ENTOVERSE

It was what Hunt had half expected. “What do you make of it all?” he asked.

“Something’s going on,” Cullen replied. “If you want my opin­ion, I don’t think that bridge coming down was any accident, either.

The police report was sloppy on a lot of points. I think it was rigged.” The same thought had crossed Hunt’s mind. He stretched out a leg and rested his foot on one of the boxes piled around the floor. The office that Cullen had reserved for himself was unpretentious, and just at the moment, half of it was taken up with undivulged items from Earth that had arrived on the Vishnu, and which he had not yet gotten around to unpacking. “What makes you say so?”

“In a lot of ways, life on Jevlen got to be very live-and-let-live under the Thuriens,” Cullen said.

“Which is what you’d expect,” Hunt agreed.

“The laws don’t contain many thou-shalt-nots. So not much is illegal here, and a lot of what we’d think of as the criminal under­world back home is just part of the scene. If you want to get burned on stuff that’s not good for your gray cells, or lose your ass on gaming tables that anyone with a positive IQ knows are as straight as knotted corkscrews, that’s up to you. The Thuriens don’t presume any right to forbid people from being stupid.”

Hunt couldn’t really fault that. “I wouldn’t argue too much with that, either, to tell you the truth, Del. It usually has the effect of sharpening people’s wits a lot faster than most things. But it doesn’t seem to have worked that way here.”

Cullen shrugged. “Anyhow, I think our friend Obayin got too zealous. He was starting to stomp on people’s toes, and somebody somewhere had a corn . . . and what’s more, I suspect that it had something to do with JEVEX.”

“Go on,” Hunt said, looking more interested.

“You know that JEVEX isn’t totally shut down? There’s a core system still running for housekeeping, and to let the Thurien hackers do some poking around in the system.”

‘‘Yes.’’

“Well, the Jevs are a pretty close society, and it’s not easy to get a direct line on what goes on. But Obayin decided to play ball with the new administration. He put together a report for Garuth that we think blew the whistle on a market that nobody’s talking about out there for hooking people in.” Cullen made a palm-upward gesture in the air. “With JEVEX officially off the air, there could be a big demand. That spells money for whoever controls the plugs. But if the Ganymeans think that JEVEX is causing the crazies, a report like that could be enough to make them crack down and ruin the business. Get the scene?”

“It certainly sounds familiar enough,” Hunt agreed. He rubbed his chin, frowning. “You said you think that this report of Obayin’s blew the whistle. Don’t you know? I mean, what does it say?”

“It disappeared before anyone got a chance to go through it.” Cullen shrugged and made a resigned gesture. “The Ganymeans don’t exactly go overboard on what you’d call being security-con­scious. That was one of the reasons why I was moved in here.”

Hunt nodded understandingly. “I can see the problem. And PAC’s full of Jevlenese. You could never be sure of every one of the them, however careful your screening.”

“That’s true,” Cullen said. “And that’s the direction that anyone’s suspicions would naturally turn in. However, although we can’t prove it conclusively, we’re pretty sure that the person who lifted that report was a Terran.”

Hunt looked up in surprise. “Who?”

“A German called Hans Baumer. He’s one of the sociologists that the UN sent here after the Pseudowar to advise the Ganymeans on setting up their administration. He was up in the Ganymean offices one day on what I think was a pretext, and afterward the report was missing.”

“Did you talk to him about it?”

Cullen shook his head. “What would the point have been? He’d just deny it, and I couldn’t prove anything. All it would do is tip him off.”

“And there weren’t any copies?”

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