Acts of Conscience by William Barton Page A

in-house apprentice school of B-VEI, expected to be much like the apprentice schools at other industrial concerns, teaching those special things that companies need their technical personnel to know. I’d had to spend a few weeks at the ERSIE apprentice school— just so you’ll know the ropes —but those years at Syrtis Major, my years of prior experience...
    Different here.
    Classes taught by our predecessors on the line— this is the way we do things here —startling to find Roald Berens himself teaching theory, Ntanë Vataro showing us the guts of the machines, showing us how things really worked.
    Do I remember things like that from before? No. The president of the Eighth Ray Scientific-Industrial Enterprise is a red-faced politician. Saw him on the netvid only days ago...
    So how does the Berens-Vataro faster-than-light overdrive really work, Dr. Berens? Small, nordic sort of man with pale blue eyes, what they call mulberry eyes, and thin, flat, mouse-brown hair. Small man with a secretive smile and a rather hapless shrug.
    You’ll have to ask Dr. Vataro about that. Me, I only figured out a way it could work. That little smile and shrug again. Most of you came out of the ERSIE apprentice school—a gesture at me—Mr. du Cheyne, I believe, went to good, old Syrtis Major...
    Anyway, you were taught how Kerechenko and her team worked out the basic principles of the field well converter, using Mace Electrodynamics money; how they then separated themselves from the company and got government loans to extend this technology to the field of gravity control, among other things...
    At Syrtis Major the history-of-technology course spent some time on the way ERSIE, Mace and the government of the Mitteleuropa went round and round over who owned the patents on antigravity. Gravity control is one of those magical technologies that simply changes everything. Like agriculture, like writing, like steam, nuclear energy... hyperdrive too, I suppose.
    Dr. Berens: “For my scholar magestral dialogue at Pantech, I did an exhaustive numerical run on the mathematics of Kerechenko Analysis. You know, it’s funny. I would’ve thought Madame Kerechenko would’ve done that herself, right at the outset, but...”
    Some woman in the back of the room, a pretty dark-haired girl with a long nose and oddly-colored tan skin, sort of a funny sallow-brick hue, said, “Didn’t have the computing power in those days.”
    Berens squinted at her and shrugged. “Right. Ms... Strachan is it? They didn’t do it because they couldn’t, and in the ensuing centuries, as Kerechenko’s discoveries turned into money, money and more money... Anyway, it looked like a good project to me, so I ran the arrays through TPI’s Skylark analogue-numerical sieve, then started doing a statistical analysis. All sorts of interesting bullshit came popping out, graduate school research topics for a thousand years to come.” He laughed. “I considered taking out a loan right then and there, so I could go into business as a professional thesis adviser. That would’ve been fun...”
    Long silence, while we watched him reminisce about his own good, old days. Then, in a pale, faraway voice: “So you put a field well converter inside the system event horizon of a gravity polarizer, link to a power load, charge up the well, run the polarizer to full throttle and head out. That was the theory behind the starships we’ve been using for so many years.” Another silence, then: “What do you suppose happens if you open the loaded well’s event horizon just then?”
    Leah Strachan said, “ Bang .”
    “You’re a pilot, aren’t you Ms. Strachan? Always a good idea for a pilot to know how her machinery works, isn’t it?”
    She said, “You never know what might happen.”
    “I suppose not. That’s why I went into mathematics, Ms. Strachan. I wanted to know what would happen.”
    Then: “You know what? After I linked up with Ntanë, we had a hell of a time getting