Once in Boston, Oscar would renew his ties to the Senator. He would also have a welcome chance to return home and reorder his domestic affairs. Oscar was very worried about his house. Clare had deserted the place and left for Europe, and it wasn’t right or safe to have his home sitting empty. Oscar imagined that Moira might house-sit his place while she looked for another job in Boston. Oscar was far from happy about either the house or Moira, but the house and Moira were two of the loosest ends that he had. It struck him as handy to knit them.
Time passed smoothly on the trip’s first leg, to southwest Louisi-ana. Oscar had Jimmy turn up the music, and while Moira sulked in her bunk with a romance novel, Oscar, Lana, and Donna passed their time debating the many potentials of Greta Penninger.
Oscar wasn’t shy about this subject. There wasn’t much sense in that. It was useless to attempt to hide his love affairs from his own krewe. Certainly they had all known about Clare from the beginning. They might not be entirely thrilled about the advent of Greta, but it was spectator sport.
And their discussion had a political point. Greta Penninger was the leading dark-horse candidate for the Collaboratory Director’s post. Strangely, the Collaboratory scientists seemed oblivious to the stark fact that their Director’s post was at risk. The scientists weren’t fully cognizant of their own situation, somehow — they would refer to their power structure as “collegial assessment,” or maybe the “succession process” — anything but “politics.” But it was politics, all right. The Collaboratory seethed with a form of politics that dared not speak its own name.
This was not to say that science itself was politics. Scientific knowledge was profoundly different from political ideology. Science was an intellectual system producing objective data about the nature of the universe. Science involved falsifiable hypotheses, reproducible re-sults, and rigorous experimental verification. Scientific knowledge it-self wasn’t a political construct, any more than element 79 in the periodic table was a political construct.
But the things people did with science were every bit as political as the things people did with gold. Oscar had devoted many fascinated hours to study of the scientific community and its weirdly orthogonal power structure. The genuine work of science struck him as sadly geekish and tedious, but he was always charmed by an arcane political arrangement.
A scientist with many citations and discoveries had political power. He had scholarly repute, he had academic coattails, he had clout. He could dependably make his voice heard within the science community. He could set agendas, staff conference panels, arrange promotions and travel junkets, take consultation work. He could stay comfortably ahead of the research curve by receiving works before their official publication. A scientist on this inside track had no army, police, or slush fund; but in that quiet yet deadly scientific fashion, he was in firm control of his society’s basic resources. He could shunt the flow of opportunity at will, among the lesser beings. He was a player.
Money per se was of secondary importance in science. Scientists who relied too openly on hunting earmarked funds or kissing up for major grants acquired a taint, like politicians slyly playing the race card.
This was clearly a workable system. It was very old, and it had many quirks. Those quirks could be exploited. And the Collaboratory had never enjoyed the prolonged attentions of a crack team of political campaigners.
The current Director, Dr. Arno Felzian, was in hopeless straits. Felzian had once enjoyed a modestly successful career in genetic re-search, but he had won his exalted post in the Collaboratory through assiduous attention to Senator Dougal’s commands. Puppet regimes might thrive as long as the empire held out, but once the alien oppres-sors were gone, their local allies would soon be despised as collabora-tors. Senator Dougal, the Collaboratory’s longtime patron and official puppetmaster, had gone down in flames. Felzian, abandoned, no longer knew what to do with himself He was a jumpy, twitching yes-man with no one left to say yes to.
Dumping the current Director was a natural first step. But this would make little sense without a solid succession plan. In the little world of the Collaboratory, the Director’s departure would create a power vacuum hard enough to suck up everything not nailed down. Who would take the Director’s place? The senior members of the board were natural candidates for promotion, but they were payoff-tainted timeservers, just like their Director. At least, they could easily be portrayed that way by anyone willing to work at the job.
Oscar and his krewe advisers agreed that there was one central fracture line in the current power structure: Greta Penninger. She was on the board already, which gave her legitimacy, and a power base of sorts. And she had an untapped constituency — the Collaboratory’s ac-tual scientists. These were the long-oppressed working researchers, who did their best to generate authentic lab results while cordially ignoring the real world. The scientists had been cowering in the woodwork for years, while official corruption slowly ate away at their morale, their honor, and their livelihood. But if there was to be any chance of genuine reform inside the Collaboratory, it would have to come from the scientists themselves.
Oscar was optimistic. He was a Federal Democrat, a reform party with a reform agenda, and he felt that reform could work. As a class, the scientists were untouched and untapped; they oozed raw political potential. They were a very strange lot, but there were far more of these people inside the Collaboratory than he would ever have guessed. There were swarms of them. It was as if science had sucked up everyone on the planet who was too bright to be practical. Their selfless dedication to their work was truly a marvel to him.
Oscar had swiftly recovered from his initial wonder and astonish-ment. After a month of close study, Oscar realized that the situation made perfect sense. There wasn’t enough money in the world to pay merely normal people to work as hard as scientists worked. Without this vitalizing element of cranky idealism from a demographic fringe group, the scientific enterprise would have collapsed centuries ago.
He’d expected federal scientists to behave more or less like other federal bureaucrats. Instead he’d discovered a lost world, a high-tech Easter Island where a race of gentle misfits created huge and slightly pointless intellectual statuary.
Greta Penninger was one of these little people, the Col-laboratory’s high-IQ head-in-the-clouds proletariat. Unfortunately, she talked and dressed just like one of them, too. However, Greta had real promise. There was basically nothing wrong with the woman that couldn’t be set straight with a total makeover, power dressing, im-proved debate skills, an issue, an agenda, some talking points, and a clever set of offstage handlers.
Such was the mature consensus of Oscar’s krewe. As they dis-cussed their situation, Oscar, Lana, and Donna were also playing poker. Poker was truly Oscar’s game. He rarely failed to lose at poker. It never seemed to occur to his opponents that since he was quite wealthy he could lose money with impunity. Oscar would deliberately play just well enough to put up a fight. Then he would overreach himself, lose crushingly, and feign deep distress. The others would delightedly rake up their winnings and look at him with Olympian pity. They’d be so pleased with themselves, and so thoroughly con-vinced of his touching lack of cleverness and deceit, that they would forgive him anything.
“There’s just one problem though,” Donna said, expertly shuffling the deck.
“What’s that?” said Lana, munching a pistachio.