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A group of visitors had announced themselves that day. They had phoned Peter from Volgograd, informing him of their arrival. As usual, Sergei watched for them. Peter's bus could be recognized from the upstairs balcony a long ways off by the cloud of dust that it raised on a dry day. Sergei got up to get himself ready when the bus was half way back. Looking at himself in the mirror, he remembered a clown he had once seen at the waterfront boardwalk in Odessa. The clown, in entertaining a group of children, had attempted a rope trick. He had cut a piece of rope in two and let the children examine it. Then he took the two pieces and went through some impressive contortions to join them back together again. At last he was finished. In a ceremonious gesture he let the rope unfurl in front of the children's eyes. There was laughter. A great big knot joined the two pieces of rope. When the laughter had faded, he asked the children. "Well, what did you expect? Magic? Nobody can do real magic, he told them. Make-believe magic, yes, but never real magic."
Afterwards the clown had invited the children on a make believe train ride. Perhaps he wanted to show them that dreaming is easy and often nice, yet never a bit more than just a game of make believe. He made train sounds with his accordion as he led the procession. A child behind him blew a whistle. Excitedly, the procession marched off and disappeared among the crowd.
Sergei had been thinking of this episode still, when he heard Laara calling that his guests had arrived.
The visitors were not statesmen. They were a delegation from the engineering team of his project. Normally such a visit would have been a matter of protocol, but the fact that the chief engineer himself had made the effort to come meant that something was deeply wrong.
"We've come to report, not to negotiate!" said the spokesmen right off.
Sergei bought himself some time to evaluate the situation by offering everyone a glass of Vodka. With their glasses in hand he invited them to join him in the garden.
What could they have come to report? The project was finished. He was puzzled. Their arrival made no sense.
"Is it safe to talk in the open?" asked the spokesman.
Sergei assured him that it was. "But if you like, we can go upstairs to the conference room," he added.
They decided to stay. It was cool in the shade of the large oak tree. A breeze came in off the lake.
"We have bad news," said the chief engineer. "Every significant measurement that was recorded during the test at Freedom One Base fell short against the design specifications. Of the five re-targeting cycles that were planned, only three were executed. The rest of the time was taken up with transmission retries and subsequent data verification. These were all tasks that you insisted should be run after a communications error. The Bureau feels that a three hundred percent safety margin is not enough. For this reason they have ordered Post-Targeting to be made optional until the long-range telemetry stations are on line. This means that post targeting can be turned off in times of a political crisis."
"Does this also mean that everything is left to someone's discretion?" Sergei inquired.
"Without the long-range stations we can't be sure that correct targeting will take place," said the chief engineer.
"It will be turned on and off according to political conditions," said the spokesman of the delegation.
"Right now, the system is switched to the old mode," said the chief engineer. "You can find out which mode it is in by looking at the Status File frame on your terminal."
"You can inspect the status, but you won't be able to alter it," added the spokesman.
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Stories about
Love
from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche
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