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might be biding their time at the back of it all, conspicuously on their best
behavior while they assessed the redrawn game board and immensely raised
stakes that the chance of access to a whole new regime of alien technology
represented? Already, items were appearing openly in more outspoken areas of
the partisan press and global net likening Terrans to the tiny but ferocious
bands that had subjugated the Americas, and claiming that Earth's "moment" was
approaching and that its destiny was "out there."
The old quotation ran through his mind again, that the only thing needed for
evil to triumph was that good men do nothing. Apart from table talk and
agreeing with a lot of people who felt likewise, what had he been doing? he
asked himself. The short answer was, "not a lot." Like everyone else, when he
examined the facts honestly, he had looked to other things to busy himself
with, all the time assuming in a vague kind of way that never quite
crystallized consciously that "something" would happen.
In the past this had never been his way. He hadn't taken over Navcomms and
built it into the largest and most dynamic division of the UN Space Arm by
waiting for "things" to "happen." Things didn't just happen. People made them
happen. A colleague had asked him once, back in the early UNSA days, if he
really thought that a few dedicated people who believed in what they were
doing could change the world. Caldwell had replied, "They're the only ones who
ever have." Actually, it wasn't his own line; he had come across it as a quote
by a woman anthropologist, or something, from way back. But it was a good one,
and he didn't think she would have minded his stealing it. His former self was
still around, speaking in his head now, asking him what he was going to do
about it.
He was still tussling with the question at home that evening, missing half the
things that Maeve was saying and bringing a new precipitation of frost on the
domestic scene just when things had begun to thaw. About the only thing he'd
done by the end of the evening, to make amends and assuage his conscience, was
cancel his golfing fixture.
The next morning, a bottle of brandy arrived for him and a bunch of roses for
Maeve, from Mildred. It reverted breakfast to its normal warm and sunny
condition, and gave his confidence in human nature a boost after his negative
musings. But Mildred had never belonged to that part of humanity whose nature
he had ever doubted in the first place.
* * *
By the next day, after repeated metaphorical walks around the subject in his
head to explore all possibilities and angles, he had satisfied himself that,
quaint though it was, Mildred's simple suggestion didn't contain any hidden
key that he should have recognized. Embarking on some kind of moral lecture
tour through the world's corridors of power was unlikely to achieve anything
of note except feed it into the gossip mill that the strain had gotten to
Caldwell finally, and possibly done with all due civility, of course, and the
requisite honors for him to cosset in his doting years cost him his job.
And even if he did get some serious and sympathetic attention here and there,
the conflicts of interests were so tangled and the true motivations behind
them so guarded that any initiative he might manage to spark would be diluted
away by countermands and bureaucratic obstruction long before it cold grow
into anything coordinated and effective on an global scale. He should know,
having played a significant part in coordinating one of the biggest
international ventures of modern times. But the Space Arm had come into being
and been able to function as it had precisely because all the financial and
political forces aligned behind it had stood to gain. They were unlikely to
show the same capacity for concerted action when they saw themselves as being
asked to renounce the very opportunities for expanding and diversifying and
generally outperforming their rivals that had spurred them before.
Caldwell wasn't going to change human nature or the way it shaped the world;
at least, not anytime soon. The only other factor in the equation was the
Thurien disposition that viewed humans as violently disposed aliens to be
accommodated generously if their inclinations could be curbed and redirected;
but if not . . . who knew what? On the face of it, Caldwell didn't see that he
could do much to change that either. It would need something that lessened the
distance between them emotionally and psychologically, so that the "alienness"
was reduced; that made humans "family," the way he accepted Mildred within his
Division of UNSA.
After Minerva's destruction, the Thuriens had shown their capability and
potential willingness to form such close ties in the way they had taken the
Lambian element of the Lunarians back and tried to integrate them into their
civilization later to become the Jevlenese. But that attempt had been marred
by the intrusion of the Ents from the surreal world of computing symbology
that came into being inside JEVEX. The Cerians, at their own request, had
remained in their own Solar System after being transported to Earth and become
the ancestral Terrans. The separation since then had produced the sense of
alienism underlying the superficially cordial relations that existed now.
What was needed was some unifying event or experience that would overwhelm all
other considerations, something momentous enough in the minds of Thuriens and
humans too to weld their two races into one with a common future with the kind
of affinity the Thuriens had been able to show for the Jevlenese. But what?
Then news came in from Hunt saying that Eesyan's group of Thurien scientists
thought they had cracked the time line convergence problem. If so, it meant
they were on the verge of getting coherent information back from other parts
of the Multiverse. Caldwell spent several hours in his office, studying the
report that followed and pondering on its implications. Slowly, a vision
formed in his mind of a time when the gulf that divided them now hadn't
existed; a time when the divergent histories of Ganymeans, Terrans, Lunarians,
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