Dr. Leopold, head of the non-military segment of the expedition, said brusquely, "Sorry, Mattern, but I'll have to apply the limiting clause here."
Mattern started to sputter. "But—"
"But nothing, Mattern. We're here. We've spent a good chunk of American cash in getting here. I insist that we spend the minimum time allotted for scientific research, as long as we are here."
Mattern scowled, looking down at the table, supporting his chin in his thumbs and digging the rest of his fingers in hard back of his jawbone. He was annoyed, but he was smart enough to know he didn't have much of a case to make against Leopold.
The rest of us—four archaeologists and seven military men; they outnumbered us a trifle—watched eagerly as our superiors battled. My eyes strayed through the porthole and I looked at the dry windblown plain, marked here and there with the stumps of what might have been massive monuments millennia ago.
Mattern said bleakly, "The world is of utterly no strategic consequence. Why, it's so old that even the vestiges of civilization have turned to dust!"
"Nevertheless, I reserve the right granted to me to explore any world we land on, for a period of at least one hundred sixty-eight hours," Leopold returned implacably.
Exasperated, Mattern burst out, "Dammit, why? Just to spite me? Just to prove the innate intellectual superiority of the scientist to the man of war?"
"Mattern, I'm not injecting personalities into this."
"I'd like to know what you are doing, then? Here we are on a world that's obviously useless to me and probably just as useless to you. Yet you stick me on a technicality and force me to waste a week here. Why, if not out of spite?"