“At the Maddox—a small hotel on the east side of town.”
“Uh-huh.” Hunt watched her silently for a few seconds to let the preliminary talk fade into the background. “So,” he said finally, “now that you’re here, what can I do for you?”
“I’d like some help with a new book that I want to write.” Gina drew back from the window, but instead of sitting back down on the couch, she crossed the lounge and turned, arms folded, propping herself against the table carrying the comnet terminal. “About the Jevlenese. You’re one of the few original sources, and from what I’ve read, a pretty open and approachable one. So I’m approaching.”
Hunt had already guessed that it would be something like that. Her directness about it was refreshing. The public was already being deluged with popular material, most of it secondhand information and wild speculation, being churned out in the rush to cash in by people who didn’t know what they were talking about. Concocting plausible but unsubstantiated reasons why any historical figure that somebody disliked or disagreed with had been a Jevlenese agent had become something of a game in the popular media.
“There’s some awful stuff out there,” he agreed, anticipating her line. “People are being told all kinds of nonsense. So you decided to come to somebody who was in at the beginning.” He nodded in a way that said he couldn’t find anything to argue with in that.
But Gina shook her head. She went back to the chair that she had occupied before and sat down. “No, that isn’t quite it. I’m more interested in some of the things they’re not being told.”
Hunt stroked the side of his nose with a finger and looked at her curiously. “Go on.”
“Let’s make sure I’ve got the background correct.”
“Okay.”
“The Jevlenese and ourselves are both the same, equally human species, descended from the same ancestors, right?”
Hunt nodded. “The Lunarians, yes.”
“But the civilization on Jevlen is more advanced, which isn’t surprising since it grew up under the wing of the Thuriens. The early colony on Earth was almost wiped out and went back to barbarism.”
“Yes,” Hunt said, nodding again.
Gina leaned forward. “But before all that happened, the Lunarian civilization on Minerva also discovered the sciences rapidly and reached an advanced stage much faster than we did, without any Ganymean help. The reason we didn’t do the same was that the Jevlenese retarded Earth’s development by infiltrating agents to spread irrational belief systems and organize cults based on superstition and unreason. That’s why it took us two thousand years to get from Euclid to Newton.”
“It took the Lunarians closer to two hundred,” Hunt said.
Gina’s voice took on a curious, more distant tone. “Just think. . nobody ever thought of Homer as a science writer before. The Iliad could all have been real—an authentic account of human contact with an alien race. Take Hesiod’s account of the origins of the
universe. First there was Chaos: just dark, empty space and protoelements. Then Gaea, the fusion of Earth and Life, and Uranus, the star—filled heavens, were born from Eros, the force of attraction that causes all things to come together. Expressed in those terms, it does come interestingly close to the real thing, doesn’t it?”
“You’ve been doing some homework,” Hunt murmured.
“The gods that kept coming down and meddling in the Trojan War might actually have existed. Maybe the Biblical miracles really happened, and Velikovsky had a point after all. Is it any wonder that ideas of magic and the supernatural became so deeply rooted here? At one time, it really used to work.”
Hunt wondered where she was leading. Everything she had said so far was more or less public knowledge.
She waited for a moment, then tossed out a hand lightly. “Speculating on which figures in history may or may not have been Jevlenese provocateurs has become a popular pastime these days. But what I’d like to see is something on a few of the obvious candidates that people aren’t talking about.”
Hunt stared at her for a second to be sure he had followed, then nodded. It was not a thought that had eluded him completely. “Christ,” he muttered.