“Look at what Lan did in those last days back on Earth,” Cavan said to her. “If you’d had a good idea that Valcroix’s people were going to pull off something like they did, wouldn’t that be exactly the kind of person you’d want to have here? I’m sorry if it was using you, Lan, and that it put you in personal danger. But as you can see now, a lot more was at stake.” He shrugged in a way that said life had to be that way sometimes. “Anyway, as you yourself said a moment ago, I did give you the opportunity to volunteer.”
Keene just shook his head, for the moment too taken aback by the enormity of the whole picture that was opening up to respond.
“Are you saying you knew what the Pragmatists were planning?” Alicia asked Cavan.
He shook his head. “Not specifically. If I had known, and could prove it, I’d have taken the evidence straight to Urzin. But I’d been around those kinds of people long enough to be pretty sure they’d try something. They don’t concede power easily. The Kronians can work miracles in some areas, but they’ve got their weak spots too. We saw some of them when they came to Earth. No security-minded government would ever have let the SA become compromised in the way it was. I tried getting it across to people like Urzin and Foy, but they just didn’t have the experience.”
Now Keene was more confused than offended. “But that’s not the way it was, Leo,” he objected. “The reason I said I didn’t want to get mixed up in political things back then was because I didn’t think Valcroix had a chance. And you agreed!”
Cavan gave one of the devious smiles that always marked finally getting to the bottom of something he had been involved in. “I agreed he could never have succeeded at Kronia,” he confirmed. “But I never said anything about their making a bid for control on Earth. The warning signals were there: the SA being packed with disgruntled Terrans; the way Harvey Mitchell was pulled from the Trojan mission after I got him assigned to it. They’d always had their sights set on Earth. The whole business about calling for a say in running the Directorates was to create an appearance of legality having failed. It was the obvious target—undefended and too far away for any timely intervention.” Cavan sighed and shrugged apologetically, this time at Vicki. “Of course, I didn’t know exactly what would be called for. So I arranged to have someone there who I knew from personal previous experience would keep his head in a crisis, know how to improvise when one thing after another went wrong, and who doesn’t know how to give up. And look what he did here. How many more people do you know who could have pulled it off?”
Vicki was staring at him fixedly. “When Mitch was pulled . . .” she said slowly. “Robin was your substitute, wasn’t he? You’d already set him up as your insider in the SA. He told us the whole story.”
Cavan nodded candidly in a way that said there was no point in hiding anything now. “I know it caused you and Landen a lot of grief,” he said. “But we were up against professionals who knew all about infiltration and undercover techniques, and hampered by the naivete of people who were too trusting and knew nothing. I needed someone in the SA to keep tabs on what was going on. We didn’t dare let you or Landen know. It was imperative for everyone to act naturally. Especially Robin. They had dossiers going way back on everyone they recruited.”
“I didn’t even know,” Alicia informed them.
“What, exactly, did you expect Robin to do?” Keene asked.
“There was no way to be specific,” Cavan answered. “But he’s from the same kind of mold as yourself. The main thing was for him to just be there. Whatever developed, he would come up with something.”
For a moment Keene felt the beginnings of indignation. But then he remembered that what they were talking about here was something that was bigger than individuals, that he had been ready to put before himself when Jon Foy opened his eyes on that day long ago in the tower room at Foundation to the things that Kronia stood for. And in any case, would he have preferred staying back there, immersed in his own world, while Earth was lost and the whole future course of human events set on a path of repeating its same sorry saga all over again?