Hunt thought it over again, nodded, and pursed his lips. “So where do we go from here?”

“The only lead I can see is to try and find out more about Baumer. I’ve got some stuff on his background from the personnel records of the department that sent him here, but it doesn’t tell us a great deal. He’s twenty-nine, originally from Bonn, studied moral and political philosophy at Munich, but without graduating finally. A mixed pattern of minor political activism around Europe, generally with leftist affiliations. Likes belonging to movements and associations, and organizing people. Doesn’t like capitalism and industrial technology. Isn’t married. Was sent to Jevlen by a department of the U.S. European government.”

“Hmm… Does he have quarters here, too, inside PAC?” Hunt asked, scratching the side of his nose pointedly. The implication was obvious.

Cullen nodded and lowered his voice. “Yes, I had a look around. Garuth doesn’t know about it. Baumer talks to a lot of Jevlenese, but that’s what you’d expect for a sociologist. He likes reading politics, history, and psychology, he gets letters from a girl in Frankfurt, and he worries about his health.” Cullen spread his hands.

“Nothing more?”

“That’s it. His office here didn’t turn up anything either. But he does use another one, a private place out in the city that he says provides a less threatening environment for talking to the Jevlenese that his work involves him with. That might be more interesting. But how do we get near enough to him?” Cullen jerked a thumb to indicate the larger office outside his. “He’s not going to say anything to my people. You’re here to look at Ganymean science, so you can’t go asking questions without it looking strange, especially if he’s got reasons to be suspicious.”

Hunt sat up slowly in his chair, his eyes widening. Just at that moment he would have rated Gregg Caldwell a genius.

Cullen looked at him uncertainly. “Are you okay?”

“We brought someone with us, just for that reason,” Hunt said. There had been so much happening that he hadn’t had a chance to explain where Gina fitted in.

“What are you talking about?”

“There’s a writer out at Geerbaine, who came on the same ship-a woman called Gina Marin. Officially she’s here on a free-lance job, but in reality she’s with us-UNSA-as a kind of undercover help. This is right in her court.”

Cullen blinked. “Well, I’ll be darned. Whose idea was this?”

“Caldwell’s, back at Goddard. He had an idea that this kind of situation could happen.”

A long, drawn-out explanation obviously wasn’t necessary. “Well, let’s get her onto it,” Cullen said. “Will she be there now?”

“As far as I know.” Hunt had called her an hour or so previously to see how things were going.

Cullen indicated the door with a nod of his head. Hunt turned on his chair and reached back to open it. “Hey, Crozin,” Cullen called to a Jevlenese in shirtsleeves at a desk outside. “Put a call through to the Best Western at Geerbaine, could you? See if you can get a Terran woman who’s staying there, name of Gina Marin. A writer.”

“Right,” Crozin acknowledged.

Cullen waved for Hunt to close the door again. “What about the work that Baumer’s been doing since he came here?” Hunt asked, turning back toward the desk. “Are there any reports and things from him that she could see to get more background?”

“Sure.” Cullen activated a screen by his desk and called up a list of file references. While he waited, Hunt fished his cigarettes from a pocket, lit one, and leaned back to run over what had been said. A minute or two later Crozin buzzed through to say that Gina was on the line from Geerbaine.

“You’d better take it,” Cullen said, swiveling the screen around to face Hunt.

“Back so soon,” Gina said. “What is it this time?”

“I think you’re in business,” Hunt told her. “We’ve got a job for you.”

“Does that mean I get to see PAC at last?”

“Yes. Catch one of those tubes into the city if they’re running today. Ask for the UNSA labs when you get here. I’m on my way to a show that Shilohin’s putting on for the ayatollahs, but you can ask for Del Cullen. He’ll tell you all about it. I’ll see you sometime later.”

“I’m on my way,” Gina said.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

At one end of a long hall inside PAC, Hunt and Sandy watched as Thardan, a young Ganymean technician from the Shapieron, checked the connections of an apparatus consisting of a metal frame festooned with tubes and cables, mounting a horizontal cylinder two feet or so long, from one end of which protruded a tapering snout ending in a hemispherical tip. Nearby, Duncan was adjusting the settings on a supply panel.

Several hundred feet away at the far end of the hall, about a dozen queesals-a kind of Jevlenese fruit, like a brown, pear-shaped melon-were mounted on wire supports positioned irregularly about the floor. A mixed company of Ganymeans, Jevlenese, and one or two Terrans were standing by the wall to one side. Shilohin was among them, with a group of gaudily clad Jevlenese who were watching the activity suspiciously. The central figure among the latter was a recently “possessed” ayatollah-Hunt’s term for them was already spreading through PAC-formerly an unknown city destitute, who now went by an exalted Jevlenese title that meant “He Who Shall Return.” Cullen had promptly christened him MacArthur. The others were followers from a Spiral of Awakening subsect that was forming around him out of the squabbles following the exit of the leader. MacArthur had restored faith and banished doubt by asserting that Ayultha, far from being a victim of transcendental retribution, had indeed discovered Truth, and as a consequence of that had attracted upon himself Cosmic Energies that even he had been unable to control. It was an opportune move at a time when the SoA needed a new Word to pull it back together, and MacArthur was already being acclaimed by many as Ayultha’s successor.

“Phase-conjugated laser,” Hunt said to Sandy, waving at the cylinder with a black, penlike object that he was holding. “That was how they did it.”

Sandy shook her head. “Sorry, I’m a biologist-remember? You’ll have to be more specific.”

Just then, Thardan glanced across at them and nodded. “It’s ready.”

“Well, let’s see what happens.” Hunt motioned to Sandy with a hand, and they began walking toward the other end of the hall. “In the real world, perfectly parallel, nondispersing beams of light don’t exist. You can think of one as a bundle of rays, spreading and being scrambled by irregularities in the medium it passes through.”

“Okay.”

“So, you can imagine a time-reversed beam whose rays follow the same trajectories, but in the opposite direction.”

“Like Newtonian particles moving backward, you mean?” Sandy said.

“Right. Well, it turns out that to create a reversed beam, you don’t have to reverse each and every quantum-level motion of the atoms and electrons that do the reflecting and radiating. Reversing the macroscopic parameters that describe the average motions is enough. All of which is another way of saying that it’s possible to make a device that behaves as a phase-conjugating mirror, where every ray that strikes it is returned precisely along its reversed path.”

“Okay…“ Sandy said, nodding.

“Alternatively, instead of making it a simple mirror, you can make it a source in its own right-a source of a signal that will follow an incident beam back to wherever it came from. That’s one way they get rid of atmospheric distortion for communications lasers: a pilot beam from the receiver effectively ‘prescrambles’ the databeam in such a way that the information comes out the other end clean.”

They were approaching the end of the hall. Hunt gestured at the queesals on their wire mounts. “Or, if the incident beam happens to be a reflection off an object, and the conjugator that it’s reflected back to is a high-gain power laser…