Hunt caught Lyn’s eye as he sent a despairing look around the room. She sent back a faint half-smile and a barely perceptible shrug that said she knew how he felt. A faction inside the UN had fought hard and for the same reasons to prevent the Farside transmissions being continued after the first, unexpected reply had come in, he remembered, but had been overruled after a deafening outcry from the world’s scientific community. That same faction seemed to be active again.
“The worst part is what we suspect might be behind it,” Heller continued. “Our brief from the State Department was to help move things smoothly toward broadening Earth’s communications with Thurien as fast as developments allowed, at the same time protecting this country’s interests where appropriate. The Department didn’t really agree with the policy of excluding outsiders, but had to go along with it because of UN protocols. In other words, the U.S. has been trying to play it straight so far, but under protest.”
“I can see the picture,” Hunt said as she paused. “But that just says that you’re becoming frustrated by the slow progress. You sounded as if there’s more to it than that.”
“There is,” Heller confirmed. “The Soviets also have a representative on the delegation-a man called Sobroskin. Given the world situation-with us and the Soviets competing everywhere for things like the South Atlantic fusion deal, industrial-training franchises in Africa, scientific-aid programs, and so on-the advantage that either side could get from access to Ganymean know-how would be enormous. So you’d expect the Soviets to be just as impatient to kick some life into this damn delegation as we are. But they aren’t. Sobroskin goes along with the official UN line and doesn’t bitch about it. In fact he spends half his time throwing in complications that slow things down even further. Now when those facts are laid down side by side, what do they seem to say?”
Hunt thought over the question for a while, then tossed out his hands with a shrug. “I don’t know,” he said candidly. “I’m not a political animal. You tell me.”
“It could mean that the Soviets are planning to set up their own private channel to fix a landing in Siberia or somewhere so that they get exclusive rights,” Pacey answered. “If that’s so, then the UN line would suit them fine. If the official channel stays clogged up, and the U.S. plays straight and sticks with the official channel, then guess who walks off with the bonanza. Think of the difference it would make to the power balance if a few heads of select governments around the world were quietly tipped off that the Soviets had access to lots of know-how that we didn’t. You see
-it all fits with the way Sobroskin is acting.”
“And an even more sobering thought is the way in which the UN’s policy fits in with that so conveniently,” Heller added. “It could mean that the Soviets have ways that we don’t even know about of pulling all kinds of strings and levers right inside the top levels of the UN itself. If that’s true, the global implications for the U.S. are serious indeed.”
The facts were certainly beginning to add up, Hunt admitted to himself. The Soviets could easily set up another long-range communications facility in Siberia, up in orbit, out near Luna maybe, and operate their own link to whatever was intercepting Farside’s signals out beyond the edge of the solar system. Any reply coming back would probably be in the form of a fairly wide beam by the time it got to Earth, which meant that anybody could receive it and know that somebody somewhere other than the UN was cheating. But if the replies were in a prearranged code, nobody would be able to interpret them or know for whom they were in-tended. The Soviets might be accused, in which case they would deny the charge vehemently . . . and that would be about as much as anybody would be able to do about it.
He thought he could see now why he had been brought in on all this. Heller had given herself away earlier when she said that the U.S. had been trying to play it straight, “so far.” As insurance the State Department had decided that it needed its own private line too, but nothing crude enough to be detected anywhere within a few hundred thousand miles of Earth. So who would they have sent Heller and Pacey to talk to? Who else but someone who knew a lot about Ganymeans and Ganymean technology, some