There was no use denying it. Not when she knew half this crowd of people, and she and Wally had called them all in to see her clever new theory. “Yes ma’am. I did,” Sianna admitted, feeling very much the way she had back in school when she was caught red-handed doing whatever it was she wasn’t supposed to be doing. Having you dead to rights was never enough. They always wanted you to admit it as well.
Gruber nodded, raised her phone, and spoke into it again. “Yes, it was Colette,” Gruber said, and then listened for a moment longer before nodding to the voice on the other end of the line. “Very well,” she said. “I will tell her.” She shut off the phone and dropped it in her pocket. “Dr. Bernhardt wishes me to tell you he will be down right away.”
And the cold lump in Sianna’s stomach turned into a solid block of ice.
The waiting seemed an eternity to Sianna. Would Bernhardt fire her from MRI? Order her public expulsion from Columbia for misuse of institute facilities and wasting people’s time? Or would he merely humiliate her, give her a public dressing-down in front of everyone and leave her to draw her own conclusions about her future prospects?
The crowd stood around her, a mass of irresolute faces. All the talking had died out, and the excitement seemed to have drained out of the room.
Sianna looked toward Wally, still sitting at his precious control board. She caught his eye, but he just looked at her in bafflement and shook his head.
At last the main doors of the sim chamber swung open, and in walked Wolf Bernhardt, Yuri Sakalov once again in tow. Sianna stood, alone, in the center of the semi-darkened room. She braced herself for what was to come, even as a wave of exhaustion swept over her.
Bernhardt was coming closer. She felt sure that she was going to faint. Her knees turned weak, and the room got a bit wobbly. He was almost to her—but then he marched right past her without breaking stride. Maybe his eyes weren’t adapted to the dim illumination and he hadn’t seen her. Maybe he didn’t recognize her. Or maybe she was utterly beneath his notice.
Sakalov saw her, though, and gave her a completely unreadable look as he walked past.
The two of them walked right over to Gruber, who was standing over Wally at the control center. “Now then,” Bernhardt said. “Dr. Gruber tells me there is a new theory that might provide certain insights. I wish to know more.”
“Shall I, ah, run it, ah, the ah, simulation, for you, Dr. Bernhardt?” Wally sounded even more hesitant and nervous than usual.
Bernhardt looked down at him in cold annoyance. “I do not, Mr. Sturgis, need to look at pretty pictures in order to follow an argument.” He looked up at Dr. Gruber. “Frau Doktor Gruber. Please summarize for me, if you would.”
“Certainly.” Gruber, Bernhardt and Sakalov went off to one side of the room. The three of them spoke in low tones for five long minutes, Bernhardt mostly listening, nodding now and then, Sakalov asking an occasional question in a voice too low for Sianna to hear. Bernhardt had no reaction at all to what Gruber said, but Sakalov seemed to grow more and more agitated.
At last Bernhardt had heard enough. He nodded one last time, gave Gruber a pat on the shoulder, and turned toward Wally. “Perhaps I will have a look at the simulation after all. You will transmit a recording of the finalized run to my office within one hour. In the meantime, I will speak to you, Miss Colette, and Dr. Sakalov out in the corridor. Miss Colette? Come, if you please.”
He turned, rather abruptly, and walked out into the hall without looking to see if any of them were following.
Sakalov followed dutifully behind. Wally saved the current settings on the simulation and stood up to follow, a bit slowly. Sianna trailed behind the others, once again struggling to ignore the forest of eyes that surrounded her.
She reached the open door and stepped from dark into light, from the gloom of the sim tank to the over-bright glare of the white-on-white hallway.
She closed the door behind her and paused, squinting, peering about to see where the others had gone. There they were, just up the hall to the right. All three waiting, stern-faced, for her to catch them up.
She forced herself to walk toward them, stiff-legged, her arms folded protectively in front of her chest. Her eyes locked with Bernhardt’s grim-faced gaze.
But then, as she got to them, Bernhardt’s face lost its fixed expression. He grabbed her by the arm, looked over her shoulder to see if anyone was behind her, and pulled her around the corner, Wally and Sakalov following behind.
Sianna glanced over her shoulder, but saw for herself there was nothing there worth looking at. But then she looked back toward Bernhardt, and saw something most remarkable indeed.
He was grinning. Grinning. Sianna had never even thought German face muscles could move that way. “You’ve got it!” he said to an astonished Sianna. “We need to be careful, and collect the proof, but there isn’t the slightest doubt in my mind that you’re right. Wouldn’t you agree, Dr. Sakalov?”
“Yes, yes,” Sakalov said, taking her right hand and shaking it vigorously. “At the cost of admitting I was wrong, I have to admit your theory holds together far better than anything I’ve ever done.”
“But… I… I…” Sianna’s voice trailed off for a moment before she managed to say anything more. “But, the way you came in just now, and the way you acted—”
Bernhardt laughed out loud. “Psychology,” he said. “There’s very little of my job left that has to do with being a scientist. Always it is politics and psychology. Five years ago, I was instructed to find a captain for the Terra Nova and send the ship off to explore the Dyson Sphere—straight to the Sphere itself with no precautions. That would have been a suicide mission. So I chose Captain Steiger and gave her orders I knew she would disobey the moment she could. You have to know your people. After the way you argued with Dr. Sakalov yesterday, I didn’t think that you would put forward a theory that you had not thought out carefully, so I came down ready to listen.
“But it is not just a question of knowing you are right. It is a question of being heard, of the signal not being lost in the noise. I know that I am not the most popular man down here. They know I am careful and efficient, but that I refuse to write the checks they want; I say no to their projects. So sometimes the people at MRI are for whatever I am against. Besides that, Dr. Sakalov is well thought of. If I charged down here and endorsed a theory that refuted much of his work—well, for some, that would be enough to turn them against your ideas for good. By being standoffish, I make them determined to prove me wrong.” Bernhardt reached out and patted Sianna on the arm. “You have done superb work. Now you must go home and get some rest.”
Sianna could do nothing more than stand there, blinking in astonishment. She had always thought being a scientist just meant working to find out the truth.
A lot she knew.
Sianna’s feet were dragging as she left the Sim Center. She got herself across the underground campus fairyland of the MRI Main Level and made her way up to the elevator banks. She was tired enough, and emotionally flattened enough, that getting into the steel coffin of the elevator and watching the doors close her in didn’t bother her at all. She was too numb to react to anything.
It seemed as if life had broken every promise it had ever made to her. Life had pulled her away from her childhood home, plopped her down in a foreign land, killed her parents, delivered her into an age of crisis and emergency that had no time to deal with teenage orphans.