Services” of the Galactic Federation-and it is needless to say what kind of coverage this
new service provided.
Six men now sat at Maynard’s conference table. Maynard, as usual, was at its head.
Lansing of WarnOil sat at his left. Spehn sat at his right. Next to Spehn was a newcomer
to the summit table-Vice-President Guerdon Dann, the Admiral of InStell’s far-flung fleet
of private police battleships. In full uniform, he was the typical officer of space: big, lean,
hard, poised, and thoroughly fit. While older, of course, than a line officer, his stiff,
crew-cut red hair was only lightly sprinkled with gray and he did not as yet wear lenses.
Side by side, below Lansing, sat two other newcomers, Feodr Ilyowicz and Li Hing
Wong, Russian and Chinese directors on the Board.
“Yes, it’ll be milk,” Spehn was saying. “Impossible to automate, easy to make one
hundred percent effective, and of extremely high emotional value.”
“Right,” Maynard agreed. “How the sobbers will shriek and scream about our starving
helpless babies to death by the thousands. Any idea yet as to time?”
“Nothing definite, but it’ll be fairly soon and the general strike won’t be. They’re holding
that up while they’re looking for our base, and nobody is even close yet to suspecting
where Base is. Deissner and Nameless are all steamed up about the vanishing boys and
girls and automation, but they’re looking for them on a new planet out in space
somewhere, not on an island on Galmetia. Are the kids still happy in Siberia?”
“Very much so; the bonuses take care of the isolation angle very nicely. They’re making a
game of being Siberians. They know it won’t be too long and they know why we have to
be absolutely sure that a lot of stuff stays hush-hush.”
“Good. Next, Dutch Deissner is making independent noises and is getting big ideas. Full
partnership, no less.” ` “He’ll get himself squashed like a bug.”
“Maybe, but so far he’s been doing most of the squashing and Mister Big is burning like a
torch.”
“Umm … um . . . mm.” Maynard thought for a moment. “So you think EastHem actually
will bomb?” “They’re sure to.” Spehn glanced across the table at Ilyowicz and Li who
both nodded. “Not too long, I think, after the general strike is called-especially when we
foul it up. Extra-heavy stuff on all our military installations, and really dirty
stuff-one-hundred-percent-lethal nerve gas-on all our biggest cities. Wait a couple of
months and take over.”
“But retaliation-oh, sure, evacuation of the upper strata, they figure they have too many
people, anyway.” “Check. They figure on losing millions of peasants and workers. They
plan on getting a lot of people away, but I can’t get even an inkling as to where. Do either
of you fellows have any ideas on that?”
Li shook his head and Ilyowicz said, “No. I do not believe it can be a developed planet; I
do not think that such a project could have been carried out so tracelessly. My thought is
that it is a temporary hide-out merely, on some distant virgin planet.”
“That makes sense,” Spehn said. “How are you making out on the subs and the big jets,
Guerd?”
“Satisfactory,” the admiral replied. “Everybody with half a brain is with us. We’ll be ready
as soon as those missile-killers come through. How are they doing on them, Mr.
Maynard?”
“It took a long time to develop controls rigid enough to stand the gravs, but they’re in full
production now. You can start picking them up at Base next Thursday morning.”
“Fine!” Dann glanced at the two Asiatics. “How are you two doing? Your jobs are tougher
than ours.” “Different, but easier, if anything,” Ilyowicz said, and Li nodded twice. “All
really intelligent persons are opposed to government by terrorism. A surprisingly large
number of such persons proved to have enough psionic ability so that our so-called
mystics could teach them to receive and to transmit thought. Thus we have no cells, no
meetings, the absolute minimum of physical contact, and no traceable or detectable
communications. Thus, the Nameless One has not now and will not have any suspicion
that he and five hundred seventy three of his butchers will die on signal.”
The Westerners gasped. East was vastly different from West. “But if you can do that,
why . . . ?” Dann began, but shut himself up. That was their job, not his.
“Right.” Maynard approved the unspoken thought. “Well, does that cover it?”
“Not quite-one thing bothers me,” Spehn said. “The minute we blockade Earth the whole
financial system of the galaxy collapses.”
“You tell him, Paul,” Maynard said. “You’re Deston and Deston.”
“Covered like a sucker’s bet.” Lansing laughed and slapped himself zestfully on the leg.
“That’s the prize joker of the whole business. GalBank-the First Galaxian Bank of
Newmars-opens for business day after tomorrow. Have you got any idea of what a
solid-cash basis even one installation like Project Barbizon is? Or especially Rhenia Four,
that’s bringing in a net profit of a megabuck an hour? And DesDes owns ’em by the
dozen. Hell, we could fight an interstellar war out of petty cash and never miss it from the
till. Son, if Dutch and Slobski had any idea of how much hard-cash money we’ve got it’d
scare the bastards right out of their pants.”
“I see.” Spehn thought for a moment. “I never thought of it before, but the way leybyrdite
is taking everything over, no ordinary bank could handle it, at that. And May nard, I’ve
studied the material you gave us on your board-of-directors government of the Galactic
Federation and I’ll vote for it. Nothing else has ever worked, so it’s time something
different was tried.”
“It won’t be easy, but I’m pretty sure it can be made to work. After all, there have been
quite a few self-cleaning boards of directors that have lasted for generations; showing
substantial profits, yet adhering rigorously to the Principle of Enlightened Self-Interest.
Examples, the largest firms in existence.
“To succeed, our board must both adhere to that Principle and show a profit-the profit in
this case being in terms of the welfare of the human race as a whole. Is there anything
else to come before this meeting?”
was nothing else.
“That’s it, then. Round it off neatly, Miss Champion -the adjournment and so forth-as
usual.”
Chapter 12
HIGHER EDUCATION
Andrew Adams had what was probably the finest mind of any strictly human being of his
age. He had a voracious and insatiable appetite for knowledge; his brain was an unfilled
and unfillable reservoir. He was without prejudice, inhibition, or bias. He could, and
frequently did, toss a laboriously-developed theory or hypothesis of his own down the
drain in favor of someone else’s anyone else’s-that gave even slightly better predictions
than did his own.
Being what he was, it was inevitable that when the Destons gave Adams his first real
insight into telepathy and, through it, into the unimaginably vast and theretofore almost
hermetically sealed universe of psionics, he dropped his old researches in favor of the
new. He and his wife studied, more and ever more intensively, the possibilities and
potentialities of the mind as the mind. Scholar-like, however, they needed to analyze and
digest all the information available having any hearing upon the subject. Therefore, since
there was no esoterica of that type in the Procyon’s library, they went back to Earth.
The Adams apartment was a fairly large one; five rooms on the sixteenth floor of
Grantland Hall in Ann Arbor, overlooking the somewhat crowded but beautifully
landscaped campus of the University of Michigan. Their living room was large-seventeen
by twenty five feet-but it was the Adams, not the ordinary, concept of a living room.
Almost everything in it was designed for books and tapes; everything in it was designed
for study.
First, they went through their own library’s stores of philosophy, of metaphysics, of
paraphysics, of occultism, of spiritualism, of voodooism, of scores of kinds of cultism and
even more kinds of crackpotism, from Forteanism up-or down. They studied thousands
of words to glean single phrases of truth. Or, more frequently, bits of something that
could be developed into truth or into something having to do with truth. Then they
exhausted the resources of the University’s immense library; after which they requested
twenty two exceedingly rare tomes from the Crerar Library of Chicago. This was
unusual, since scholars usually came to the Crerar instead of vice-versa, but Adams was
Andrew Adams of the College; one of the very biggest of the Big Brains. Wherefore:
It can be arranged, Dr. Adams,” Crerar’s head librarian told him, as one bibliophile to
another. “These are replicas, of course-most of the originals are in Rome-and not one of
them has been consulted for over five years. I’m glad to have you study these volumes, if
for no other reason than to show that they are not really dead wood.”