Chapter Eleven
In Which I (Almost) Learn the Meaning of Life
Valerie acted so self assured, but I really doubted she and her handlers knew all that I knew. It’s difficult or impossible to keep a secret for very long if it can be told in a word or two. Passwords and passphrases can be hacked. Keywords and simple facts can be guessed. “Lukewarm fusion” is hardly a notion that, even if true, could be protected from a curious public, let alone an unscrupulous press that eavesdrops in person and in cyberspace and pays interns to paw through your garbage bin. So it didn’t surprise me, nor particularly worry me, that Valerie might have dug up that factoid about the Pasha’s subterranean power plant’s seeming to be a technological miracle on a par with suspending the law of gravity or achieving p
