The file concluded with a final note from McLeod to the director, dated 19 June 2231:
My dear Mr. FitzMaugham:
The X-72 will leave Nairobi in eleven hours, bound outward, manned by a crew of sixteen, including myself. The men are all impatient for the departure. I must offer my hearty thanks for the help you have given us over the past years, without which we would never have reached this step.
Flight plans include visiting several of the nearer stars, with the intention of returning either as soon as we have discovered a habitable extrasolar world, or one year after departure, whichever first occurs.
Sincere good wishes, and may you have as much success when you plead your case before the United Nations as we have had here—though you'll forgive me for hoping that our work might make any population equalization program on Earth totally superfluous!
McLeod
Walton stared at the three notes for a moment, so shocked he was unable to react. So a faster-than-light drive was not merely a hoped-for dream, but an actuality—with the first scouting mission a year absent already!
He felt a new burst of admiration for FitzMaugham. What a marvelous old scoundrel he had been!
Faster-than-light achieved, and the terraforming group on Venus, and neither fact released to the public ... or even specifically given to FitzMaugham's own staff, his alleged confidants.
It had been shrewd of him, all right. He had made sure nothing could go wrong. If something happened to Lang and his crew on Venus—and it was quite possible, since word from them was a week overdue—it would be easy to say that the terraforming project was still in the planning stage. In the event of success, the excuse was that word of their progress had been withheld for "security reasons."
And the same would apply to the space drive; if McLeod and his men vanished into the nether regions of interstellar space and never returned, FitzMaugham would not have had to answer for the failure of a project which, as far as the public knew, was still in the planning stage. It was a double-edged sword with the director controlling both edges.
And now Walton was in charge. He hoped he would be able to continue manipulations with an aplomb worthy of the late Director FitzMaugham.
The annunciator chimed. "Dr. Lamarre is here for his appointment with you, Mr. Walton."
Walton was caught off guard. His mind raced furiously. Lamarre? Who the dickens—oh, that left-over appointment of FitzMaugham's.