The difference was, however, that the Hunts were happy to get on with their own lives and let the visionaries enjoy their agonizings if that was what they wanted. But the converse wasn’t true. If the world didn’t want to change, then give the Baumers access to the power and they would make it change—because they saw more, and deeper. And the rack, the stake, the Gulag, and the concentration camp showed what could happen when they succeeded.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Hunt lit a cigarette and, easing himself back in the chair at the, desk built into a corner of his personal quarters, contemplated the screen showing the notes he had compiled thus far, along with a list of questions that just seemed to keep growing longer.
Why was Baumer, a Terran, spying for aliens that he had known less than six months, against an administration that had shown nothing but goodwill toward Earth? Because the Jevlenese were at least human, and Ganymeans weren’t? Hunt doubted it. Nothing that hinted of an anti-Ganymean bias had come across in anything Baumer had written or said, or anything he had told Gina. Surely an ideologue of his nature, who saw Jevlen as the potential utopia and its population as putty to be molded, would have sought to work as part of the potential government, not against it—unless he had reason to believe that the Ganymeans wouldn’t be running things for very much longer. That was a thought.
In that case, who was he helping, that he thought might be taking over? Not anybody who wanted the Ganymeans replaced by an occupation force from Earth; that would only be inviting in all the things that Baumer said he had come to Jevlen to get away from. Eubeleus and the Axis? That would have been Hunt’s first guess, but the latest business of wanting to move his whole operation to Uttan, right at the crucial time, flew in the face of it.
Which left the criminal underworld that Cullen had talked about—a conjecture that certainly gained further strength if Obayin’s death had been arranged, as Cullen suspected. But what kind of connection would somebody like Baumer have with a criminal organization? There would hardly be any shared ground in areas of ideology, morality, politics, social goals, or any of the other things
that concerned Baumer. The only alternative that Hunt could see was that they had to have some kind of hold over him. It was hard to imagine any grounds for blackmail: Baumer seemed to have kept his nose clean, and he was here in an official capacity, not a fugitive like Murray. His life style was free of any obvious complications. What, then?
And finally there were the fundamental issues that had brought Hunt to Jevlen, which were still unscratched: What was the source of the “plague” that the Ganymeans believed was making the Jevlenese impervious to reason? Did the ayatollahs represent simply an extreme of a general human trait in the way that Danchekker maintained, or were they a case of something completely different? What was the significance of Uttan?
Lots of questions; not many answers. Gina had come away from her meeting with Baumer depressed by a feeling of failure. But he was still the only obvious lead; how to find out more about him wasn’t so obvious. Hunt reached out to the touchpad and called the transcript of Gina’s talk with Baumer onto a screen to study it again. Two Jevlenese had been leaving just as she arrived. From Gina’s description they sounded like thugs, which strengthened the suspicion that Baumer was connected with the underworld. What kind of business did Baumer conduct with them in his office outside, which he didn’t want brought into PAC?
Hunt read again what Baumer had said to Gina about the translation service wired across the city. Since Thuriens and Jevlenese had been dealing with each other for millennia, small, wearable translator chips to convert between their languages—similar in appearance to the stick-on interfaces to VISAR—had long ago been developed as standard. But Terran dialects—and the Shapieron brand of Ganymean, as well—were new, and the chips couldn’t handle them. So the conversation between Baumer and the Jevlenese had been translated by ZORAC.