Between the Strokes of Night

And did you follow up with a check on us? Hans Gibbs nodded and went on. “Wolfgang is completely loyal to you, just as I work for and am loyal to Salter Wherry. I gather that you’ve never met him?”

Judith Niles looked up at him from under lowered brows. “I don’t know anyone who has — but everybody has heard of him, and of Salter Station.”

“Then you know he has substantial resources. Through them we can find out rather a lot about the Institute, and the work that goes on here. I want you to know that although Wolfgang and I have talked generalities from time to time about the work here, none of my specific information, or that of anyone else in our organization, came from him.”

She shrugged in a noncommittal way. “All right. But now you have me intrigued. What do you think you know about us that’s so surprising? We’re a publicly funded agency. Our records are open information.”

“True. But that means you are restricted in the budget available to you. Just today, for example, you have learned of additional budget cuts because of the crisis in U.N. finances.”

Her expression showed her astonishment. “How in the name of Morpheus can you possibly know that? I only found out a couple of hours ago, and I was told the decision had just been made.”

“Let me postpone answering that, if you don’t mind, until we’ve covered a couple of other things. I know you’ve had money problems. Worse still, there are restrictions — ones you find hard to accept — on the experiments that you are permitted to perform.”

The lower lip pushed forward a little, and her expression became guarded. “Now I don’t think I follow you. Care to be more specific?”

“With your permission I’ll defer discussing that, too, for the moment. I hope you’ll first permit me a few minutes on another subject. It may seem unrelated to budgets and experimental freedom, but I promise you it is relevant. Take a quick look at this, then I’ll explain exactly why I’m here.”

He passed a flat black cylinder across to her. “Look into the end of it. It’s a video recorder — don’t worry about focus, the hologram phases are adjusted for a perceived focal plane six feet from the eye. Just let your eyes relax.” She wrinkled her brow questioningly, put her unbroken bread roll back on her plate, and lifted the cylinder to her right eye. “How do I work it?” “Press the button on the left side. It takes a couple of seconds before the picture comes.”

He sat silent, waiting as a waitress in a green uniform placed bowls of murky brown soup in front of each of them.

“I don’t see anything at all,” Judith Niles said after a few seconds. “There’s nothing I can focus on — oh, wait a minute.…”

The jet-black curtain before her took on faint detail as her eyes adjusted to the low light level. There was a backdrop of stars, with a long, spindly structure in the foreground lit by reflected sunlight. At first she had no sense of scale, but as the field of view slowly shifted out along the spider-net of girders other scene elements began to provide clues. A space tug lay along one of the beams, its stubby body half hidden by the metal. Farther down, she could see a life-capsule, clamped like a tiny mushroom button in the corner of a massive cross-tie. The construction was big, stretching hundreds of kilometers away to a distant end-boom.

The camera swung on down, until the limb of the sunlit Earth appeared in the field of view.

“You’re seeing the view from one of the standard monitors,” said Hans Gibbs. “There are twenty of them on the Station. They operate twenty-four hours a day, with routine surveys of everything that goes on. That camera concentrates mostly on the new construction on the lower boom. You know that we’re making a seven-hundred-kilometer experimental cantilever on PSS-One? Salter Station, most people down here apparently call it, though Salter Wherry likes to point out that it was the first of many, so PSS-One is a better name. Anyway, we don’t need that extension cantilever for the present arcologies, but we’re sure we’ll use it someday soon.”

“Uh-uh.” Judith did not move her eyes from the viewing socket. The camera was zooming in, closing steadily on an area at the very end of the boom where two small dots had become visible. She realized that she was seeing a high-magnification close-up from a small part of the camera field. As the dots grew in size, the image had begun to develop a slight graininess as the limit of useful resolution was reached. She could make out the limbs on each of the space suits, and the lines that secured the suits to the thin girders.