A day later I got orders to start winding up the BEE's installations on Niobe. The consular service would take over after I had finished....
Lanceford looked at his watch. "Well, we're going to have time. It looks like they'll be late. Want to hear the rest of it?"
"Naturally," Perkins said. "I certainly wouldn't want you to stop here."
"Well," Lanceford continued, "the next four years weren't much."
We spent most of the time closing down the outpost and regional installations, but it took longer than I expected what with the difficulty in getting shipping space to move anything but viscaya concentrate off the planet. Of course, like any of the Confederation bureaus, the BEE died hard. With one thing and another, there were still a lot of our old people left. We still had the three main bases on the continental land masses in operating condition, plus a few regional experiment stations on Alpha Continent and the Marine Biology Labs on Varnel Island. I'd just closed the last regional stations on Beta and Gamma when Heinz Bergdorf paid me an official call.
Heinz was the senior biologist on Varnel. He was a good looking lad of Teutonic ancestry, one of those big blond kids who fool you. He didn't look like a scientist, but his skull held more knowledge of Niobe's oceans than was good for a man. He would have to unlearn a lot of it before he took his next job, or so I thought at the time.
Anyway, Heinz came into my office looking like someone had stolen his favorite fishnet. The expression of Olympian gloom on his beak-nosed face would have done credit to Zeus. It didn't take any great amount of brains to see that Heinz was worried. It stuck out all over him. He draped himself limply in the chair beside my desk.
"We've got troubles, Chief," he announced.