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the Center's work, and ultimately, of keeping alive the population that would exist in years to come. Even
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a laborer with a shovel could watch the spectacle of a fusion-driven interplanetary lifting out of orbit and
say, "I helped build the place where the engines for that ship were designed."Appretiare.
Pang-Yarbat's office with its lab space behind was roughly halfway along one of the upper corridors.
They found him draped in the chair pushed back from his L-shaped desk with its usual litter of
hand-scrawled calculations and papers, facing a screen showing some of the group's earlier work. The
man seated in a chair drawn up behind him had to be Jansinick Wernstecki. The shelves around them
were cluttered with tools, workshop materials, and pieces of equipment in various stages of disassembly.
In the area to the rear, Reyd Orne and Merlin Friet were working amid a tangle of instrumentation wiring
sprouting from where the outer metal cladding had been removed from the original Valkyrie
array about the size of a regular door but thicker, mounted horizontally in a steel frame wreathed in
tubes and power cabling.
"Ah, Lan!" Pang beamed, getting up. "So welcome back from your shot-in-the-arm vacation. We were
starting to wonder if you were transferring up there permanently." It was one of Pang's puns. The
Security "Arm," who among other things operated the LORIN stations, was the nearest Kronia had to a
military force, while "shot" had doubtless been an allusion to X-ray laser bombs.
Pang was from somewhere in eastern Asia, brought to Kronia at an early age. He was short and
chubby, with rich hair cropped short, and deep, alive eyes made more intense by ancient silver-framed
spectacles which he refused to change for surgical correction. He had a broad, flat nose, fleshy chin to
match, and a rubbery face that could take on an infinite variety of expressions and spoke its own
language. His joviality and penchant for puns and expressing himself in riddles masked one of the most
agile scientific minds that Keene had ever encountered or maybe they were an irrepressible byproduct
of it. Pang's father and an uncle had played key roles in the Kronian development of fusion energy after
hostile politics quashed the chances of any concerted program on Earth, and Pang had followed in the
same general field. In earlier years he had directed the design of the drives for theOsiris spacecraft that
had brought Keene and others from Earth, so Keene's grasp of nuclear-propulsion physics had not been
lost on him when it came to his attention. Inviting Keene into his group had been the result not a bad
salary offer at all for somebody relatively new in from Earth at the time.
Wernstecki, who had also stood at Keene and Shayle's arrival, was physically Pang's opposite in just
about every respect. A tall, gaunt Caucasian, he had a halo of fair, frizzy hair, thin, pointy nose and chin,
and thick lips that looked as if they belonged to another face. His eyes were pale, almost colorless, and
took in Keene with a steady gaze, unlike Pang's, which shifted restlessly as if constantly reading in
updates from the surroundings. His head was perched atop a long neck protruding from a shirt collar
riding atop a sweater, with a light jacket hanging loosely over a gangly frame. Keene judged him to be in
his mid thirties.
"Lan, meet Jansinick Wernstecki," Pang said, making an ushering motion. "Jan, this is Doctor Landen
Keene, one of the survivors that Gallian's mission brought back, who looks after the power-engineering
side of the project. . . . And this is Lan's colleague, Shayle Hartz. Fission and fusion. They make a good
combination or should I say hybrid? I hear Jan is one of the top theoreticians in celestial
electrodynamics, Lan. A real live-wire in the field." The corners of the rubber mouth twitched upward.
Keene refused to encourage him.
The three shook hands. Wernstecki's fingers were like turkey talons, but the grip was surprisingly firm.
On meeting the unwavering eyes, Keene got the feeling of everything readable about himself being
absorbed and logged, and immediately sensed an odd but strangely powerful personality. He knew that
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