Chapter 16

"It is, Tabs, but it is a burden you have to bear, if you are to be trusted with other important matters later in life."

"Understood. Wow! Penny getting married!"

"Perhaps, Tabs. It is all at the "depends" stage. Now, can you back off with your questions; questions I cannot answer?"

"Yes, sir. I will stop, and keep things to myself. Thank you for trusting me. I won't let you down. Penny, wow!" She halted her enthusiasm. "Does this mean I can't speak to Penny about her wanting to marry you?"

"That is a tricky one for me, Tabs. Can I suggest that you don't come straight out with it? Perhaps suggest that the way she has been acting, it was almost as if she wanted to become another wife of John. That way, you leave it to her as to how much she wants to reveal. You could promise to not talk about it, if it is true, to protect her from gossip."

"That sounds okay, Dad." She hesitated. "Dad? How do you manage to come up with these solutions? You always seem to know what to say, and how to say it."

"Tabs, believe it or not, but it all goes back to my schooldays. Two of my school friends, who are coming to visit us shortly, reminded me that I had a nickname as "the organiser" at school. I was often the volunteer to be the organising secretary of a club - chess, music, literary, or sports. I couldn't tell you why now, but at the time, I enjoyed being involved that way.

"Thinking back, perhaps it was my way to be seen as socially acceptable, or possibly socially responsible, for my father was a working man, not from the upper echelons of society. Maybe it was just my own personal makeup, wanting to do such things. As it happened, it has led to me being a capable administrator, which ended up with me being appointed as Governor of this colony. I did a management degree at university, which helped as well.

"Anyway, why are we talking about me and my career? We should be talking about you and your career.

"I think we have Penny working towards being an economist – a useful talent even if she does get married. What do you think you should be doing in the way of a career? Something associated with chemistry?"

"Dad – I am only fourteen! Give me a chance."

"Tabs, this is the age when you should be thinking about your future. Do you just want to be a wife and mother, or do you see yourself doing grander things? Many careers could help the colony expand and prosper. You could be part of that. You could still be a wife and mother as well, if you wanted."

"What? With you?"

"No, silly. I wasn't thinking like that, just in general terms."

"But if Penny could do that, so could I."

"Not a good idea to think that way, at fourteen, Tabs."

"You just told me I should be thinking about my future, Dad."

"Well, not in that way, my girl. I have enough on my hands with Penny. Don't make things more difficult for me, please."

"All right, then. I'll not bother you with that sort of thing until I am much older. How old was Gloria when you married her?"

"Eighteen."

"There you are then. We can talk about this when I am nearer eighteen."

"I am happy to postpone such talk until that age, Tabs. You will have found a boy you are madly in love with, by then, I am sure, and you will see me as an old man, twenty years older than you." John stood up and gently escorted Tabs from his study, ending the conversation.

At his office next day, John was faced with the lack of an environmentalist. He rang Bob Kempe at Rehome, and put his problem to Bob. Bob was not amused.

"John, you keep 'borrowing' people from me, and I seldom see them back. What do you want an environmentalist for?"

"At its simplest, to make sure the native animals and plants get the living conditions appropriate to them."

"And how is that determined?"

"Observing them in their natural conditions, where we find them, and duplicating that situation as near as possible in captivity."

"Yes, and does anyone have that basic knowledge already?"

"No, but an expert would be the person to get to that point."

"John, define 'an expert'".

"Well, I suppose I mean someone expert in the subject."

"I agree, but when the subject is animals we don't know, there can be no pre-existing expert. One has to be created, from scratch."

"Then what kind of graduate do we need for that task? A zoologist?"

"Perhaps. But I was thinking; why not create your own expertise? Train up someone to be a New Eden environmentalist, or a New Eden zoologist."

"You know we don't have a university, Bob. For that matter, you are only now starting your own university. Should we perhaps import one or two of your more promising students, to study the flora and fauna of New Eden? I suppose they would be exobiologists or something."

"I am up for that, John. I think it would be great, to create our own expertise in a new subject; one that Earth has never seen. It may take some time to find suitable candidates and persuade them of the opportunity such research offers."

"Wait, though, Bob. Students don't study just for the sake of getting a degree. They study to start a career in the subject, don't they? Most of them, anyway. Where is the work for them in the future?"

"John, at the rate The Personalia are finding planets suitable for human colonisation, I suspect that the career opportunities are going to throw themselves at the graduates. Every new planet will need at least one exobiologist to examine it for dangers and economic choices."

"O.k. Assume we start a course in the subject. Who teaches it?"

"In the first year or two, it is inevitable that the students will teach themselves in their specialism. They can start on Rehome, learning the basics of scientific research: how to study an unknown biology, collect and examine the facts, how to draw conclusions and develop theories; how to test these conclusions and come up with definitive, reproducible, results.

"I expect that most of the first year of university is going to be like that: preparation for the nitty-gritty of research. You are going to have to muddle through for a year until we can get the students to the point where they can be useful for you.

"What did you say you had for staffing your research station? One or two people?"

"A couple of biologists, one botanist, and we have what is in effect a zoo-keeper to look after the animals and plants housed at the station."

Bob hummed and hawed for a moment, then declared, "Your scientists are not going to want to collect facts for next year's students. They will want to embark on their own studies, probably concentrating on a specific species or genus. Your zookeeper is going to have to be the one to amass data for the students to use later."

"Bob, that guy is currently a labourer, building rail track."

"So? Einstein spent years as an examiner in the Swiss patent office; as boring a job as I could imagine!"

"But this guy is anti-academia. Einstein was a maths graduate by then."

"Some people have the brains but don't use them. If he shows talents, let him exploit that talent, John."

"Very well, I'll look into that, Bob. Beggars can't be choosers, as they say. Please make a start on your exobiology course, for me, if nothing else."

"Leave it to me, John. I'll kick-start it, giving a grant to those who take up the course. It makes me think that The Personalia might consider supporting some technical courses. If rich numbskulls can endow university chairs, why not clever and rich Personalia? Thanks for the idea, John. Goodbye, old friend."

John Wells was perplexed. Bob Kempe seemed to think that just because you wanted a thing to happen, it would. Life was not so beneficent in reality.

He looked up the file of Hubert Swanson, in despair. The labourer's file said that he had left school with good passes in zoology, botany, mathematics, physics and chemistry, and also music!

Now John was even more confused. If the guy had so many good passes, why hadn't he gone to university? It did not make sense. He delved deeper into the file, looking for answers.

He found that Hubert's parents were low-level workers. His father had been a railway signalman: fairly well paid, but not enough to send a child to university, and not after his father was killed by a shunting engine. His mother was a railway cleaner, working on passenger carriages.

Hubert was sent out by his mother to earn cash for the family, instead of continuing his studies. He could never go to university, while better-off families could send their children to university to study anything they felt like. It provided the perfect chip on the shoulder: academics were rich people who cared little for poor people. Therefor academics were to be hated. Q.E.D. (the Latin phrase quod erat demonstrandum – meaning, which was therefore demonstrated.)

John thought carefully, looking for a solution to his problems. Aaron Yakovlev had interviewed Hubert. Perhaps he had noticed some fact that might help. He called him.

"Aaron, could I ask you to come see me at a time convenient to yourself, to talk about Hubert Swanson, and what was said at the interview?"

"Sure, why not? Five o 'clock today? That's when I get off my work."

"O.K., my office, five p.m., Aaron."

At that time, the pair got together, and talked about Hubert. Aaron started them off.

"Hubert is a non-achiever, because he could never attain his dream. Everything else was second-rate to him, so any achievers were to be derided – mainly because they did things that were denied to him."

John put that into perspective.

"Hubert attained a whole bunch of good school results; enough to go to university, but his family could not afford such education."

Aaron: "Hubert has a large chip on his shoulder, and bad-mouths all academics he encounters."

John: "Hubert could have been an academic himself, but it was denied him."

Aaron: "Hubert had a dream of becoming a zookeeper, but even that job had a requirement of a degree, so he failed there."

John: "We have offered Hubert a zookeeper-equivalent job, which is why he has taken it up. Will he be happy at it?"

Aaron: "Eventually not. He is going to be angry at the academics that will control his job. He wants to be in control of his own destiny."

John: "So we must persuade him that he should become an academic, such that he can turn the practical knowledge he is amassing into a deeper understanding on how the ecology works on New Eden.