"I realize that," I said. "But could you see your way clear to telling me much more than you have, if I can convince you that it would help me solve a problem I can't solve otherwise."
His eyebrows went up a little at that. "What kind of problem, Ralph?"
"It's as old as the hills," I said. "The really ancient kind with fossils embedded in them. It goes right back to the Old Stone Age, and maybe a lot earlier. Joan doesn't want to go to Mars. She's very stubborn, very determined about it. If I can't make her change her mind I'll have to go alone. And I guess I don't have to tell you what that would do to me. If I just had a little more time, another week or two—"
"So that's it," he said. "You want me to tell you that your assignment can be put off, that you're not really needed on Mars. We're just sending you there because we like to do whimsical things occasionally, to break the God-awful monotony of thinking about the problems the project is confronted with in a serious way."
I was startled, because I'd never known him to indulge in deliberate irony before. He had all the intellectual equipment for it, but his mind just didn't work that way.
Then I suddenly realized he was going to tell me everything I wanted to know and had just used that approach to make me a little angry and keep me alert and analytical, so that I wouldn't underestimate the seriousness of what he was about to say.
"All right, Ralph," he said. "I'll risk angering a third of the Board. I'm going to tell you exactly why the Mars Colony is in trouble, and just how tremendous your task will be. You'll be in the middle, Ralph, in the biggest clash of interests a new and growing society has ever known.
"A clash of interests can destroy any society, if they're violent enough and have powerful enough backing and the population is divided in its loyalties and lacks firm and courageous leadership.
"That's especially true if the society is on a pioneering level, with serious scarcities developing everywhere and with every man, to some extent at least, in fierce competition with his neighbors, all apart from the massive power monopolies that are in even fiercer competition among themselves.
"Don't you see, Ralph, don't you realize what that kind of cross-purpose distribution of power in a new and pioneering society can mean? When you have a three or four-way conflict, when everyone is bidding for what you've got and can't afford to sell, or what you haven't got but would like to sell, or what you can't sell for what you'd like to get?"