“There,” Monchar pronounced, watching. “Look, it’s started. I don’t understand it. Can they be so irrational? What good to anybody can come from it?”

As the unrest spread, Garuth watched, then turned to Shilohin. “If this kind of thing starts breaking out all over Jevlen, people are going to get hurt,” he murmured. “Maybe killed. We couldn’t deal with it. It would need a different kind of response.”

He meant with force-or the credible threat of being able to resort to force if necessary. That would mean replacing the Ganymeans with a Terran military occupation, since Ganymeans were psychologically unsuited to applying that kind of solution. Garuth didn’t like it any more than another of his kind would have; but enough history had shown that it was the only way to contain humans once they started running amok.

Shilohin thought silently for a while. “Suppose it isn’t just irrationality?” she said at last. “Suppose it’s precisely what somebody wants?”

“Who? Surely it couldn’t be in the interests of any of the Jevlenese,” Garuth replied.

“I don’t think half the Jevlenese are capable of knowing what’s in their interests,” Shulohin said.

“JPC rejected such a policy when it was proposed,” Garuth pointed out.

“And now some of the Terran members are urging them to change their minds.”

The Joint Policy Council, consisting of both Thuriens and Terrans, had been established following the Pseudowar and the collapse of the Jevlenese Federation to formulate the program that Garuth was attempting to implement. At that time, some of the Terran representatives, particularly from the West, had predicted problems of the kind that were now appearing and proposed setting up a Terran security force on Jevlen for Garuth to be able to call upon. JPC, however, heady with the euphoria of the moment and swayed by Thurien ideals, had turned the suggestion down. Garuth was beginning to worry that if demonstrations of the kind now breaking out were to get sufficiently out of hand, JPC, instead of merely installing an auxiliary force to supplement the Ganymean presence as had first been proposed, would order the Ganymeans to be replaced completely.

And if that happened, all their work on trying to understand the Jevlenese problem would probably have been in vain, just when it seemed that they were onto something important. For Garuth was convinced that there was more to account for in the Jevlenese condition than just apathy and reality-withdrawal caused by overdependence on JEVEX. Something more serious was going on, and had been for a long time. Something about JEVEX had been sending the Jevlenese insane.

Garuth slumped back in his chair wearily. “Fortunately, we do have some friends in political circles on Earth,” he said. “Perhaps we can find out from them what’s happening.”

“I’m not so sure it’s their political people that we should be going to,” Shilohin answered in a distant voice.

“No?”

Shilohin shook her head. “Their affairs are so convoluted that none of us understand them. I was thinking, more, of somebody whom we know we can communicate with and trust-in fact, one of the very first of the Terrans that we met.”

Garuth sat back, his face thoughtful and his eyes illuminated suddenly by a questioning light that seemed to ask why the idea had not occurred to him sooner. “You mean direct? We just forget about ‘proper channels’ and all that official business in between?”

Shilohin shrugged. “Why not? It’s what he’d do.”

“Hmm… And he does know them better Garuth thought about it, then looked at Shilohin and grinned. It was the first time she had seen him smile all day.

“As you said yourself, people might start getting killed if we don’t,” she said. “We wouldn’t want to risk that.”

“Of course not.” Garuth raised his voice slightly and addressed the computer-control intelligence built into the Shapieron. “ZORAC.”

“Commander?”

With JEVEX suspended, ZORAC had been coupled into the planetary net to monitor its operations and provide a connection to the Thuriens’ VISAR system.

“Connect a channel into Earthnet for us, right away,” Garuth instructed.

Her name was Gina Marin. She was from Seattle, and she wrote books.

“What kind?” Hunt asked. “Anything I might have read?”

Gina pulled a face. “If only you knew how tired writers get of hearing that question.”

He shrugged unapologetically. “It comes naturally. What else are we supposed to say?”

“Not any blockbusters that you’d know as household names,” she told him candidly. Then she sighed. “I guess I have a habit of getting into those controversial things where whatever line you take will upset somebody.” She managed not to sound very remorseful about it. “Taking sides probably isn’t the smart thing to do if you want to be popular.” She shrugged. “But those are the things that make life interesting.

Hunt grinned faintly. “Isn’t there a German proverb about people preferring a popular myth to an unpopular truth?”

“Right. You’ve got it. Exactly.”

They were sitting drinking coffee in the lounge of his apartment, she on a couch by the picture window, he sprawled in the leather recliner by the fireplace. Alongside his recliner was the cluttered surface that served as a desk, elbow-distance bookshelf, breakfast bar, and workbench for a partly dismantled device of peculiar design and fabrication, which he had informed her was from the innards of a Ganymean gravitic communications modulator. The rest of the room was a casual assortment of easygoing bachelordom mixed with the trappings of a theoretical scientist’s workplace. A framed photograph of Hunt with a couple of grinning colleagues and a group of Ganymeans posing in front of a backdrop of the Shapieron was propped on top of the frame of a four-foot wallscreen showing a contour plot of some kind of three-dimensional wave function; a tweed jacket, necktie, and bathrobe hung all together on a cloakroom hook fixed to the endpiece of a set of overloaded bookshelves; there was a reproduction of a Beethoven symphonic score affixed to the wall next to several feet of a program listing hanging above a pile of American Physical Society journals.

“So, you take up unpopular causes,” Hunt said. “Not exactly a creature of the herd, I take it.”

Gina made a brief shake of her head to forestall any misunderstanding. “Don’t get me wrong. It’s not something that I set out to do deliberately, just to be different or anything like that. It’s just that I get interested in things that seem to matter.” She paused. “When you start taking the trouble to find out about things, it’s amazing how often they turn out not to be the way ‘everyone knows’ at all. But once you’re into it that far, you have to go with what’s true as you see it.”

Hunt pursed his lips for an instant. “Why worry? People are going to carry on believing what they want to, anyway. They don’t want truth; they want certainty. You won’t change that. Why burn your life away at both ends trying to?”

She returned a short, resigned nod. “I know. I’m not trying to change anybody. It’s more for me, really-you’ve got to be true to yourself. I’m just curious about the way the world really is. If it turns out to be not the way a lot of people think, then that’s just too bad. They won’t change reality, either.”

Hunt raised his coffee mug and regarded her over the rim. At least she wasn’t launching into one of the standard recitations that he had heard so often of how people rationalize their being at odds with the world. If she was a misfit, she had come to terms with the fact and was fully at ease with herself. Whatever the subject was that had brought her here, he decided that he had the time and the inclination to listen.

After a few seconds he said, “Maybe you’re in the wrong job. You’re beginning to sound as if you should have been a scientist.”