"That's a trifle strong," Spangler had said. "I won't deny that this buried information, whatever it is, must be valuable. But what makes you assume that it's crucial? Presumably, it's a record of the Rithian's espionage or sabotage activities…"
"Sabotage," Pembun had said quickly. "It couldn' be the other, Commissioner, becawse the Rithch wouldn' care that much if you found out something you already know. I b'lieve Cassina knows this: 'e knows w'ere the bombs are buried."
"Bombs!" Spangler had said after a moment. The idea was absurd. "They wouldn't be so stupid, Mr. Pembun. We have military installations on two hundred sixty planets, not to mention the fleet in space. We'd retaliate, man. It would be suicide for them to bomb us."
"You don' understand, Commissioner. They don' want to bomb Earth—if they did, there wouldn' 'ave been any need for the Rithch to leave a record of w'ere the bombs were. 'E'd simply set them with a time mechanism, and that would be that. We couldn' do a thing till after they went off. But 'e was the last one alive, an' 'e couldn' be sure 'e'd get back with 'is information, so 'e 'ad to leave a record. That only means one thing. The Rithi just want to be able to warn us: 'Leave us alone—or else.' "
Spangler's mind had worked furiously. It was terrifyingly possible; he could find no flaw in it. Suitably placed, a few score medium-sized disruption bombs would break a planet apart like a rotten apple. "Medium-sized" meant approximately six cubic centimeters; they would be easy to smuggle, easy to conceal, almost impossible to find. The only defense would be a radio-frequency screen over the whole planet; and if the enemy knew the precise locations of the bombs, even that defense would not work; a tight directional beam, accurately aimed, would get through and trigger the bombs. All it required was a race stubborn enough to say, "Leave us alone—or else"—and mean it. from what Pembun had said about the Rithians, they might well be such a race.
But Earth played the percentages. Earth took only calculated risks. Earth would have to succumb.
That chain of reasoning had taken only a fraction of a second. Spangler examined it, compared it with the known facts, and discarded it. He smiled.
"But, Mr. Pembun—we've got Cassina. It doesn't matter whether we get the information out of him or not; all we care about is that the Rithians aren't going to get it."
Pembun had looked absurdly mournful. "No, you're assuming that Cassina is the only one 'oo's got the information. I wish that was so, but I don' see 'ow it can be. Don' you see, giving it to Colonel Cassina was a mistake, becawse 'is mind is the obvious place for us to look. Now, I can see the Rithch making that mistake, deliberately, becawse it struck 'im so funny 'e couldn' resist it—but I can't see 'im making that mistake becawse 'e was stupid. I think Colonel Cassina was jus' an afterthought: 'e was feeling cocky, and 'e decided to plant the message one more time, right under your noses. I think 'e and 'is friends 'ad already planted it a 'undred or two 'undred times, 'owever many they 'ad time for. An' if it was me, I would 'ave picked interstellar travelers —agents for trading companies, executives who travel by spaceship a lot, visitors to Earth from other systems. I think that's w'at they did. If they did, it's practicly a mathematical certainty that their agents will eventually reach one of those people. You could keep up the embargo, not let anybody leave, but 'ow long would it take to process everybody 'oo might carry the message?"
"Years," Spangler had said curtly, staring at his desk-top.
"That's right. It could be done, and if you were lucky it might work. But it would kill Earth just as sure as blowing it up… We've got to find out what Colonel Cassina knows, Commissioner. There isn' any other way."
After that, the news about Cassina had come, almost as if it had been timed to underscore Pembun's words. Then the second and more painful interview with Keith-Ingram. Then Spangler had turned to some of the routine matters that had been filling his in-box all day, and quite suddenly it had been quitting time.
Spangler had started to leave, but had stopped at the door, turned to look at the silent, comforting walls, turned around and sat down at his desk again. Acting on an impulse he could hardly explain, he had called Joanna and begged off taking her to dinner. He had been sitting there, hardly moving, ever since.
He pressed the stud of his thumb-watch. Twenty-one-eighteen and one quarter."
Three hours; and he had had no dinner. There was a sickish taste in his mouth, and he felt a little light-headed, but not at all hungry.
He thumbed open the revolving front of the desk, took out a dispenser vial of pick-me-ups, and swallowed one moodily.
It came down to this, Spangler thought slowly. They had been very nearly beaten; except for one man—Pembun—they would have been beaten. And that was all wrong.
Pembun was uncouth, ill-educated, unmannered. His methods were the merest improvisation. He had intelligence, one was forced to admit, but it was crude, untutored and undirected. Yet he got results.
Why?
It was possible to explain all the events of the past two days simply by saying that Pembun had happened to possess special knowledge, not available to Security, which had happened to be just the knowledge needed. But that was an evasion. The knowledge was not "special"; it was knowledge Earth should have had, and had tried to get, and had failed to get.
Again, why?
It seemed to Spangler that since Pembun's arrival the universe had slowly, almost imperceptibly turned over until it was upside down. And yet nothing had changed. Pembun was the same; so were Spangler and the rest of the world he knew. It was a little like one of those optical illusions that you got in Primary Camouflage—a series of cubes that formed a flight of stairs going upward; and then you blinked, and the cubes were hollow, or the stairs were hanging upside down. Or like the other kind, the silhouettes of two men, with converging perspective lines at the top and bottom: you thought one man was much taller, but when you measured them you found that both were the same—or even that the one that had seemed smaller was larger than the other…
Spangler swore. He had been on the point, he realized, of getting up, taking a scooter to G-level, Suite 111, and humbly asking Pembun to explain to him why the sun now revolved around the Earth, black was white, and great acorns from little oak trees grew.
He picked up a memocube and flung it violently onto the desk again.
The gesture gave him no relief; the feeling of rebellion passed; depression and bewilderment remained.
Like a moth to the flame—like Mohammed to the mountain —Spangler went to Pembun.
This time the door was closed.
After the space of three heartbeats, the scooter moved off silently down the way he had come, lights winking on ahead of it in the deserted corridor and fading when it passed. It turned the corner at Upsilon and disappeared, heading for the invisible lategoer who had signaled it.
Silence.
Down the corridor for five meters in either direction, glareless overhead lights showed Spangler every detail of the satin-finished walls, the mathematical lines of doors and maintenance entrances, the almost invisible foot-traces that, sometime during the night, would be vibrated into molecular dust and then gulped by suction tubes. Beyond was nothing but darkness. Far away, a tiny dot of light flared for an instant, like a shooting star, as someone crossed the corridor.