They came back out of the coupler room. Sandy went on through into the smaller lab, where she activated a terminal and began talking to ZORAC about something. In the main area with its central worktable, Danehekker wandered around, checking closet space, looking in drawers, and activating a couple of screens. “Most satisfactory,” he pronounced. “I must say, you seem to have gone to an inordinate amount of trouble for us.”
“Not at all,” Garuth assured him.
Danchekker rubbed the palms of his hands together and looked about. “It’s all very splendid and lavish for just the four of us.”
“Plenty of room if you find you need extra help,” Cullen said. Hunt saw that Duncan was about to make another wisecrack, no doubt about the company that Hunt had reappeared with from the city, and silenced him with a warning look.
And then Sandy’s voice came through the open interconnecting door from the adjoining lab. “Hello, out there?”
“What is it, Sandy?” Hunt called back.
“ZORAC has a call for Professor Danchekker. Shall I leave it on here?”
Danchekker looked at Hunt bemusedly. “What? Already? But we’ve barely arrived, for God’s sake. Who could it possibly be?”
“One way to find out,” Hunt said.
Frowning, Danchekker went through into the next lab. Hunt sent Duncan a puzzled look. Duncan shook his head and shrugged. “Don’t ask-”
“Arghh!”
The scream that came back through the open doorway was one of pure, animal terror. Danchekker bolted back into the room, white-faced. He looked imploringly at Hunt. “It can’t be, not here… Vic, you’ve got to do something.”
Hunt strode through the door and found Sandy, looking at a loss, standing to one side of a live display screen. On it, the face of Ms. Mulling from Goddard confronted him frostily.
“Ah, Dr, Hunt,” she observed. “I distinctly saw Professor Danchekker there a moment ago. Could you call him back, please? There are some questions concerning certain records that he left, and it is most imperative that I speak with him.”
Hunt fought back the urge to burst out laughing. “Er, I think he’s been called away,” he said. “His assistant is here, though. Couldn’t she help?”
Ms. Mulling sniffed disdainfully. “Very well. I suppose so.” Hunt moved out of the viewing angle and gave Sandy an encouraging wink. Then he went back into the main lab. “Don’t worry, Chris,” he said cheerfully to Danchekker, who had sunk onto a stool.
“We’ll take care of it if this keeps up. It’ll probably be some time before we go back.”
“What makes you imagine that I intend to?” Danchekker replied miserably.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The team spent the rest of the day relaxing, adjusting to local Jevlen time, and catching up on their rest. The next morning, Hunt and Danchekker met with Garuth and Shilohin in Garuth’s suite in the Ganymean offices. The items of equipment and other effects that they had brought from Earth had arrived, and Sandy and Duncan were busy getting things organized in the UNSA labs. The two Ganymeans summarized what they had learned after six months with the Jevlenese.
“We thought we might draw a lesson from the dismantling of socialism on Earth,” Garuth said, speaking from behind his huge Ganymean desk, which was also an elaborate console. “It seemed that the JEVEX dependency here could be thought of as analogous to the over dependency that developed there on the too-protective state.”
“A lot of people on Earth have been saying the same thing,” Hunt commented.
“But simply unhooking them from JEVEX doesn’t seem to be the answer,” Garuth went on. “Or at least, not enough of an answer. It seems to work for some of them. Those are the ones who are finding what needs to be done and doing it. That was how we hoped the majority would react, more or less as happened on Earth.”
“But they turned out to be relatively few,” Shilohin said.
Garuth continued. “The general mass of Jevlenese seem to suffer from a… you could call it a ‘predisposition’ toward irrationality that goes beyond anything seen on ancient Earth. They just don’t seem to possess any faculty for distinguishing possible from impossible, or the plausible from the ridiculous. So we get these cults of unreason flourishing across Jevlen, and we’re at a loss for an effective answer to them.” Garuth motioned in the air with a gray, double-thumbed hand. “We watch the intellectual degeneracy of what once showed every promise of maturing into an advanced technological civilization. It’s like a plague from somewhere, but one which affects the mind. We need you to help us find where it’s coming from.”
“That’s not all there is to it, though, is it?” Hunt queried. “Didn’t you say something when you called me in Washington, about being worried that JPC might be about to pull you out?”
“Some of the Terran representatives on JPC have been saying that the Ganymean administration here isn’t working, and that the situation is heading toward breakdown,” Garuth replied. “They’re not disagreeing with the Thuriens’ policy, but they believe that it’s going to need some kind of backing by force to make it work.”
Which would mean Terran-style force, Hunt understood; in other words, putting in a Terran military occupation. Ganymeans didn’t work that way.
“They may not be entirely wrong,” Hunt cautioned. “The Jevlenese stayed away from violence while they had the chance to exploit Thurien know-how. But they were going to end all that, as we all know, and they came frighteningly close. Now they don’t have that restraint anyway. Once they get themselves reorganized, there could be serious trouble.”
“I’m not disputing that,” Garuth conceded. “I accept the differences that set us and humans apart. But I’ve also studied enough of your history to have an idea of the kind of inflexibility that an authoritarian solution will lead to once it’s adopted. The cause of the Jevlenese problem won’t be important; all that will matter will be how to suppress the effects. And that would be a tragedy, because we’re convinced that at the bottom of this mass insanity there’s something important waiting to be uncovered, that we don’t understand. We know what sent Earth off into irrationality thousands of years ago. But none of that applies here.”
Garuth got up and moved a short distance across the room to stand staring for a moment at a framed picture of the Shapieron standing on the shore of Lake Geneva. He turned and faced the others again.
“This may sound strange to you, but in many ways I’m beginning to feel the same toward the Jevlenese as I did toward my own people aboard that ship, when I was their leader through all those years in space. I feel a responsibility for them, an affection, even. I’d like to see them develop the confidence and self-reliance that Earth is starting to display now. But that can’t happen until we find out what’s undermining them. And to do that, we need help from people who understand humans better than we do. Del Cullen is doing his best, but we know that none of us would make a very good Mac-” Garuth hesitated. “ZORAC, who was that famous Terran who wrote about intrigue and deceit?”
“Machiavelli?” the computer replied.
“Yes. Was he Scottish?”
“No. Italian.”
“I thought ‘Macs’ were Scottish.”
“Not always.”
“Oh.” Garuth sighed. “Is there anything about Earth that’s completely consistent, ZORAC?”
“If there is, I haven’t found it.”
Garuth looked back at Hunt and Danchekker. “So those are my fears. If there’s a risk of our being replaced, there might not be very much time. That was why we came to Vic when we did, and in the way that we did.”
There was a short pause. Then Danchekker clasped his fingers together, his elbows resting on the arms of his chair, and cleared his throat. “Can you be sure that there really is an identifiable cause of this ‘plague,’ as you put it, waiting to be tracked down?” he asked. “We know that in the case of Earth, the Jevlenese deliberately introduced nonsensical belief systems thousands of years ago and engineered supernatural workings to support them. But the Jevlenese have always been under the totally rational guidance of the Thuriens, which, one would suppose, should produce exactly the opposite results. That turns out not to have been the case, however.”