As Steffi Roderick walked back to her office, she thought over her conversation with Lou. He’d been trying hard to sound like the very model of probity, but he wasn’t doing quite as well as he thought he was. If anything, his responses had sounded too casual, too matter-of-fact, as if he were trying to make her think that there was nothing going on, nothing to see.
It didn’t help that his geneset coded for a very open face. Steffi still remembered when she first encountered his ur-brother. She’d been working at JPL at the time, having just come into it from a stint with Mitsubishi’s US division, where they built Blue Gemini spacecraft on contract for NASA in the old McDonnell-Douglass building in St. Louis.
It had been a big deal to have the NASA Administrator himself visit the Lab, especially since he was a famous astronaut rather than a bureaucrat or politician like his predecessors. Everyone knew why President Dole had chosen him in the wake of the Moonbase disaster — she wanted a new broom to sweep clean, and knew she was dealing with a man who’d had his own experience with sloppy work leading to disaster.
Only later, after he’d retired and settled in Silicon Valley, had she gotten the opportunity to make a more personal acquaintance of the man, thanks to her ties with Toni Hargreaves. Although they’d never been close, it was astonishing how much of him she recognized in Lou and the other clone-brothers.
Probably because you did spend a fair amount of time with Toni and Cather, at least until you transferred to Johnson.
Steffi shrugged. At this point, most of that was past history. Still, she did wonder just what Lou didn’t want to talk about. She had a good idea that Spruance Del Curtin was still up to mischief, no matter how hard everybody tried to keep him busy. But now was not the time to confront him.