Free Space Eater by David Langford

looked at him. It was another moment when I knew I was being left out. Of what?
    “Ought to send Wui ...Mick y, if you want an MT teacher out there,” I offered.
    Wui flashed a smile. “First, I know too much. They might take me apart and use the know-how to build nullbombs, even deduce the old disastrous gate all over again, which would tend to spoil the point of your jaunt. Secondly, I might not function out there; I might just lie around and be a vegetable like whatever ghastly percentage of your boys drop out on their very first death trauma. You two should be able to cope with that.”
    I raised an eyebrow and looked over to Corman, back to Birch. “What?” he said. “Ah, Rossa. She is special Comm auxiliary and thus accustomed to trauma.” He stopped. That explained everything. What more could he add? Back to that damned Plan: “Ultimately, of course, should everything else fail, we still trust that Rossa will be able to transmit data back to us using her special talents. Then Central can plan further action as necessary.”
    Corman looked up. “You mentioned contingency plans, plans in the plural, when we first talked about this. Now we have one plan of action—‘overawe them’—and one contingency plan—‘give them a minigate.’ What are the other contingency plans?”
    “They are entirely dependent on feedback from your contact operation,” Birch told her blandly. “It would not be profitable to discuss such remote contingencies at this stage.”
    “What’s important now is that you get your lines right,” said Wui. “Right from the first ‘Hello, we’re from Earth, stop your MT experiments because we’ve got something better’ to the final ‘bye-bye.’ We’ll go through some possible scripts after mess—you be you and I’ll be a mean, distrustful Pallas colonist.”
    I shook my head, trying to free it from the webs they were all spinning. “Mean and distrustful is the way I feel,” I said. “This whole plan of action is wooly ... disconnected ... feeble. If CC approved it there must be teeth somewhere, but I can’t see them and I don’t like any of it, one little bit.”
    Corman clapped her hands very slowly and silently, still staring at the floor.
    Birch’s lips wriggled around. He leaned forward, looking frozen and savage. “Forceman Jacklin,” he said, “I have no doubt that you are an infinitely wiser strategist than the whole of CC and their computers.
    Have you considered the small, strategic point that sending you to Corvus is part of a compromise to please the nonaggression lobby in Central? Have you considered that if we can’t make these ‘wooly’
    makeshifts work, there is a faction that would be delighted to abandon the minimum-loss-of-life guidelines and sweep the whole problem under the carpet in the interests of ‘Earth security’?Mick y can tell you how we could do exactly that to the whole damned untidy planet, to ten dozen of them if CC
    gives the word. Every problem solved ... at ... a ... stroke.”
    Wui nodded with something like sympathy. But was Birch’s speech just a shade overdone, the angry look in his face too good a performance to be true? I thought about that textbook passage on infinite energy release, and shut up for the time being.
    Eight
    I was on my own in the dark, with cold feet. The damp air creeping from the old, crumbling parts of Tunnel; it sneaked under my door, across the floor and straight through the bunk’s flimsy sheets. But my face felt hot ... feverish? The days had rushed past too quickly to count. Now, tomorrow, they were opening up that tiny doorway in space (Wui had giggled, said something about Alice in Wonderland, shut up as suddenly). Tonight was still T minus one, which was what they called it in the formal reports Birch put together for Central; and I was in the dark. Everything here was too complicated. Every datum had two meanings, with the important one hidden. People said things and thought different things.