up.
"You can't know how much I admire you, Colonel Malenfant," Frank was saying. "I'm twenty years younger than you. But I modeled myself on you."
Malenfant eyed him dubiously. "Then I'm in hell."
"No, I mean it. You started a company called Bootstrap. You had plans to exploit the asteroids."
"It failed. I was a lousy businessman. And when I lost my wife--"
"Sure, but you had the right idea. If not for that--"
Malenfant was looking longingly at the BDB mock-up. "If not for that, if the universe was a different shape -- yes, maybe I'd have done all this. And who knows what I'd have found?"
The silence stretched. Dorothy Chaum was frowning, Xenia noticed, as she studied Malenfant's cloudy, troubled expression.
Chapter 3
Debates
It was four more years before Malenfant encountered Frank J. Paulis again.
In 2029, Malenfant was invited to the Smithsonian at Washington, D.C., as a guest at the annual meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science -- or at least, a stream of it supported by the SETI Institute, a privately funded outfit based in Colorado and devoted to the study of the Gaijin, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and other good stuff.
Despite the subject matter of the conference, Malenfant had come here with some reluctance.
He had grown wary of appearing in public. As Paulis's robot probe swung relentlessly out from Earth, the unwelcome notoriety he had attracted nine years back was picking up again. He thought of it as the Buzz Aldrin syndrome: But you were there... When people looked at him, he thought, they saw a symbol, not a human being; they saw somebody who was incapable of doing original work ever again. It was a regard that was embarrassing, paralyzing, and it made him feel very old. Not only that, Malenfant had found himself the target of unwelcome attention of the most extreme factions from either side of the spectrum, both the xenophobes and xenophiles.
But he had been invited here by Maura Della, a now-retired congresswoman he'd encountered in the course of the unraveling of that initial discovery.
Maura Della was about Malenfant's age, small, neat, and spry. She had served as part of the president's science advisory support at the time of the Gaijin announcement, when Malenfant and Nemoto had been dragged before the president himself, the secretary of defense, the Industrial Relations Council, and various presidential task forces as the administration sought an official posture concerning the Gaijin. Unlike some of the Beltway apparatchiks Malenfant had encountered in those days, Della had proved to be tough but straightforward in her dealings with Malenfant, and he had grown to respect her sense of responsibility about SETI and other issues. It would be good to see her again.
And, he hoped, maybe she was still close enough to the center of power to give him a genuine insight into anything new.
In that, as it turned out, he would not be disappointed.
At first, though, the conference -- summing up what was known about the Gaijin, nine long years after discovery -- proved to be meager stuff. In the absence of new facts the proceedings were dominated by presentations on the impact of the Gaijin's existence on philosophical principles.
Thus, the first talk Maura Della escorted him to was on the brief and unrewarding history of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Since the 1950s, appropriately tuned radio telescopes had been turned on promising nearby stars, like Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eradini. Over the years the search was taken up by NASA and upgraded and automated until it was possible to search thousands of likely radio frequencies at very high speed.
But decades of patient, longing search had turned up nothing but a few evanescent, tantalizing whispers of pattern.
As Malenfant listened to the stream of detail and acronyms, of project after project -- Ozma, Cyclops, Phoenix -- he became consumed with pity for these patient, hungry
"You can't know how much I admire you, Colonel Malenfant," Frank was saying. "I'm twenty years younger than you. But I modeled myself on you."
Malenfant eyed him dubiously. "Then I'm in hell."
"No, I mean it. You started a company called Bootstrap. You had plans to exploit the asteroids."
"It failed. I was a lousy businessman. And when I lost my wife--"
"Sure, but you had the right idea. If not for that--"
Malenfant was looking longingly at the BDB mock-up. "If not for that, if the universe was a different shape -- yes, maybe I'd have done all this. And who knows what I'd have found?"
The silence stretched. Dorothy Chaum was frowning, Xenia noticed, as she studied Malenfant's cloudy, troubled expression.
Chapter 3
Debates
It was four more years before Malenfant encountered Frank J. Paulis again.
In 2029, Malenfant was invited to the Smithsonian at Washington, D.C., as a guest at the annual meeting of the American Association of the Advancement of Science -- or at least, a stream of it supported by the SETI Institute, a privately funded outfit based in Colorado and devoted to the study of the Gaijin, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and other good stuff.
Despite the subject matter of the conference, Malenfant had come here with some reluctance.
He had grown wary of appearing in public. As Paulis's robot probe swung relentlessly out from Earth, the unwelcome notoriety he had attracted nine years back was picking up again. He thought of it as the Buzz Aldrin syndrome: But you were there... When people looked at him, he thought, they saw a symbol, not a human being; they saw somebody who was incapable of doing original work ever again. It was a regard that was embarrassing, paralyzing, and it made him feel very old. Not only that, Malenfant had found himself the target of unwelcome attention of the most extreme factions from either side of the spectrum, both the xenophobes and xenophiles.
But he had been invited here by Maura Della, a now-retired congresswoman he'd encountered in the course of the unraveling of that initial discovery.
Maura Della was about Malenfant's age, small, neat, and spry. She had served as part of the president's science advisory support at the time of the Gaijin announcement, when Malenfant and Nemoto had been dragged before the president himself, the secretary of defense, the Industrial Relations Council, and various presidential task forces as the administration sought an official posture concerning the Gaijin. Unlike some of the Beltway apparatchiks Malenfant had encountered in those days, Della had proved to be tough but straightforward in her dealings with Malenfant, and he had grown to respect her sense of responsibility about SETI and other issues. It would be good to see her again.
And, he hoped, maybe she was still close enough to the center of power to give him a genuine insight into anything new.
In that, as it turned out, he would not be disappointed.
At first, though, the conference -- summing up what was known about the Gaijin, nine long years after discovery -- proved to be meager stuff. In the absence of new facts the proceedings were dominated by presentations on the impact of the Gaijin's existence on philosophical principles.
Thus, the first talk Maura Della escorted him to was on the brief and unrewarding history of SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
Since the 1950s, appropriately tuned radio telescopes had been turned on promising nearby stars, like Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eradini. Over the years the search was taken up by NASA and upgraded and automated until it was possible to search thousands of likely radio frequencies at very high speed.
But decades of patient, longing search had turned up nothing but a few evanescent, tantalizing whispers of pattern.
As Malenfant listened to the stream of detail and acronyms, of project after project -- Ozma, Cyclops, Phoenix -- he became consumed with pity for these patient, hungry
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