3 x T

by Harry Turtledove

  He was a good psychologist; Stavros was sure he wasn't the only student who hurried off to the dorm to see what world he'd drawn.

  He brought the report up on the screen. The lead frame had a list of authors and a vid shot of the principal author. She was a redhead good-looking enough to make Stavros pause a moment before he started paying attention to the document itself. When he did, his jaw dropped. He whistled softly. "He wasn't kidding," breathed the young man from New Thessaly. "Bilbeis IV?"

  * * *

  Pleased with herself, Paulina Koch attacked the printouts in her IN basket with an energy alien to the dogged persistence that was her hallmark. She saw with relief that no red-flagged items were in there, and only a few with yellow warning tags. The Survey Service was orderly and efficient, as it should have been.

  She disposed of the first two priority items in short order. One should never have had a flag; a deputy coordinator earned a black mark for not being able to make up his own mind.

  The third paper with the yellow strip at the top made her frown. Why should she care in particular if the Survey Service ship J?ng Ho had come in to the Service base on Topanga from a routine survey of a world without space travel? Then she saw which world it was and punched for the full report.

  The Survey Service had given itself a black eye on Bilbeis IV, no doubt about it. The Purists had been beating the Service over the head with David Ware's folly for fifteen hundred years. Fortunately, most interference canceled out in time, no matter how loud the Purists yapped. The odds were excellent that Bilbeis IV would be another case like that and could return to the obscurity it deserved.

  The abstract came up on the screen. Paulina Koch read it. Disciplined as always, she started on the report itself. The phone buzzed several times while she was working through it. She was a trained speed-reader; the long document took her only about an hour and a half.

  That was how long her career took to crumple, she thought when she was done. If Valleix howled for blood at the thought of giving a race a plow it had not had before, what would he say about giving a world a goddess? She knew the answer to that only too well: he would howl to shut down the Service. He'd have backing too, curse him, not just Purists but penny-pinchers of all stripes. She'd fought for years to keep that kind of unholy alliance from forming. Now it had a cause to coalesce around, one she knew would be strong enough to wreck the Service and her with it.

  Even so, she thought she was in perfect command of herself until she tried to clear the report. She needed three stabs before she could hit the right button. At last the screen went blank and gray.

  She also had to try several times before she got the extension she wanted.

  "External Affairs," a deep voice said.

  "Hovannis, will you come up here for a moment?" At least her voice gave away nothing, she told herself with lonely pride. Not that it mattered?not that anything would matter once the report came out. Still, rather than just yield to despair, she preferred to go on naturally as long as she could. "An interesting situation has arisen, one you'll want to see."

  "On my way," Hovannis said briskly. The phone went dead. Hovannis was a capable man, Paulina Koch thought, well suited to running the Survey Service's External Affairs Bureau?Security, an organization less sensitive to public relations would have called it.

  * * *

  Stavros Monemvasios felt caffeine buzzing through his veins like current through wires. Excitement also energized him, perhaps more powerfully. Under both stimulants his exhaustion was rising, but he had no trouble shoving it down, though his clock told him the time was closer to sunrise than to midnight. He would be a zombie in class, but he did not care.

  Fogelman couldn't have looked at the data cards before he dished them out. Stavros was certain of that. The report on Bilbeis IV was no plum; it was a bomb, waiting to go off and blow the Survey Service to smithereens.

  Even as an undergrad, Stavros had learned about Bilbeis IV. It was the "don't" pounded into every would-be fieldworker, and carried two lessons with it. Breaking the rule of noninterference not only improperly influenced primitive worlds, it also guaranteed?and earned?professional death for anyone foolish enough to try it.

  Improperly influenced… "Ho, ho, ho!" Stavros muttered. His lips skinned back from his teeth in a humorless grin. He would have backed that phrase in any understatement contest anywhere.

  That anthropologist had cured Queen?what was her name? Sabium, that was it?Queen Sabium's cancer, all right. He'd cured her so well that there she still was, very much alive, fifteen hundred years later. No wonder a whole continent and part of another worshiped her as the undying goddess.

  Stavros wished it weren't so late. He wanted to call Fogelman and scream in his ear. He reached for his phone. The anthropology prof had given his grad students his home code, and he wouldn't mind getting out of bed for news like this.

  Then Stavros put the phone down. Rousting Fogelman would be fun, but coming into class in a week, all cool and innocent, and stunning everyone at once sounded even better. He plucked at his beard, trying to compose a couple of innocent-sounding opening sentences for his presentation. He chuckled. That wouldn't be easy.

  He wondered just how many heads would roll at the Survey Service because of the Bilbeis IV report. He was no Purist, but he didn't relish the idea of having a whole planet's development yanked out of shape by external influences. And the only way the Service kept its budget so nice and fat was by insisting that kind of thing never happened, never could happen. Now that it had, a lot of people would need to cover their asses in a hurry.

  He caught himself yawning enormously. Caffeine or no, work on the presentation would have to wait till tomorrow.

  * * *

  Roupen Hovannis did not read as fast as his boss, but he did not have to wade through the whole report, either. Paulina Koch brought the relevant, damning sections up on the screen one at a time.

  "Enough," Hovannis said, waving for her to stop. He was a big, dark stocky man with a large hooked nose, heavy eyebrows, and a permanent five o'clock shadow even though he shaved twice a day. The thuggish exterior added to his effectiveness; people underestimated his intelligence.

  "Reactions?" Paulina Koch asked after Hovannis had sat silent for some time.

  "We are in major trouble if and when this report gets out." Paulina Koch frowned; she preferred bureaucratic circumlocutions to plain speech. But at the moment Hovannis did not care; for one of the few times in his career, he was shaken. He went on. "PK"?no one called the Chairman by her first name, not more than once?"when the Purists see it, they'll scream for our blood, and I think they'll get it. The document is plenty to drive everyone cool or lukewarm to us into the Purist camp, and to make our friends look for a good place to hide."

  "Very much my own assessment, Roupen." Hovannis glanced at Paulina Koch with surprised admiration; she might have been talking about the pricing policy for oxygen tanks. "What response do you recommend we make, then?" she asked.

  His grin was frightening. "I wish the damned ship had crashed before that crew of traitors ever got the chance to file their report."

  "That, unfortunately, is not relevant at this point in time."

  "I suppose not," Hovannis said regretfully.

  "Still," the Chairman said, "I do not relish the prospect of standing up before the Assembly and telling them of the blunder we have found."

  "David Ware got his a long time ago."

  "Too long ago, I fear, for it to matter. We are the ones available now to be punished for his mistake."

  Hovannis grunted. "The report ought to disappear from the files."

  "I thought of that also. I concluded it would yield us no lasting benefit. Eventually the crew of the J?ng Ho will simply refile: probably when they notice no outcry has erupted from the report."

  "But then we'll be ready for them." Once Hovannis had an idea, he ran with it. "If they start raising a stink, they'll do it through channels at first. Computer foulu
p explains anything once, especially since odds are those bastards don't even realize the mess they've landed us in. Hell, they may even be naive enough to believe the file got erased by accident twice. Any which way, we'll have bought ourselves some time."

  "Maybe even enough to see us through this session of the Assembly," Paulina Koch mused. "Maybe. And an old scandal, even if unearthed, will not do us nearly so much damage next time as a fresh one now." She took her time to think it over and then slowly nodded. "Very well, Roupen. The critical issue, you understand, is to make certain the deletion is either invisible or, if by some mischance it should be noticed, cannot be traced to your intervention."

  Hovannis nodded. "Depend on it. I'll handle the erasure myself." His smile did not touch his eyes. "After all, we don't need more people thinking about Bilbeis IV than are already."

  "No."

  "May I use your terminal?" The question was only formal.

  "No," Paulina Koch said again. Hovannis stopped in surprise, his stubby-fingered hands poised over the keyboard. She went on. "Please note, Roupen, I have not told you what to do, and I can truthfully state that under oath. Nor do I care to see you do anything."

  The External Affairs Director's eyes lit in anger, but it faded as he thought things through. He gave a grudging nod. "Sensible, from your seat."

  "Indeed."

  "All right." Hovannis wet his lips. Paulina Koch was one of the few people who made him nervous, and not because she outranked him. He had to work to bring out his next words: "Remember, though, PK, if the wave rolls over me, I won't be the last one to drown."

  "Who said anything of waves? All we aim to do is keep the water calm and quiet. Thank you for coming up, Roupen. Now I hope you will excuse me; I have other business to attend to."

  Paulina Koch watched him go. Her brows drew together very slightly. A capable man, yes, and one who could prove dangerous?no one had had the nerve to warn her that way in a long time. But their interests here ran in the same direction. And the dismissal she'd given him would keep him in his place a while.

  She set the matter of Bilbeis IV aside and turned to the printouts still cluttering her desk. She could not ignore all of them because of a single problem elsewhere; that would have been bad management. She had kept the Survey Service running smoothly for nineteen years; she wanted to keep her seat at least that much longer.

  Hovannis's abrupt return startled her. "Yes?" she said coldly. What was he doing back here?

  "It's gone from our files."

  "I assumed so. I did not need to hear that, nor want to. If you are seeking to implicate me in what you have done, you may have succeeded, but I assure you that you will not enjoy your success much."

  "I'm not stupid enough to think I would, PK."

  "Well, then? I assume this visit does have some reason?"

  Hovannis started to sink into a chair, hesitated, waited for the Chairman's nod, then finished sitting. "You know that survey ships' reports, like most other government reports, go into open access."

  "How could I not know that? It helps the Purists meddle." Paulina Koch had been maneuvering behind the scenes for years to get Survey Service records shifted to restricted access. The Purists were only part of her political consideration. Too many things happened on primitive planets that the public could not be expected to understand. Bilbeis IV was a perfect example. The Chairman nodded slowly, as if to herself. "You are, I presume, about to tell me seventeen people on thirteen different planets have already made copies of the report. If so, we are finished, and nothing to be done about it."

  "If that were so, I'd still be downstairs, working on my vita so I could start looking for another job." That was candid enough to surprise a smile out of Paulina Koch. Hovannis noted it with some relief; it would soften the bad news. "One copy was accessed, less than half an hour before I dumped the file."

  "Tell me the rest."

  "Accessor is Isaac Fogelman, home planet Hyperion."

  "Have you checked on him? I've heard the name, I think."

  "Not yet. You needed to know ASAP."

  "Mmp." The grunt told Hovannis he was forgiven. "Let's see what the data store tells us about him," Paulina Koch said. "No, don't leave, Roupen; seeing who uses Survey Service information will not incriminate me unduly." She punched buttons and grunted again. "University of Hyperion, anthropology department."

  "Bad," the External Affairs Director said. People who chose teaching over fieldwork had no real notion of what conditions were like away from their keyboards and terminals. Most of them were Purists, and most of the ones who weren't were sympathizers.

  Studying the readout, he saw Fogelman was like the rest. Several of his publications criticized Survey Service field technique, though he himself had stayed on Hyperion the last fifteen years. He was also a member of the Noninterference Foundation, a private watchdog group that monitored the Service. If he wasn't an out-and-out Purist, he came too close for comfort. "Bad," Hovannis repeated.

  "Yes," the Chairman said. "When he makes his dramatic revelation, he will have the credentials to be taken seriously."

  "If his copy of the text was to vanish also?"

  "No," Paulina Koch said. Then she reconsidered. With the Service on the line, what did one meddling professor matter? "Well, perhaps?if he never has the chance to accuse us of anything. In this area, any publicity is bad publicity: the less anyone outside the Service thinks of Bilbeis IV, the better."

  Hovannis agreed with her completely. "I've done some checking. The Service has contacts with a discreet individual on Hyperion, one who, by luck, operates out of New Westwood, the university town."

  "Yes, that is fortunate," the Chairman agreed.

  Hovannis waited for a more definite order, then realized he would not get one. "It will be attended to," he said. Bureaucratic language sometimes had its advantages; he could truthfully deny under oath that he had ever said he would do anything.

  * * *

  The discreet individual had already made electronic hash of all the data cards in Fogelman's study. Trashing the professor's entire data storage system was about the craziest commission he'd ever had, but he got paid for results, not questions. Very well paid in this case, certainly enough to keep him incurious.

  The screen of Fogelman's terminal came on, filling the study with pale gray light. The discreet individual got to work again. Fogelman's security precautions were more than sufficient to keep amateurs from getting into his files, but the discreet individual was no amateur. Besides, he had been briefed about likely keywords and traps, which made the job go faster than it would have otherwise.

  One thing the discreet individual had not been briefed about was Professor Fogelman's weak kidneys. As he usually did, Fogelman woke up in the middle of the night. The light downstairs bothered him. He sometimes left his computer up, but he thought he'd turned it off before he went to bed. Muttering to himself, he went down to check.

  The discreet individual heard him coming, of course, and shot him through the head with a discreetly silenced weapon when he appeared in the study doorway. Fogelman lived alone; his neighbors would never notice the small noise he made falling. The discreet individual went back to what he had been doing.

  When he was through, he efficiently ransacked the place?he had not been paid not to?and left through the same window he'd used to enter.

  Unlike the luckless Fogelman, he had no trouble sleeping when he got home.

  * * *

  Stavros was the first one to the seminar room, which showed how eager he was to get on with his presentation. Cooling his heels outside while the group inside finished, he wondered if eagerness was cause enough to drum him out of the grad students' union. It probably was, he decided.

  The session in the room broke up, and the students came out excitedly discussing something or other that wasn't anthropology and made very little sense to Stavros. He pushed through them and found a seat.

  One by one, the other members of the seminar drif
ted in. Some wanted to talk about their presentations. Others were too nervous about speaking in public to care to put out their conclusions more than once. Stavros kept quiet, too; he was saving his ammunition for Fogelman.

  He was no poker player, though. "You look like the cat that ate the canary," the girl from Earth said. She was sitting across from him.

  "The what?" he said foolishly, not following the idiom. What was her name? He'd only heard it at the meeting last week. "You're Andrea Dubois, aren't you?"

  She smiled, pleased he remembered. She was a big pink blond girl and thus seemed strange to Stavros; most of New Thessaly's population was Hellenic, as slim and dark as he was. "How's this?" she said. "You look like someone sitting there waiting for the Academic Medal to go on your chest."

  "I think I did a good piece of work." He still didn't want to talk about it, but she was pretty, obviously bright or she wouldn't be here, and so he didn't want the conversation to end either. "You speak beautiful Basic?you sound like the instruction tapes I learned from."

  "Thanks." She smiled again. "I wish I could take more credit for it, but I just happen to come from Perth, and everyone in Australia talks this way. At home we call it English."

  "I'm jealous."

  "It's not as big an advantage as you think," Andrea said. "Because I use Basic all the time and never had to learn another language, I'll probably have more trouble than you in picking up alien languages."

  "Well, maybe," Stavros said dubiously.

  Without heat, they argued about it for a while until Andrea looked at her watch and said in some surprise, "Professor Fogelman is very late."

  "He makes a habit of it." Stavros chuckled. But when Fogelman did not show up after another ten minutes, he began to wonder himself.

  The door opened. But it was not Fogelman who came into the seminar room?it was one of the administrative aides from the anthropology department. The fellow looked shaken; his voice wobbled as he said, "May I have your attention, please?"