[9]
"You will not tell me how to run my own division." The words were spaced, like steel rivets, evenly into the air. Dr. Haenlingen looked around the meeting-room, her face not even defiant but simply assured.
Willis, of Labor, was the first to recover. "It's not that we'd like to interfere—" he began.
She didn't let him finish. "That's a lie." Her voice was not excited. It carried the length of the room, and left no echoes.
"Now, Dr. Haenlingen—" Rogier, Metals chairman and head of the meeting, began.
"Don't soft-soap me," the old woman snapped. "I'm too old for it and I'm too tough for it. I want to look at some facts, and I want you to look at them, too." She paused, and nobody said a word. "I want to start with a simple statement. We're in trouble."
"That's exactly the point," Willis began in his thin, high voice. "It's because we all appreciate that fact—"
"That you want to tamper," the old woman said. "Precisely." The others were seated around the long gleaming table of native wood. Dr. Haenlingen stood, her back rigid, at one end, facing them all with a cold and knowing eye. "But I won't allow tampering in my department. I can't allow it."
Rogier took a deep breath. The words came like marshmallow out of his overstuffed body. "I would hardly call a request for information 'tampering'," he said.
"I would," Dr. Haenlingen told him tartly. "I've had a very good reason, over the years, to keep information about my section in my own hands."