toon resonated under themshot a starded glance at her.
“Weren’t you told why you were being sent here? I’d
have expected you to raise hell at having your leave
postponed when you’ve waited twenty years for it!”
“No, I just did as I was told.” Maddalena narrowed
her eyes against the brilliant sunshine and let her gaze
rove over the ddily-parked spaceships.
“Hm! You must have changed in the years since we
last met,” Langenschmidt said. “Yon used to be a con-
siderable spitfire. Well, IWell!” He ran his hand
around the collar of his full-dress jacket. “I’d better start
by explaining, hadn’t I? It’s to do with the ZRP’s, of
course. The row about non-interference has blown up
yet once moreit’s been in the wind since shortly before
I was recalled from my beat and put in charge here, and
I was put in charge here for precisely the reason that the
centre of the whole brewing row was right on Cyclops.”
Maddalena, hardly paying attention, made some sort of
sound interpretable as an interested comment.
Langenschmidt went on: “In fact, some of it was to
do with our little affair at Carrig. Although they were
never able to come out and complain openly, the pride
of the Cyclops government was badly hurt by the fact
that a hundred or so Cyclopeans had been dropped into
volcanoes by dirty smelly barbarians, and that we hadn’t
acted to stop this because of the principle of non-inter-
ference with ZRP development. It takes years to stir up
trouble when there are two hundred and whatevertwo
hundred sixty, isn’t it?worlds with a say in running the
Corps, but a determined party can get the wheels turn-
ing eventually. And on Cyclops we have just such a de-
termined party. Her name is Alura Quist, and if there
weren’t officially a representative government here I’d
say she was a dictator. She’s just ahunstoppable.
“The Cyclopeans don’t like having our base here, but
they can’t balance their planetary budget without the
revenue it brings in. So short of kicking the Corps off-
planet, there’s only one way they can get back at us for
the Carrig business. That’s to attack our prized principle
of non-interference. And with a view to this, Quist is
right now staging a big conference on the subject, with
delegates from all kinds of worlds including Earth, and
frankly I’m horrified at the influential names she’s man-
aged to rope in.
“The problem is in my lap, Maddalena, and I’ve wor-
ried myself stupid about it. They put me here to try and
stave off what Quist is doing, and I’m losing out. When I
heard you were at the end of your tour, I thought, ‘By
Cosmos! She’s from Earth, and out this way Earthborn
Corpsmen are few and far betweenshe’s served as an
on-planet agent, so she has first-hand testimony avail-
able.’ For all these and several other reasons, I thought
maybe you’d jolt my mind out of its old grooves and
somehow inspire me to get the better of Quist.”
Maddalena stirred and turned her finely-shaped head.
Her former look of fragility, Langenschmidt noted, had
faded, and she seemed toughened and far less feminine.
“After twenty years watching a gang of Zarathustra
refugees getting nowhere, Gus, I’m pretty well con-
vinced myself that it’s a crime to leave them to make
fools of themselves. I’m sorry to disappoint you within
minutes of our first meeting in years, but that’s the way I
feel right now, and if you want to convince the dele-
gates to this conference that non-interference is the right
course, you can start by trying it on me!”
m
For the third time Bracy Dyge began on the miscel-
laneous collection of transistors littering the bottom of
his spares box, hoping against hope that the fault in his
fish-finder would put itself right. He was four days from
port, even if he started home right away, in this sluggish
ancient trawler which represented his whole family’s
means of supportwith himself as sole able-bodied
seaman. He had been three days on the fishing-grounds,
and only last night had he cottoned on to the fact that
the reason for his inability to locate any schools of oilfish