The Cassandra Complex - Brian Stableford [139]
“I expect I can keep them fully occupied for quite a while,” Lisa said as she accepted the proffered wafer and tucked it into her thigh pocket. “Go far. Go fast. Try to let me know how it works out for you.”
When they had gone, she put the gun down on the desk and moved over to open the door to Morgan’s cell.
He should have looked relieved when he saw that it was Lisa coming through the door, but he didn’t. He had expected her. He’d had faith in her—but it was too belated to win him any moral credit. In spite of everything they had done together, and everything they had been to one another, he had never had quite enough trust in her discretion, or in her devotion to the only real duty she had ever recognized.
“You’re a smug, selfish, secretive bastard,” she said as she went to help him up.
“And you,” he muttered reflexively. All things considered, it seemed preferable to a counteraccusation of contributory negligence.
EPILOGUE
When Morgan and Chan had finally finished packing, Lisa went with them to take one last look at the ruins of Mouseworld. The room had been tidied up, as far as was possible, and all the roasted corpses had been removed, but the plastic slag that had once been feeding mechanisms, cleaning systems, ladders, and cage fronts had resolidified into a bizarre work of conceptual art.
“They’re not actually going to leave it like this, are they?” Lisa asked.
“Undecided as yet,” Chan told her. “It all depends on Ed Burdillon. I told him that a monument of this kind is worth far more to the department, and to the world, than anything that could be put in its place, but this is supposed to be a research-active department, and there is a war on.”
“It won’t matter,” Morgan Miller stated loftily. “When the big collapse really begins, in ten or twenty or thirty years, all this will be lost. Not just the appearance, but the meaning too.”
“A pity, if true,” Chan opined. “The allegory of Mouseworld was never so apt as it was in the manner and aftermath of its destruction. I always said it was a far better symbol of the world’s predicament than you would ever allow, and I was right.”
Chan was the only one of the three who could have kept his job if he had wanted to. The university authorities still didn’t know about his unauthorized usurpation of the Mouseworld experiment, and probably never would. His only misdemeanor, according to the official record, had been an idiosyncratic but understandable desire to talk to Lisa before he talked to Peter Grimmett Smith. That was little or nothing by comparison with Morgan’s self-confessed forty-year history of unlicensed and unrecorded experiments. If Morgan had bothered to state his case to the Ethics Committee and the university senate, he would have faced several dozen charges of gross misconduct and would have lost on every one of them. Even so, Lisa thought, it would have been very interesting to hear his defense, and it would have been a real education for every undergraduate allowed to listen in.
She hadn’t had the option of stepping down that quietly, although neither Judith Kenna nor Peter Grimmett Smith had had the slightest interest in putting her in the witness box in an open court. She had been refused permission to resign before facing an internal inquiry, so she had been forced to undergo the ritual humiliation of listing as many of her sins as she cared to admit, expressing repentance and offering profuse thanks for the leniency of her punishment. She had taken the procedure very seriously, as was only to be expected of such a long-serving officer, and she had taken great care to confess to every peccadillo they could actually prove, even condescending to own up to a couple they couldn’t, in the interests of not having them dig too deeply in pursuit of more.
Surprisingly enough, she had played the game well enough to absolve Mike Grundy from all blame except that attached to his carelessness in managing his computer passwords. For that, he got off with a caution. He could have gone back to work, at least