you in the end, Paul. The hearing, and all.”
“You do?”
“The Company will cover for you. As you say, there was no way you could have brought those people onto your ship. The only thing you did wrong was to fail to make a proper report of the incident, and that’s probably going to cost you some slope, but Samurai isn’t going to want it to come out in public that one of its ships left a bunch of castaways to die—it looks bad even if it was justifiable—and so they’ll square the court in some way and get the charges dismissed, and shove the whole story out of sight, and quietly transfer you back to the Weather Service, or something. After all, throwing you to the wolves isn’t going to bring those Kyocera people back to life, and any kind of finding of guilt would become a matter of public record that wouldn’t do Samurai’s image any good. They’re going to bury the whole event and make it seem as though nothing ever took place out there between your ship and that Kyocera one. I’m sure of it, Paul.”
“Maybe you’re right,” Carpenter said. He could hear an odd mixture of pessimism and desperate hope in his tone.
Up till now, he had regarded everything that happened, including the 442 hearing, as relatively minor, a tough judgment call that he had handled as well as he could, all things considered, and which now because of the innate class hostilities of Hitchcock and the rest was entangling him in an administrative hassle that would at worst give him a black mark on his record. But somehow in the course of half an hour’s conversation with his oldest and closest friend it had all come to seem much worse to him, the act of a criminally panicky man who had funked the only really critical decision of his life. He was starting to feel as though he had murdered the people in those three dinghies with his own hands.
No. No. No. No.
Time to talk about something else. Carpenter said, “You mentioned on the phone that some sort of complication had come up for you while I was away, that you would tell me about it tonight.”
“Yes.”
“And so—?”
“I had a job offer,” Rhodes said. “Right after you sailed. Kyocera-Merck called me out to their Walnut Creek headquarters and I had an interview with a Level Three of theirs named Nakamura, the most ice-cold human being you could possibly imagine, who invited me to jump to K-M with my whole adapto team. They would give me a blank check, essentially, to set up whatever I wanted in the way of a lab facility.”
“We talked about this, just before I sailed. You were worried about Samurai getting too powerful, having too much control over the genetic destiny of the human race. This is precisely what I told you to do: jump over to Kyocera—I think I mentioned them specifically—and set them up as a competitor to Samurai in adapto technology. Thereby forestalling the Samurai genetic monopoly that you feared so much. Well? Are you going to do it?”
“You haven’t heard the whole story, Paul. There’s a man named Wu Fang-shui tangled up in this. Until about twenty years ago he was the ranking genius of genetic research. The Einstein of the profession, the Isaac Newton, you might say. The trouble with him was that he got his ends mixed up with his means and carried out a truly hideous program of unethical gene-splitting experiments off in one of the Central Asian republics. Using human subjects. Involuntary subjects. Real nightmare stuff: mad-scientist stuff, you might almost say. Except that he was completely sane, just had no moral sense built into him anywhere. Eventually the word of what Wu had been up to got out, and supposedly he committed suicide. But actually what he did was to disguise himself as a very convincing woman and go into sanctuary in space—he disappeared up to one of the L-5 habitats and was never heard from again.”
“And you’re beginning to see yourself as some kind of moral monster equivalent to this Wu Fang person, is that it?”
“That’s not it at all,” Rhodes said. “What has happened is that Kyocera has peeled Dr. Wu Fang-shui out of his sanctuary habitat, don’t ask me how, and has him working on the faster-than-light-starship program for them. Evidently the ship’s crew is going to need some kind of genetic retrofitting, and Wu is doing it for them. After he’s finished with that, Nakamura said, he’ll be made available to my research group as a consultant.”
“This twisted but utterly formidable geneticist.”
“The Einstein of my profession, yes. Working with me.”
“But you abhor him so much that you wouldn’t dream of—”
“You’re still missing the point, Paul,” Rhodes said. “Right now we’re a long way from solutions to some of the biggest adapto puzzles. The big ambitious total-transformation scheme that my kid Van Vliet laid out is full of obvious holes, and even he is coming to recognize that. A mind on the order of Wu Fang-shui’s will be able to deal with those problems and solve them. Put him on the team and we’d be likely to have full adapto technology ready in no time at alL Which would mean that Kyocera would have the genetic monopoly that I’ve been afraid of giving to Samurai.”
“And therefore you’re not going to accept the offer,” Carpenter said.
“I’m not sure about that.”
“No?”
“I still wonder: Do I have any real right to stand in the way of a technology that will enable the human race to deal with the changes that are coming down the pike at it?”
Carpenter knew that a hole in Rhodes’ logic would turn up sooner or later. And here it was. “You can’t have it both ways, Nick. You say you don’t want to impede progress, but you’ve just finished telling me that you’re worried about giving one company a monopoly over—”
“I am. I repeat my question, though. My team plus Wu Fang-shui can probably produce the answers we need for survival. But my team belongs to Samurai and Wu belongs to Kyocera. If we put them together, we get things worked out within two or three years. If we don’t, who knows if anybody will ever come up with the solutions to the problems? Do I want to be the key player that makes total-transform a reality? Or do I want to be the key player who prevents or seriously delays total-transform? It’s all up to me, isn’t it? And I’m not at all sure what I should do. In fact I’m completely mixed up, Paul.” Rhodes grinned. “Not for the first time.”
“No,” Carpenter said. The familiar air of moral confusion rising from Rhodes almost took his mind off his own troubles. “Not for the first time.”
The actual 442 hearing took place three days later, once more at the Port of Oakland’s Administration Shed Fourteen. The rain had not halted for a moment during those three days: a steady maddening downpour, a drumbeat of great filthy drops pelting the entire Bay Area in a demented reversal of the long-standing weather pattern. No one could say how much longer it would go on before the iron band of drought clamped once again over the West Coast. Meanwhile, though, highways were flooding, houses were tumbling down cliffs, whole hillsides were slashed by deep gullies, rivers of mud flowed in the streets.
When Carpenter presented himself for the hearing there were only two other human beings in the room: the hearing officer with the Irish name and the androidal-looking woman bailiff. Carpenter wondered where Tedesco, who was supposed to be representing him on behalf of Samurai Industries, was. Taking the day off because of the rain?
O’Brien, O’Reilly, O’Leary, gaveled the hearing into session. This time Carpenter took the trouble of noticing and remembering his name. O’Reilly, it was. O’Reilly.
“Objection,” Carpenter said immediately. “My counsel isn’t here.”
“Counsel? We don’t have counsel here.”
“Mr. Tedesco of Samurai. My representative. He was supposed to be present today.”
O’Reilly looked at the bailiff.
“Mr. Tedesco has filed a stipulation of posteriori,” she said.
“A what?” Carpenter asked.
“A request to be absent today and to receive a transcript of today’s proceedings at a later time. He will file appropriate responses if he deems it necessary to do so,” O’Reilly said.
“What? I’m on my own today?” Carpenter said.
Impassively the hearing officer said, “Let us proceed. We enter into evidence the following exhibits—”
