“But why?” Jo said. “If all history is fixed, why do we bother with these boy-meets-girl assignments, for instance?
The meetings will happen anyhow.”
“Of course they will,” Krasna agreed immediately. “But look, Jo. Our interests as a government depend upon the future. We operate as if the future is as real as the past, and so far we haven’t been disappointed: the Service is 100 per cent successful. But that very success isn’t without its warnings. What would happen if we stopped supervising events? We don’t know, and we don’t dare take the chance.
Despite the evidence that the future is fixed, we have to take on the role of the caretaker of inevitability. We believe that nothing can possibly go wrong … but we have to act on the philosophy that history helps only those who help themselves.
“That’s why we safeguard huge numbers of courtships right through to contract, and even beyond it. We have to see to it that every single person who is mentioned in any Dirac ‘cast gets born. Our obligation as Event Police is to make the events of the future possible, because those events are crucial to our societyeven the smallest of them. It’s an enormous task, believe me, and it gets bigger and bigger every day. Apparently it always will.”
“Always?” Jo said. “What about the public? Isn’t it going to smell this out sooner or later? The evidence is piling up at a terrific rate.”
“Yes and no,” Krasna said. “Lots of people are smelling it out right now, just as you did. But the number of new people we need in the Service grows fasterit’s always ahead of the number of laymen who follow the clues to the truth.”