine Intelligence: Awareness of Self” (that primarily for Myra, but it fascinated Ranjit almost as much when he listened), and heaven only knew what arcane aspects of what previously unexplored (by Ranjit) other areas of human investigation turned up somewhere on the vast and challenging menu of events.
Myra kept right up with him, too, as fascinated by the panoply of human learning as he, with a few exceptions. The principal exception was the daily nap after lunch that he insisted on, because one of their doctors had insisted. “You are getting ready to have a baby, you know!” he informed her every day, although in fact she was never in any doubt of it. And then, on almost the last day of the convention, when Ranjit was tucking her in, they heard a gentle beep-beep from their telephone. It was a fresh text message, and what it said was:
I would be grateful if you could join me in my suite sometime today to discuss a proposal that I think will interest you.
Ranjit and Myra looked at each other. “It’s the man Gamini was talking about in New York,” Ranjit said, and Myra nodded briskly.
“Of course it is. Go ahead, call him, see what he wants. And then come back here and tell me all about it.”
The suite belonging to Lt. Col. (ret.) T. Orion Bledsoe was noticeably bigger than the one the AAAS convention had provided for Ranjit and Myra. Even the bowl of fruit on the conference table in the drawing room was larger, and it wasn’t alone on the table, either. Next to it was an unopened bottle of Jack Daniel’s whiskey, with the ice, glasses, and mixers to go with it.
T. Orion Bledsoe himself was not much taller than Ranjit, which for an American was hardly tall at all, and at least a couple of decades older. But he still had all his hair, and a pretty muscular handshake, though it was the left hand he offered and used to pull Ranjit in. “Come in, come in, Mr. uh—have a seat. Are you enjoying our District of Confusion?”
He didn’t wait for an answer, either, but led the way to the conference table. “Care for a drink, Mr. Subra—uh—? I mean, if Jack isn’t going to be too strong for you?”
Ranjit repressed a smile. Anyone who had spent his wild sixteenth year ingesting arrack was not likely to find some American tipple too strong. “That would be fine,” he said. “Your message said something about a proposal.”
Bledsoe gave him a reproachful look. “They say we Americans are always in a hurry, but in my experience it’s you foreigners that are always jumping the gun. Sure, I want to talk about something with you, but I like to get to know a man a little bit before we do business.” And all the time his previously neglected right hand was gripping the whiskey bottle while the other was opening the seal. Bledsoe noticed where Ranjit’s eyes were focused and gave a little chuckle. “Prosthetic,” he admitted—or boasted. “Pretty good design, too. I could even shake hands with it if I wanted to, but I don’t. I can’t feel your hand if I do, so what’s the point? And if I got absentminded and squeezed a little too hard, you could suddenly be in the market for one of your own.”
The artificial arm was actually quite efficient, Ranjit observed, reminding himself to tell Myra about it. The bottle open, the hand was pouring an even two centimeters of whiskey into each glass, and then passing Ranjit’s over to him. Bledsoe watched attentively to see if Ranjit was going to use any of the mixers. When he didn’t, Bledsoe gave a little nod of approval and took a taste from his own glass. “This is what we call sippin’ whiskey,” he said. “You can chug it down if you want to—hey, it’s a free country—but you ought to give it a chance. Ever been in Iraq?”
Ranjit, sipping a little of the sippin’ whiskey out of politeness to his host, shook his head.
“It’s where I got this.” He tapped the imitation arm with his good one. “With all the Shiites and the Sunnis doing their best to kill each other, but taking time out to kill as many of us as they could along the way. It was the wrong war, in the wrong place, for the wrong reasons.”
Ranjit tried his best to sound interested enough to be polite, wondering whether Bledsoe was going to say the right war would have been Afghanistan, or maybe Iran. It wasn’t, though. “North Korea,” Bledsoe proclaimed. “They’re the ones we should’ve pulverized. Ten missiles in the ten right places and they’d have been right out of the game.”
Ranjit coughed. “As I understand it,” he said, swallowing a little more of his Jack Daniel’s, “the trouble with fighting North Korea is that they have a very large and very modern army and they’ve got it sitting right on the border, less than fifty kilometers from Seoul.”