"We could put a stop to it," said Marcus Appleton. "All we need to do is drop a word or two. No more com-memoratives, no more semi-postals, no more fancy air mail issues."
"You forget one tiling," Frost reminded him. "It's not only stamps and coins. It's porcelain, as well, and paintings and a lot of other tilings. Almost anything that will fit into a time vault that is not too large. You can't put a stop to everything that is being bought."
B.J. said, tartly, "We can't stop anything. There's already too much talk about how we own the world."
Carson Lewis, vice-president in charge of facilities, said, "I think it's talk of that kind which keeps the Holies active. Not, of course, that they're causing too much trouble, but they are a nuisance."
"There was a new sign across the street," said Lane. "A rather good one, I must say…"
"It's not there any more," Appleton said, between his teeth.
"No, I imagine not," said Lane. "But simply running around behind these people with a bucket and a brush and scrubbing off their signs is not the entire answer."
"I don't think," said Lewis, "there is any entire answer. The ideal thing, of course, would be to root out the entire Holies operation. But I doubt that's possible. Marcus, I think, will agree with me that all we can do is hold it down a little."
"It seems to me," said Lane, "that we could do more than we are doing. In the last few weeks I've seen more slogans chalked on walls than I've ever seen before. The Holies must have quite a corps of sign painters working surreptiously. And it's not only here. It is everywhere. All up and down the coast. And in Chicago and in the West Coast complex. In Europe and in Africa…"
"Some day," said Appleton, "there'll be an end to it. I can promise that. There are just a few ringleaders. A hundred or so, perhaps. Once we have them pegged, we can put an end to it."
"But quietly, Marcus," BJ. cautioned. "I insist it must be quietly."
Appleton showed his teeth. "Very quiet," he said.
"It's not just the slogans," said Lewis. "There are the rumors, too."
"Rumors can't hurt us," B.J. said.
"Most of them can't, of course," said Lewis. "They're just something that give people something to talk about, to pass away the time. But there are some that have a
basis of truth. And by that I mean that they are based on situations which do exist in Forever Center. They start with a truth and twist it in an ugly way and I think that some of those may hurt us. Rumors of any sort hurt our image. Some of them hurt us quite a lot. But the thing that worries me is how do these Holies learn of the situations upon which they base the rumors? I would suspect that they may have developed many pipelines into this very building and into the other branches of Forever Center and that is something that we should try to put a stop to."
"We can't be sure," Lane protested, "that all the rumors are started by the Holies. I think we are inclined to attribute too much to them. They're just a gang of crackpots.."
"Not entirely crackpots," said Marcus Appleton. "We could clean out the crackpots. This bunch is a group of smart operators. The worst thing we can do is to underestimate them. My office is working on it all the time. We have a lot of information. I have a feeling that we may be closing in…»
"I would agree with you," Lewis told him. "About their being an effective and well-organized opposition. I have often felt they might have some tie-up with the Loafers. Things get too hot, those who have the heat on them can simply disappear into the wilderness and hide out with the Loafers…»
Appleton shook his head. "The Loafers are nothing more or less than they appear to be. You're letting your imagination run away with you, Carson. The Loafers are the unemployables, the chronic no-goods, the misfits. Comprising, what is it, Peter, something like one per cent…"
"Less than a half of one per cent," said Lane. "All right, then, less than one half of one per cent of the population. They've declared themselves free of us, in effect. They roam the wilderness in bands. They scrape out a living somehow…"
"Gentlemen," said B.J. quietly, "I am afraid we're
getting rather far afield into a subject we've discussed many times before, with no particular results. I would imagine we can leave the Holies to the close attention of Security."
Marcus nodded. "Thank you, B.J.," he said.
"Which brings us," said B.J., "to the problem that I mentioned."
Chauncey Hilton, section chief of the Timesearch project, spoke softly, "One of our research people has disappeared. Her name is Mona Campbell. I had a feeling that she was onto something."
"But if she was on the track of something," Lane exploded, "why should she…"
"Peter, please," said B.J. "Let's discuss this as calmly as we can."
He looked about the table. "I am sony, gentlemen, that we did not let you know immediately. I suppose it wasn't something that we should have kept quiet about. But it was something that we didn't want noised around too much and Marcus thought…"
"Marcus has been looking for her, then?" asked Lane.
Appleton nodded. "Six days. There's been no trace of her."
"Mavbe," Lewis said, "she just went off somewhere to be alone and think a problem through."
"We thought of that," said Hilton. "But if that had been the case, she would have spoken to me. A most conscientious person. And her notes are gone."
"If she'd gone off to work," insisted Lewis, "she'd have taken them along."
"Not all of them," said Hilton. "Just the current working notes. Not the entire file. Really, no one is supposed to take anything out of the project. Our security, however, is not as tight as it perhaps should be."
Lane said to Appleton, "You've checked the monitors?"
Appleton nodded curtly. "Of course, we did. That's routine, for all the good it does us. The monitoring system is not set up to deal with identity. Each computer picks up a person when they show up in its quadrant,
but it is simply concerned with the signal which establishes the fact there is a living person there. If one of the signals clicks off, then it knows someone has died and a rescue crew is dispatched at once. But these signals keep shifting all the time as people move about. They shift off one quadrant and are picked up by another."
"But it could indicate a person traveling." "Certainly. But a lot of people travel. And Mona Campbell may have done no traveling. She may have just holed up."
"Or been kidnaped," Lewis said.
"I don't think so," Hilton told him. "You forget the notes are gone."
"You think, then," said Frost, "that she defected. Deliberately quit the project." "She ran away," said Hilton.
Howard Barnes, head of Spacesearch, asked, "You really think she made some sort of breakthrough?"
"I think so," Hilton said. "She told me, rather guardedly, she was following a new line of calculation. I remember that distinctly. She said a new line of calculation rather than a new line of research. I thought it rather strange, but she had an intense look about her and…" "She said calculation?" Lane asked. "Yes. I found out later that she was working with the Hamal math. You remember it, Howard?"