And if that happened, all their work on trying to understand the J evienese problem would probably have been in vain, just when it seemed that they were onto something important. For Garuth was convinced that there was more to account for in the Jevlenese condition than just apathy and reality-withdrawal caused by overdependence on JEVEX. Something more serious was going on, and had been for a long time. Something about JEVEX had been sending the J evlenese insane.
Garuth slumped back in his chair wearily. “Fortunately, we do have some friends in political circles on Earth,” he said. “Perhaps we can find out from them what’s happening.”
“I’m not so sure it’s their political people that we should be going to,” Shilohin answered in a distant voice.
“No?’’
Shilohin shook her head. “Their affairs are so convoluted that none of us understand them. I was thinking, more, of somebody whom we know we can communicate with and trust—in fact, one of the very first of the Terrans that we met.”
Garuth sat back, his face thoughtful and his eyes illuminated suddenly by a questioning light that seemed to ask why the idea had not occurred to him sooner. “You mean direct? We just forget about ‘proper channels’ and all that official business in between?”
Shilohin shrugged. “Why not? It’s what he’d do.”
“Hmm. . . And he does know them better Garuth thought about it, then looked at Shilohin and grinned. It was the first time she had seen him smile all day.
“As you said yourself, people might start getting killed if we don’t,” she said. “We wouldn’t want to risk that.”
“Of course not.” Garuth raised his voice slightly and addressed the computer-control intelligence built into the Shapieron. “ZORAC.”
“Commander?”
With JEVEX suspended, ZORAC had been coupled into the planetary net to monitor its operations and provide a connection to the Thuriens’ VISAR system.
“Connect a channel into Earthnet for us, right away,” Garuth instructed.
CHAPTER FOUR
Her name was Gina Marin. She was from Seattle, and she wrote books.
“What kind?” Hunt asked. “Anything I might have read?”
Gina pulled a face. “If only you knew how tired writers get of hearing that question.”
He shrugged unapologetically. “It comes naturally. What else are we supposed to say?”
“Not any blockbusters that you’d know as household names,” she told him candidly. Then she sighed. “I guess I have a habit of getting into those controversial things where whatever line you take will upset somebody.” She managed not to sound very remorseful about it. “Taking sides probably isn’t the smart thing to do if you want to be popular.” She shrugged. “But those are the things that make life interesting.
Hunt grinned faintly. “Isn’t there a German proverb about people preferring a popular myth to an unpopular truth?”
“Right. You’ve got it. Exactly.”
They were sitting drinking coffee in the lounge of his apartment, she on a couch by the picture window, he sprawled in the leather recliner by the fireplace. Alongside his recliner was the cluttered surface that served as a desk, elbow-distance bookshelf, breakfast bar, and workbench for a partly dismantled device of peculiar design and fabrication, which he had informed her was from the innards of a Ganymean gravitic communications modulator. The rest of the room was a casual assortment of easygoing bachelordom mixed with the trappings of a theoretical scientist’s workplace. A framed photograph of Hunt with a couple of grinning colleagues and a group of Ganymeans posing in front of a backdrop of the Shapieron was propped on top of the frame of a four-foot wallscreen showing a contour plot of some kind of three-dimensional wave function; a tweedjacket, necktie, and bathrobe hung all together on a cloakroom hook fixed to the endpiece of a set of overloaded bookshelves; there was a reproduction of a Beethoven symphonic score affixed to the wall next to several feet of a program listing hanging above a pile of American Physical Society journals.
“So, you take up unpopular causes,” Hunt said. “Not exactly a creature of the herd, I take it.”
Gina made a brief shake of her head to forestall any misunderstanding. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s not something that I set out to do deliberately, just to be different or anything like that. It’s just that I get interested in things that seem to matter.” She paused. “When you start taking the trouble to find out about things, it’s amazing how often they turn out not to be the way ‘everyone knows’ at all. But once you’re into it that far, you have to go with what’s true as you see it.’’