Page 27 - Unlikely Stories 3

Gaea Omphalos

point of sea water is, of course, affected by pressure, so some careful
calculations are involved in knowing where to stop. This is hot news,
and I can’t understand the reticence of people like Foucault. If the
rest of the world knew how close GAEA is to providing an endless
supply of cheap, clean electricity, the project would get all the
support it could ever want. Si also said that he and the other senior
scientists had repeatedly asked Foucault to send journalists down
here to get the story out, and that Foucault had told them there was
no interest. That was hard to believe, even for guys as locked up in an
ivory tower (or ferroplex dome) as Si and his buddies. They were
about to complain to people up on the surface when Foucault
announced I was on the way. So then they calmed down and went
back to their monitors and robotic mining controls. Now I’ve really
got to be on my toes: if I screw up it will not be easy to get another
outsider in here for a long time.

March 21: Risky or not, I had to find out a few things without asking.
I was interviewing Si again on some pretext or other, in his cubicle,
when he was called away to look at the latest coring samples. I’m not
supposed to be unescorted inside the project workspace, but Si was
eager to see what had been dug up and I was busy scribbling his
words of wisdom in my other notebook—or so I let him think. The
moment he was gone I got into their computer system; he had never
thought to conceal his password keystrokes when I was present. Si is
a real security risk, thank God. Anyway, I didn’t like what I found:
Umberto Foucault’s fingerprints were all over the data, in places
where a G-3 documentalist should not have update capability. In fact,
he and his group had access to every file in the GAEA network,
whereas the senior staff often were seeing only a sort of duplicate
world of information, one that Foucault could change at will without
anyone else realizing it. I didn’t have time to probe this phenomenon
in any depth, and I had no idea what sort of tracks would be left by
my browsing under Si’s logon, so I quickly signed off and went back
to making nice reportorial comments with pen and ink. I didn’t even
bring a laptop with me, in order to authenticate my image as a
computer semi-literate. I wish I could have brought some microbugs
down here and planted them in Foucault’s area.

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