Here, and for the first time in more years than he could remember, Sax felt supremely in his element. Scientific conferences were all the same, at all times and in all places, even down to the way people dressed: the men in conservative, slightly shabby professorial jackets, all tans and browns and dark rust colors; the women, perhaps thirty percent of the total population, in unusually drab and severe business dress; many people still wearing spectacles, even though it was a rare vision problem that was not correctable by surgery; most of them carrying around their program packets; everyone with their name tag on their left lapel. Inside the darkened meeting rooms Sax passed talks that were beginning, and there too all was the same as ever: speakers standing before video screens that displayed their graphs and tables and molecular structures and so on, talking in stilted candences timed to the rhythm of their images, using a pointer to indicate the parts of overcrowded diagrams that were relevant. . . . The audiences, composed of the thirty or forty colleagues most interested in the work being described, sat in rows of chairs next to their friends, listening closely and readying questions that they would ask at the end of the presentation.

For those fond of this world, it was a very pleasant sight. Sax poked his head into several of the rooms, but none of the talks intrigued him enough to draw him in, and soon he found himself in a hall full of poster displays, so he kept on browsing.

“Solubilization of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbons in Monomeric and Micellar Surfactant Solutions.” “Post-Pumping Subsidence in Southern Vastitas Borealis.” “Epithelial Resistance to Third-Stage Gerontological Treatment.” “Incidence of Radial Fracture Aquifers in Impact Basin Rims.” “Low-voltage Electroporation of Long Vector Plasmids.” “Katabatic Winds in Echus Chasma.” “Base Genome for a New Cactus Genera.” “Resurfacing of the Martian Highlands in the Amenthes and Tyrrhena Region.” “Deposition of the Nilosyrtis Sodium Nitrate Strata.” “A Method for Assessing Occupational Exposure to Chlorophenates Through Analysis of Contaminated Work Clothing.”

As always, the posters were a deliciously mixed bag. They were posters rather than talks for a variety of reasons— often the work of graduate students at the university in Sabishii, or concerned with topics peripheral to the conference— but anything might be there, and it was always very interesting to browse. And at this conference there had been no strong attempt to organize the posters into hallways by subject matter, so that “Distribution of Rhizocarpon geographicum in the East Charitum Montes,” detailing the high-altitude fortunes of a crustose lichen that could live up to four thousand years, was facing “Origins of Graupel Snow in Saline Particulates Found in Cirrus, Altostratus and Altocumulus Clouds in Cyclonic Vortexes in North Tharsis,” a meteorological study of some importance.