Free Web of Everywhere by John Brunner

looked back to as a kind of Golden Age. But he had never expected to find himself chatting casually with one of the experts responsible.
    Far off in his memory resonated something Dany had flung at him in a moment of inspiration during one of their frequent quarrels, and luckily never had the wit to re-use. It had wounded him. She’d charged that he was forever groveling at the feet of the past, scared of doing anything that might shape the future, even his personal future.
    It was true he got little encouragement to act otherwise. His contact with people who had new ideas and the leverage to put them into effect was limited to reporting on the caches of industrial goods he unearthed. His task was to describe and identify them, not dictate what use they should be put to.
    His one genuinely personal project would not be known until after his death … but that was merely sound sense, that decision.
    Aloud he said, ‘Yes, the point had been puzzling me. Why is it?’
    ‘Because our best measurements haven’t given us the transmission-span to closer than two centimeters plus or minus. Of course over such a long distance that’s too slack by an order of magnitude. Earthside the problem doesn’t exist; to be out by a couple of millimeters doesn’t signify and one can compensate automatically for crustal tides and other minor nuisances. So what we’ve all been dreaming of is a batch of those ultra-high-precision lasers that Zeiss of Jena were alleged to be working on when … ’
    Hans let him rattle on. He had not had the vaguest notion that the moon’s distance had been measured to within two centimeters, but he wasn’t about to admit it. Nor, come to that, was he going to do a lot of talking during the party. He was going to compel himself to listen.
    It was clear from the way Pech spoke that English wasno more his mother tongue than it was Hans’s. Both he and Dany had been born to French and Flemish, he in Antwerp and she in a village near Liège.
    But Pech used this language with a fluency and vocabulary which made Hans sound like a backward schoolboy, even though he had decreed to Dany when they first got married that they should use English in private as well as in public. She had agreed that the proposal was sensible. English was the first or second language of more people who had survived the Blowup than anything else bar Chinese and Swahili, neither of which had been scattered paint-spray-fashion around the globe. But it sat uncomfortably on his mind, and he remained terribly aware of how small an area of its immense richness he had learned to exploit. And if Pech was typical of Aleuker’s friends …
    He was. So Hans stuck by his resolution, and almost at once found it was both an advantage – for a patient listener was automatically defined as ‘charming’ – and a shame. He seldom got on easily with strangers, and he had fully expected Aleuker’s friends to regard the treasure-hunt party as a joke. But they weren’t in the least patronizing. They clearly assumed that anybody who solved the cryptic clues deserved to be treated as equally well-informed, equally intelligent.
    That gave Hans a warm glow inside, marred only by the fact that he was obliged to stick to the ‘good listener’ rôle instead of – dare he? No!
No!
He must not mention what one day would add his own name to the roster of the famous, his secret project … (What the hell kind of wine was this, anyhow? Must be strong for him even to consider admitting the illegal things he was getting up to!)
    Never mind. To be treated by the members of this in-group as an equal, however temporarily, was an accolade. News had begun to be acceptable again during the past decade or so, as the race’s psychological sores began to heal, and with the dissolution of nations individuals made the headlines nowadays. Such individuals, in fact, as these: ‘Fred, have you met Hans who was the first to find the party?’ – and it was the Okinawan