Caldwell studied the charts with a new interest once Benson had finished. After a while he sat back and asked, “So what does it tell us? What’s the connection with what went on at Farside? Figured that out yet?”
“I just collect facts,” Benson replied. “I leave the rest to you people.”
Packard moved to the center of the room. “There is another interesting side to the pattern,” he said. “The whole network represents a common ideology-feudalism.” The others looked at him curiously. He explained, “Cliff’s already mentioned their involvement in the antinuclear hysteria of thirty or forty years ago, but
there’s more to it than that.” Re waved a hand at the charts that Benson had been using. “Take the banking consortium that gave Sverenssen his start as an example. Throughout the last quarter of the 1900s they provided a lot of behind-the-scenes backing for moves to fob the Third World off with ‘appropriate technologies,’ for various antiprogress, antiscience lobbies, and that kind of thing. In South Africa we had another branch of the same net pushing racism and preventing progressive government, industrialization, and comprehensive education for blacks. And across the ocean we had a series of right-wing fascist regimes protecting minority interests by military takeovers and at the same time obstructing general advancement. You see, it all adds up to the same basic ideology-preserving the feudal privileges and interests of the power structure of the time. What it says, I guess, is that nothing’s changed all that much.”
Lyn appeared puzzled. “But it has, hasn’t it?” she said. “That’s not the way the world is these days. I thought this guy Sverenssen and the rest were committed to just the opposite-advancing the whole world all over.”
“What I meant was that the same people are still there,” Packard replied. “But you’re right-their underlying policy seems to have shifted in the last thirty years or so. Sverenssen’s bankers provided easy credit for Nigerian fusion and steel under a gold-backed standard that couldn’t have worked without the cooperation of people like the Van Geelinks. South American oil helped defuse the Middle East by leading the changeover to hydrogen-based substitutes, which was one of the things that made disarmament possible.” He shrugged. “Suddenly everything changed. The backing was there for things that could have been done fifty years earlier.”
“So what about their line at Bruno?” Caldwell asked again, looking mystified. “It doesn’t fit.”
There was a short silence before Packard proceeded. “How’s this for a theory? Controlling minorities never have anything to gain from change. That explains their traditional opposition to technology all through history, unless it offered something to advance their interests. That meant it was okay as long as they controlled it. Hence we get the traditional stance of their kind through to the end of the last century. But by that time it was becoming obvious from the way the world was going that if something didn’t change soon, somebody was going to start pressing buttons, and then there wouldn’t be any kind of pond left to be a fish in. The only choice was nuclear reactors or nuclear bombs. So this revolution they made happen, and they managed to maintain control in the process-which was neat.
“But Thurien and everything it could mean was something else. This group would have been swept away by the time the dust from that kind of revolution finally settled. So they cornered the UN handling of the matter and put up a wall until they got some ideas about where to go next.” He threw out his hands and looked around the room to invite comment.
“How did they find out about the relay?” Norman Pacey asked from a corner. “We know from what Gregg and Lyn said that the coded signals had nothing to do with it. And we know Sobroskin wasn’t mixed up with it.”
“They must have been involved with getting rid of it,” Packard replied. “I don’t know how, but I can’t think of anything else. They could have used some personr’el of UNSA who they knew wouldn’t talk, or maybe a government or commercial outfit that operates independently to send a bomb or something out there