As they passed through the buzzing arcades and plazas, Hunt tried to make more sense out of what had happened. He didn’t believe that the real motivation could be simply a straight takeover of the administration for the reasons Langerif had claimed. JPC was already talking about winding the existing administration up, and the obvious thing would have been to wait and see what came of it.
The only other possible aim was to prevent details getting back to JPC and the powers behind it of what was happening at PAC. But all that anyone outside could know was that the Ganymeans were
checking out the main JEVEX sites, and all that could tell anyone was that a lot of JevEX was not where it was supposed to be. That meant that whoever was behind it did not want people making the connection with Uttan; which was another way of saying that they were very anxious not to give JPC any grounds for reconsidering its decision to let Eubeleus go there.
The street they were following crossed a small square in which a wildly gesticulating ayatollah clad in a yellow tunic and green smock was haranguing a crowd pressed from wall to wall. There was no quick way through. They could either work their way across to where the street continued on the far side, or back up and find another way around. Hunt looked resignedly at Gina. She shrugged back. He turned and began edging his way between the waving, applauding Jevlenese.
What he sensed wasn’t the uplifting, jubilant kind of excitement that went with carnivals and festivals. It was more intense, fervently passionate. The faces around them were inflamed, mouths writhing mindless slogans, eyes glazed, oblivious to all but some inner rapture. This was the beast that made lynch mobs and Nuremberg rallies out of the same people who brought their children to Sunday-afternoon parades.
No, Hunt told himself after they had gone a few yards. The beast wasn’t in the crowd. It was up there, on the makeshift platform of packing boxes fronted with banners. It didn’t belong to the rational universe. It was a product of another place, another reality.
He looked at the crowd again: unaware, unseeing, incapable of knowing. Nothing would ever change of its own accord there. And he looked at the shrewd, hawklike features of the speaker, scanning, alert to every feedback and cue, trying to grasp the alienness staring out from behind the glittering eyes.
The eyes seemed to meet Hunt’s for an instant, and even at that distance Hunt had the eerie feeling that his thoughts were being read as plainly as his face. He wondered how long ago the being inside the body he was looking at had found itself staring out at this new world. Whether his initial reactions had been of terror or otherwise, he had come to terms with his new existence and its irreversibility, and mastered the survival skills of the niche in which he found himself. And all the while, the mass of those who had been born there and belonged there immersed themselves in fantasies and waited for the Thuriens to repair their decaying cities. And from their unwitting ranks, the intruders had recruited the followers that they needed around them to make them feel secure. Just as was happening right now, in front of Hunt’s eyes.
Just as had been happening on Earth all through its history because of the agents that the Jevlenese had sent there. Those were the ones whose insecurity had appeared as paranoia or the craving to control others, in a way that normal people were incapable of comprehending. And now Hunt could see why that should be so. The agents that had infiltrated Earth to perpetrate some of its worst episodes of brutality and inhumanity had not been human at all. Their only goal had always been what Hunt was witnessing right now: to secure themselves against other rivals from the Entoverse by reinforcing their own army of fanatics. The simple, undeveloped peoples of Earth became what misplaced Thurien benevolence had turned the bulk of the Jevlenese into: a ready—made pool of exploitable recruiting fodder.
Exploitable recruiting fodder . . . The phrase kept running through Hunt’s mind all the way to Murray’s.