Read Online The Long Result by John Brunner - Free Book Online
Authors: John Brunner
Tags: Science-Fiction
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to his feet. ‘Who’s in charge of BuCult? Me, or you? If you’re so proud of your ability to run a smooth department, try tackling something
difficult!
Name of disaster, I could slot a dozen competent people into your present post – I could put Micky Torres on,straight from college and without even a year’s fieldwork. Well, couldn’t I?’
‘Now Micky Torres is an exception,’ I countered feebly.
‘Exception be –
Ach!’
He thrust his fingers into his lank hair. ‘He’s still twenty years your junior. The point stands: you have no right to accuse me of letting the Bureau be – what did you say? –
stampeded
by the Starhomers, unless you show you could have handled the situation better yourself. I won’t deny you might have done. But how the hell am I or anybody to know that unless you come out from your snug little office and prove it?’
Breathing heavily, he sat down. For long moments I think I literally gaped at him, unable to frame words.
‘Go home and calm down, Roald,’ he sighed at length. ‘And take this with you, hm? It’s my impression that everybody has confidence in you except yourself. And if you can see the truth of that, you’ll do what I want because you want it too.’
By the time I got home to my apartment, I’d added one more accusation to the list Tinescu had fired at me. I wasn’t really riled any longer; I’d accepted that the chief must have been under tremendous pressure to avoid putting a foot wrong with the touchy Starhomers, and the strain accounted for his snapping my head off. I was still wound up of course – losing my temper was such a rare occurrence the let-down took nearly as long as the build-up, and my pulse was running fifteen above normal. But a relaxing hot bath would take care of that, I figured.
It was this additional accusation, which he’d refrained from hurling at me, that mainly engaged my mind. I’d let myself make a stupid error. Presumably because I disliked Starhome and its conceited inhabitants, I’d never looked closely enough at the recent social assay material from it to spot the faked information added between receipt anddispatch. And I should have been sufficiently thorough to detect it long before Tomas did in Integration.
How much of the altered material had related to the Tau Cetians?
At that point I really began to feel ashamed of myself. As the Bureau file had informed me, that race was roughly where we’d been in the nineteenth or twentieth century. They were competent engineers, astronomers, chemists and architects; they were laying the foundations of the more difficult, because ‘softer’, disciplines like psychology. Such a race was potential dynamite. In the last resort I should have been able to say, from the cultural survey missions’ reports, that the Starhomers were likely to use their existence as a weapon against Earth. I’d never come out and said so: I’d let it be inferred from other sources.
All right: I recognized my shortcomings and I was determined to make up for them. Why, then, should I not be able to let go of my tension even now that I was lying in this hot tub, being massaged by the automatic rubbers?
The reason came to me with shocking suddenness. I spoke it aloud.
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid of being
killed.’
It wasn’t logical. But it was powerful. The survival level of a modern man’s brain was still at the stage it had reached long ago in the process of evolution, reacting blindly to any threat of danger. Its only concession to progress had been to widen the range of the cues to which it responded, matching the increased span of human life. I could expect a hundred and ten years of healthy, productive existence on current averages; naturally, like anyone in my position I took fewer risks and watched myself more closely than someone who’d subconsciously accepted that he was lucky to have survived his birth.
And what my reflexes had pieced together, obviously, was the
difficult!
Name of disaster, I could slot a dozen competent people into your present post – I could put Micky Torres on,straight from college and without even a year’s fieldwork. Well, couldn’t I?’
‘Now Micky Torres is an exception,’ I countered feebly.
‘Exception be –
Ach!’
He thrust his fingers into his lank hair. ‘He’s still twenty years your junior. The point stands: you have no right to accuse me of letting the Bureau be – what did you say? –
stampeded
by the Starhomers, unless you show you could have handled the situation better yourself. I won’t deny you might have done. But how the hell am I or anybody to know that unless you come out from your snug little office and prove it?’
Breathing heavily, he sat down. For long moments I think I literally gaped at him, unable to frame words.
‘Go home and calm down, Roald,’ he sighed at length. ‘And take this with you, hm? It’s my impression that everybody has confidence in you except yourself. And if you can see the truth of that, you’ll do what I want because you want it too.’
By the time I got home to my apartment, I’d added one more accusation to the list Tinescu had fired at me. I wasn’t really riled any longer; I’d accepted that the chief must have been under tremendous pressure to avoid putting a foot wrong with the touchy Starhomers, and the strain accounted for his snapping my head off. I was still wound up of course – losing my temper was such a rare occurrence the let-down took nearly as long as the build-up, and my pulse was running fifteen above normal. But a relaxing hot bath would take care of that, I figured.
It was this additional accusation, which he’d refrained from hurling at me, that mainly engaged my mind. I’d let myself make a stupid error. Presumably because I disliked Starhome and its conceited inhabitants, I’d never looked closely enough at the recent social assay material from it to spot the faked information added between receipt anddispatch. And I should have been sufficiently thorough to detect it long before Tomas did in Integration.
How much of the altered material had related to the Tau Cetians?
At that point I really began to feel ashamed of myself. As the Bureau file had informed me, that race was roughly where we’d been in the nineteenth or twentieth century. They were competent engineers, astronomers, chemists and architects; they were laying the foundations of the more difficult, because ‘softer’, disciplines like psychology. Such a race was potential dynamite. In the last resort I should have been able to say, from the cultural survey missions’ reports, that the Starhomers were likely to use their existence as a weapon against Earth. I’d never come out and said so: I’d let it be inferred from other sources.
All right: I recognized my shortcomings and I was determined to make up for them. Why, then, should I not be able to let go of my tension even now that I was lying in this hot tub, being massaged by the automatic rubbers?
The reason came to me with shocking suddenness. I spoke it aloud.
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid of being
killed.’
It wasn’t logical. But it was powerful. The survival level of a modern man’s brain was still at the stage it had reached long ago in the process of evolution, reacting blindly to any threat of danger. Its only concession to progress had been to widen the range of the cues to which it responded, matching the increased span of human life. I could expect a hundred and ten years of healthy, productive existence on current averages; naturally, like anyone in my position I took fewer risks and watched myself more closely than someone who’d subconsciously accepted that he was lucky to have survived his birth.
And what my reflexes had pieced together, obviously, was the
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