As for the technical capabilities involved, he found himself adjusting to the idea of them fairly rapidly. It was an extension of what they had done in the old days: solve some initial problems in materials, design, and homeostatic control, and one’s powers grew very considerable indeed. One might say that their reach no longer exceeded their grasp. Which, given the directions their reach sometimes took, was a frightening thought.
In any case, some fifty drilling platforms were now located in the northern Sixties, boring wells and inserting permafrost melting devices at their bottoms that ranged from heated collection galleries to nuclear explosives. The new meltwater was then being pumped up and distributed over the dunes of Vastitas Borealis, where it froze again. Eventually this ice sheet would melt, partly under its own weight, and they would have an ocean in the shape of a ring around the northern Sixties and Seventies, no doubt a very good thermal sink, as all oceans were, although while it remained an ice sea the increase in albedo would probably make it a net heat loss to the global system. Yet another example of their operations cutting against each other. As was the location of Burroughs itself, relative to this new sea; the city was well below the sea level most often mentioned, the datum itself. People talked of a dike, or a smaller sea, but no one knew for sure. It was all very interesting.
• • •
So Sax attended the conference every day, all day, living in the hushed rooms and halls of the conference center, chatting with colleagues, and the authors of posters, and his neighbors in audiences. More than once he had to pretend not to know old associates, and it made him nervous enough that he avoided them when he could. But people did not seem to feel that he reminded them of someone they knew, and for the most part he was able to concentrate on the science. He did that with gusto. People gave talks, asked questions, debated details of fact, discussed implications, all under the uniform fluorescent glow of the conference rooms, in the low hum of ventilators and video machines— as if they were in a world outside of time and space, in the imaginary space of pure science, surely one of the greatest achievements of the human spirit— a kind of utopian community, cozy and bright and protected. For Sax, a scientific conference was utopia.
• • •
The sessions at this conference, however, had a new tone, a kind of nervous edge that Sax had never witnessed before, and did not like. The questions after the presentations were more aggressive, the answers more quickly defensive. The pure play of scientific discourse which he so enjoyed (and which admittedly was never quite pure) was now more and more diluted by sheer argument, by obvious power struggles, motivated by something more than the usual egotism. It wasn’t like Simmon’s unconscionable lift from Borazjani, and Borazjani’s exquisite riposte; it was more a matter of direct assault. As at the end of a presentation on deep moholes and the possibility of reaching the mantle, when a short bald Terran stood and said, “I don’t think the basic model of the lithosphere here is valid,” and then walked out of the room.
Sax witnessed this in complete disbelief. “What is his problem?” he whispered to Claire.
She shook her head. “He works for Subarashii on the aerial lens, and they don’t like any potential competition for their regolith melting program.”
“My Lord.”
The question-and-answer session staggered on, shaken by this display of rudeness, but Sax slipped out of the room and stared down the hall curiously after the Subarashii scientist. What could he be thinking?
But this miscreant wasn’t the only one acting strange. People were stressed, nerves were on edge. Of course the stakes were high; as the pingo below Moeris Lacus showed in a small-scale way, there were going to be some bad side effects to the procedures being studied and advocated at the conference, side effects which would cost money, time, lives. And then there were financial motivations. . . .
And now that they were entering its final days, the programming was shifting from very specific issues to more general presentations and workshops, including some presentations in the main room on the big new projects, what people were calling the “monster projects.” These were going to have such major impacts that they affected almost everyone else’s programs. So when they discussed them, they were arguing policy, in effect, talking about what to do next rather than about what had already happened. That always made things more of a wrangle— but never more so than now, as people began to try to plug the information from the earlier presentations into advocacy for their own causes, whatever they might be. They were entering that unfortunate zone where science began to drift into politics, where papers became grant proposals; and it was dismaying to see that degraded dark zone invade the heretofore neutral terrain of a conference.