James Hogan - Entoverse

But Grevetz and Scirio, used to that from somebody who thought he was a walking extension of a computer, reacted impassively.

The subject of Eubeleus’s wrath was a document lying on the table at which Grevetz and Scirio were sitting. It was a report from Obayin, the deputy chief of the Shiban police, to Garuth, head of the Ganymean administration headquartered at the Planetary Administration Center, on the facilities for illicit access into JEVEX that had been uncovered both in that region of Jevlen and elsewhere. And it reported them straight, without playing things down. That kind of overzealousness could lose the Axis a lot of followers-not to mention cost Grevetz a lot of lost revenue from his own clients-if the authorities started taking serious action. A deputy chief of police who was any use would have known that. And there were longer-term plans that Eubeleus had chosen not to divulge yet that were far more important and stood to be disrupted even more. The risk was intolerable.

“So what if we do get rid of him?” Grevetz asked. “Do you have anybody in particular in mind to take over?”

“Whom do you have prepared?” Eubeleus threw back.

Grevetz looked at Scirio. “What are we paying Langerif these days?”

“Enough. It has to be. It’s the second cut down, anyhow.”

“We’d go for Langerif,” Grevetz told Eubeleus.

The Deliverer nodded. “I shall have his record checked by my own sources. If it proves satisfactory, a word in the right quarters will assure his appointment.” He tossed out an arm beneath his cape as if casting out an evil and moved a few paces away. “Then I can leave the more immediate aspect to you?” he said, turning and staring at Grevetz.

Grevetz looked across the table at Scirio. “He’s on your turf. Reckon you can arrange a convenient accident or something for citizen Obayin?”

“It would take a little thought. He likes to be careful.”

“I can arrange some suitable disturbances about the city,” Eubeleus offered. “A turbulent and discordant background, against which all manner of the unlikely and the unexpected might happen?”

“It’s the kind of thing that would get him out there,” Grevetz agreed.

Scirio rubbed his chin and nodded. “Like I say, let me think about it from a few angles. I figure we should be able to come up with something.”

The window behind the desk looked out over the bronzed-glass office towers, concrete experimental buildings, and tree-lined avenues of the UN Space Arm’s Goddard Space Center. At the desk in front of it, a stockily built figure with a craggy face and close-cropped, steel gray hair drummed a tattoo on the leather top with his fingers. “What did they want?” Gregg Caldwell, director of UNSA’s recently formed Advanced Sciences Division, demanded in his gravelly, bass baritone voice.

The Thurien contact had made nonsense of all the plans for Man’s expansion into space, just when those plans had at last begun taking shape as a united effort by the entire race. Accepting the pointlessness of preserving forms that even its bureaucrats were unable to deny now served no sensible purpose, UNSA had scrapped most of its previous organizational structure to clear the decks for the new challenges. This had included wrapping up Caldwell’s former Navigation and Communications Division, which would have had about as much relevance to the changed circumstances as an astrolabe on the command deck of one of the Jupiter mission ships. Caldwell had moved to Washington to set up a new division charged with assimilating as much of the alien technology into Earth’s space program as was practicable and desirable, and Hunt had moved with him to become deputy director.

Hunt answered from a leather-upholstered easy chair in front of a battery of display screens on the opposite wall. Caldwell had always liked big windows and lots of screens. His old office at Navcomms HQ in Houston had been fitted the same way.

“Garuth’s realizing that he bit off more than he could chew when he agreed to take charge on Jevlen. Let’s be frank, Gregg-it was a daft idea in the first place. Ganymeans aren’t cut out to be planetary overlords. We should have put our foot down harder when Calazar and the rest of the Thuriens came up with it. Neither of us was happy about it at the time.”

Caldwell shrugged. In the headiness of those times, everyone’s judgment had been affected. Nothing could be done about it now. “You can’t miss if you never shoot at anything,” he replied. “What kind of problems are they having with the Jevlenese?”

“Nothing that would seem especially strange to us: civil disturbances and agitation. But to Ganymean minds it doesn’t make any sense. They don’t know how to handle the illogic of it.”

“They still don’t know what to make of people acting normal, eh?”

“I’m not sure they ever will-completely.”

“What kind of illogic are we talking about? Give me a specific.” Hunt spread his hands for an instant. “Oh, keeping JEVEX shut down means that the Jevlenese can’t function without Ganymean help-at least, so some of them say. Therefore the situation equates to forced subjugation and violates their rights of self-determination. And then the standard terrorist line: If we end up killing each other because we don’t like it, it will be your responsibility.”

“Which the Ganymeans buy, right?”

“They believe it, but they don’t understand it.”

“It sounds as if the leash is on the wrong way round, all right,” Caldwell agreed.

“Yes… but what’s making matters worse is the withdrawal symptoms of unhooking them from JEVEX, which it seems everyone underestimated. Garuth says the number of headworld junkies there was epidemic. You have to admit, it is the ultimate in escapism. People could get into it in a big way-even the Thuriens admit they sometimes have problems with it. But in the case of the Jevlenese, it’s left half the population with no idea of how to cope. They’ve been conditioned to be totally, uncritically receptive, which makes them complete suckers for anyone with a message to put in their heads.”

“Hmm.” Caldwell drummed on the desk again for a second. “I thought the UN sent a bunch of sociologists and psychiatrists there who were supposed to know about how to deal with that kind of thing. How come they’re not handling it?”

Hunt made a you-know-how-it-is gesture. “They’re out-of-work social engineers looking for new places to take their theories now that people here are managing their own lives instead of expecting governments to do everything for them. Apparently the experts are producing lots of reports and statistics, but when anything serious happens they head for cover and leave it to the riot police.”

“So why is Garuth coming to us? Our business is Ganymean physics, not Jevlenese psychology.” Caldwell already had a pretty good idea of the reason; he just wanted to hear Hunt’s reading of it.

“He’s worried that if things get worse and JPC starts to panic, he might be pulled out and replaced by a Terran military administration. They’ve been putting in a lot of work there, Gregg.”

Caldwell nodded. “Garuth doesn’t want to see it all go to waste,” he guessed, saving Hunt the need to spell it out. “Just when they might have been about to see some results?”

“That-and more.” Hunt motioned briefly with a hand. “He sounded as if he thought they were close to discovering something important about what’s screwing up the Jevlenese-more than their simply being JEVEX cabbages. But putting in a Colonel Blimp-style board of governors there would blow any chance of getting to the bottom of it.” Hunt shook his head before Caldwell could ask. “He didn’t go into any more details.”