Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (21 page)

A sweeping glance informed me that Elf and his buddy were beginning to look a little concerned. Both were listening intently, both leaning forward, both with fists under their chins and forefingers laid along their cheeks as if they were deep in thought.

“Has not our entire history until now proved this truth conclusively? We continue to make the same mistake, age after age. We confuse imposed governance for legitimate authority. What, then, is legitimate authority? Is it not a mutual contract between free beings who agree to apportion their fields of responsibility and levels of decision-making, according to their gifts, while maintaining accountability, and placing above all other social considerations the necessity of mutual respect? If this is so, we must conclude that rare indeed has been its exercise in the history of mankind.”

Again, I paused. Now Elf and Skinner were no longer smiling. Their brows were furrowed unpleasantly, their heads tilted at an angle of inquisitive worry.

“That is why I am grieved this evening”, I continued. “I am grieved most of all that we have learned so little from our past. For this reason, I must now refer to a disequilibrium in the conduct of onboard life. The electronic surveillance of all of us has continued unabated since our departure from Earth. Each of our personal computers in our private rooms is monitored. Nothing typed or spoken into them goes unexamined. Someone, somewhere on this ship, has total access to your most deeply private conversations and thoughts. They are read or listened to by unseen people to whom you gave no permission to do so.”

At this point, heads were turning in the audience, people murmuring or whispering to each other. Elf and Skinner were on their feet and striding toward the stage, Elf waving his hand as if to brush aside everything I had just said, or to send me a cease-and-desist order. Regardless, I pressed on.

“No one asked me if they could listen to my voice journals, read my mail, listen to my mail, or track where I surf in the great sea of knowledge.”

Now the audience broke out in rumbling conversation. A few people rose to their feet, shaking their heads, while others sat in frozen concentration, not so much perplexed as alarmed and unable to decide how to respond.

Now Elf and Skinner reached the steps and tripped hastily up to the stage.

The head of DSI approached me with courteous body language, but he gripped one of my biceps painfully. Elf, eyes scowling but mouth smiling broadly, put his hand over the sun (apparently doubling as a microphone) and said, “What the hell are you doing? Say good night and get off this stage.”

His voice boomed throughout the auditorium, the sound doubly amplified. Startled, Elf glanced at the sun and banged it with his fist. While he was thus distracted, a number of people moved in.

Stron McKie pushed himself between me and Skinner and disengaged the latter’s meaty paw. Xue, Pagnol, and Teal, stepped up beside me, facing the audience.

“What Dr. Hoyos has told you is true”, Pagnol said, his voice booming. “I am Dr. Etienne Pagnol. For those who do not know me, I am assistant director of the biology department.”

One by one, the others identified themselves and confirmed the truth of the message. Five more men and women joined them—doctors all, figures in various sciences, as well as the two other Nobel laureates who had been sitting in the front row.

By now, Skinner and Elf were livid, but trying unsuccessfully to give the impression that they had things well under control, that the accusation was groundless.

Elf tapped something on his lapel and growled
soto voce
: “Turn off the damned sound system.” His words echoed loudly.

By then, all the people in the audience were on their feet and about two-thirds of them were making their way toward the stage. Some called out questions.

“How do you know this? Can you prove it? Why would they do such a thing?”

“Consider this”, I shouted, though there was no need to shout. “Consider that the public talks we’ve enjoyed since the beginning of the voyage are always accessible,
live
in real-time, through your
max
. Doesn’t that tell us something? If they can broadcast into your
max
, why wouldn’t the flow go outward too? They designed the ship’s communications systems, and it would be no great effort for them to implant code that walks right through your individual firewalls.”

Elf whispered into his lapel, “What do you mean it doesn’t work? Use the override. Cut the feed to the rooms. And cut the power to the hall. Do it
now!
”

His whisper boomed, and at that point, he realized he was showing his cards to the audience. He shut up and stood aside, letting me continue, but with every bit of his nonverbal mountain of flesh proclaiming his adamant rejection of what I was saying. I was as perplexed as he was, wondering why the sound system was behaving the way it was, and why something was preventing the power cut to the auditorium.

“Consider also,” I went on, “that pre-flight briefings informed us, and the Manual itself states, that our rooms are our personal spaces—so they called it—and that we can do whatever we wish in them. The Manual further states that each of our
max
es is an autonomous sealed unit, intended exclusively for our private use. Read the Manual, page 1013. It’s all there.”

Now a few dissident voices were shouting objections, while the majority of people were calling out for more evidence.

And that was the rub. I had no hard evidence. None at all. This cold fact momentarily disabled me, and I began to falter.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” said Stron, stepping in, “I’m Dr. McKie, head of the on-planet astronomy team. And I tell you that what Dr. Hoyos has told you tonight is the truth. You ask us for evidence. This is not a court of law. This is not a police forensic lab. But I will ask you this: If you were lying on your bed after a shower, undraped shall we say, and you spotted an eyeball at the keyhole of your door, and then you donned your coverlets as fast as you could and raced out into the hallway to catch the culprit, and failed, would you then say to yourself, ‘Naw, I was dreaming’? After all, you don’t have the Peeping Tom by the scruff of his neck, not even his eyeball in your tight little fist. But you know you saw that eye looking in on you. What any sensible person would do at that point is to try to track the culprit.”

“That’s just suspicion, that’s no evidence!” someone shouted.

“The smell of a skunk is no evidence that a skunk has walked past. You can’t see it, can you? Can’t pick it up. Can’t photo it. Should you then say, ‘Naw, there’s no skunk here!’?”

“Maybe there is no skunk here. Maybe it’s a figment of your imagination.”

“Try stepping on the figment in the dark, laddie.”

Which made a few people chuckle, and others look thoughtful.

Even so, we were on the verge of losing the audience, when Xue stepped in and raised a hand, calling for silence. He was known by all, and was generally so well respected that people stopped talking and listened. Here was an instance of the strategic superiority of self-mastered dignity over the more unstable manners of the idiosyncratic (by which I mean people like myself and Stron).

Calmly, quietly, Xue said: “I am in total concurrence with the position of Dr. Hoyos and Dr. McKie, as well as the others you see before you. Our agreement on the truth of these troubling assertions is not, as you have correctly said, hard evidence. However, at the very least they should be examined objectively. I therefore propose that an investigative committee be formed, composed of representatives from the science teams, the flight crew, and if they wish to be part of it, the Department of Social Infrastructure. In this way, it may be possible to find a conclusion satisfactory to all.”

The audience, for the most part, erupted with applause.

Elf stepped forward and said, “Of course, the Department will be part of any investigation, if it should be decided that one is necessary, which I am fully convinced it is not. I can assure you that there are no grounds
—absolutely
no grounds—to these allegations. They began as a suspicion in the mind of Dr. Strachan McKie, and then it began to spread as speculative gossip. It was then gradually inflated into a so-called fact in the minds of a handful of people associated with him. Now, through this ridiculous piece of theater, we must contend with disruption and the potential for division, which could negatively affect the outcome of our mission. We are a team, we are a community, and the role of DSI was precisely formulated by global authority to assist in that communal sense, as well as to offer remedial efforts whenever it is threatened by the irrational elements in. . .”

The first half of this declaration went over somewhat limply. He sounded too much like a team leader trying to revive the spirits of a crowd of rain-soaked, mosquito-bitten campers. The second half of the declaration went largely unheard, because the sound system quit suddenly midway, to the relief of all except, perhaps, Elf himself.

Then the lights in the auditorium went off, leaving only the tiny glowing dots along the aisles, showing us the way out.

As I made my way past the row closest to the exit, I noticed Dwayne in the gloom, still hunched over, reading his book by the light of its pale green glow. More than a hundred people had congregated outside the doors, and they pressed close around me and our small band of accusatory scientists. Elf was among us too, and it quickly became a one-on-one exchange, with the others listening. Elf had regained his composure and his public style.

“Dr. Hoyos,” he began, in a quiet, courteous and saddened tone, “I am really at a loss for anything to say. I feel strongly the need to convince you—”

“I’m sure you do, Dr. Larson.”

“I feel strongly the need to convince you that these allegations are without any basis in reality.”

“Dr. Larson, I’m curious to know how you came to the conclusion that these allegations originated with Dr. McKie.”

“People have mentioned his suspicions”, he shrugged innocently.

“No, Dr. Larson, you overheard Dr. McKie and myself speaking about our suspicions. You overheard it by surveillance of our voice communications through our
max
es.”

“That’s absurd”, he protested.

“My sentiments exactly. Eavesdropping is an absurd activity, a symptom of something lacking in a person—or, on the other hand, an excess of unhealthy curiosity.”

“You don’t need to get personal in your accusations.”

“What is more personal than what you’ve been doing to us, and to everyone on board? Everyone, that is, except yourself. You don’t eavesdrop on yourself, do you?”

“This is ridiculous”, Elf mumbled. “Doctor, I think you’ve been overstraining your imagination. Dr. McKie has infected you with his fantasies.”

“Dr. Larson, how do you explain the fact that no one outside of Dr. McKie and myself have ever discussed Dr. McKie’s thoughts on the matter? Yet this evening you seem to be very certain he is the cause of the trouble.”

Stron was clearly enjoying the exchange, grinning, nodding in affirmation of my points, but he held himself back from interfering. Elf looked somewhat flustered, caught red-handed, but he covered it deftly. The hundred or so people around us were listening with close attention, their eyes flicking back and forth between us.

“You’re quite mistaken”, Elf said. “Dr. McKie’s wild opinions are common knowledge. A number of people have mentioned it to me.”

“How many?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter how many. My point is, it’s common knowledge that he has some harebrained theories and expounds on them to anyone who’ll listen.”

“That’s getting personal”, said Stron with a wicked smile.

Elf nodded summarily, as if he had rested his case.

“Gentlemen,” I said with an uplifting air, glancing at my co-conspirators and the surprise co-defenders too. “We’ve had a lot of excitement tonight. I’d like you all to be my guests at supper. Would anyone object to Chinese food?”

“I would”, said Xue.

None of the others took him seriously, so it was agreed that we would all go downstairs to the Asian restaurant on deck B.

I turned to Elf and Skinner. The director of DSI had not yet said a word, but he was boring holes in my skull with his eyes.

“Won’t you join us for supper?” I asked (with relative sincerity). “It might defuse the situation. I’m sure we can sort this whole thing out tomorrow. For now, maybe we should just shake off the tension and enjoy ourselves.”

“No thank you”, said Elf. Skinner merely tightened his lips.

With cold looks, they turned on their heels and strode away along the concourse. Me and my band of merry men, ten of us, went off in the other direction.

We gathered around a long table in the restaurant, replaying the night’s proceedings and speculating about what would be the outcome. The mood was elevated, the banter perfect for shaking off tension. I noticed that people seated at nearby tables kept looking at us. Some may have been in the audience; others may have watched the whole thing on their
max
es and experienced the disturbing sensation of sudden revulsion for their closest electronic friend. Did they see us as bearers of unwelcome news, the messengers who should be shot, I wondered, or had the message hit home?

Xue leaned over to me from across the table and said, “Dariush asked me to send you his apologies. He wanted to attend your lecture, but he’s in bed with a bad virus.”

“Poor man, I’ll go see him tomorrow.”

“He said he would watch it on the
max
. I’m not sure if he saw the shenanigans at the end. They may have cut transmission at that point.”

The waiters were loading platters of steaming food onto the table when a finger tapped my shoulder. I looked up. It was Dwayne. “Enjoy your book?” I asked.

“It wasn’t a book. Sorry about the audio volume.”

“You did that?”

“Yup. Thought we should catch reactions. Rigged it into the ship’s public speakers too. Did a back-feed on it. There were just over four hundred people in the auditorium. Sixty-seven people watched it in their rooms.”