The Two Worlds

by James P. Hogan

  "So I ask you again, how long?" Showm said. "How long has this been practiced?"

  "Ten, maybe twenty years . . . I can't remember."

  "You don't know?" She looked at Wylott. "It's your department. Have you no records?"

  "jevex keeps the records," Wylott replied woodenly.

  "visar," Calazar said. "Obtain the records from jevex for us."

  "This is outrageous!" Broghuilio shouted, his face turning black with anger. "The surveillance program is entrusted to us by long-standing agreement. You have no right to make such a demand. It has been negotiated."

  Calazar ignored him. A few seconds later visar informed them, "I can't make any sense of the response. Either the records are corrupted, or jevex is under a directive not to release them."

  Showm did not seem surprised. "Never mind," she said, and looked back at Estordu. "Let's give you the benefit of the doubt and say twenty years. Therefore anything reported by jevex before that time will not have been altered. Is that correct?"

  "It might have been more," Estordu said hastily. "Twenty-five . . . thirty, perhaps."

  "Then let's go back farther than that. The Second World War on Earth ended eighty-six years ago. I have examined some of the accounts of events during that period as reported by jevex at the time. Let me give you some examples. According to jevex, the cities of Hamburg, Dresden, and Berlin were devastated not by conventional saturation bombing but by nuclear weapons. According to jevex, the Korean conflict in the 1950s escalated into a major clash of Soviet and American forces; in fact, nothing of the kind took place. Neither were tactical nuclear devices used in the Middle East wars of the '60s and '70s, nor was there an outbreak of Sino-Soviet hostilities in the 1990s." Showm's voice became icy as she concluded, "And neither was the Shapieron taken into captivity by a United States military garrison on Ganymede. The United States has never had a military garrison on Ganymede."

  Estordu had no answer. Wylott remained immobile, staring straight in front of himself. Broghuilio seemed to swell with indignation. "We asked for evidence!" he thundered. "That is not evidence. Those are allegations. Where is your proof? Where are your witnesses? Where is your justification for this intolerable behavior?"

  "I'll take it," Heller said, rising to her feet beside Caldwell. There was no way she was going to let him beat her to it this time. From where Hunt was sitting nothing appeared to change, but the way the three Jevlenese heads snapped around to gape at her left no doubt that visar had suddenly put her on stage.

  Before any of them could say anything, Calazar spoke. "Allow me to introduce somebody who might satisfy your requirement—Karen Heller, Special Envoy to Thurien from the State Department of the United States."

  Estordu's face had turned white, and Wylott's mouth was opening and closing ineffectively without producing any sound. Broghuilio was standing with his fists clenched and paroxysms of rage sweeping in visible tremors through the length of his body. "We have many witnesses," Calazar said. "Nine billion of them, in fact. But for now, a few representatives will suffice." The Jevlenese's eyes opened wider as the remainder of the Terran delegation became visible. None of them glanced in the opposite direction, indicating that Calazar had not yet instructed visar to reveal Garuth and the others from the Shapieron.

  Karen Heller had compiled a long list of suspicions concerning Jevlenese manipulations of events on Earth, none of which she could prove. The opportunity for bluffing the confirmation from the Jevlenese would never again be quite what it was at that moment, and she plunged ahead without giving them a second's respite. "Ever since the Lambians were taken from Luna to Thurien after the Minervan war, they have never forgotten their rivalry with the Cerians. They have always seen Earth as a potential threat that would one day have to be eliminated. In anticipation of that day, they took advantage of their access to Ganymean sciences and devised an elaborate scheme to insure that their rival would be held in a state of backwardness and prevented from reemerging to challenge them until they had absorbed the last ounce of the knowledge and technologies that they thought would make them invincible." She was unconsciously addressing her words to Calazar and the Thuriens as if they were judge and jury, and the proceedings were a trial. They remained silent and waiting as she paused for a moment to shift to a different key.

  "What is knowledge?" she asked them. "True knowledge, of reality as it is, as opposed to how it might appear to be or how one might wish it to be? What is the only system of thought that has been developed that is effective in distinguishing fact from fallacy, truth from myth, and reality from delusion?" She paused again for a second and then exclaimed, "Science! All the truths that we know, as opposed to beliefs which some choose blindly to adopt as if the strength of their convictions could affect facts, have been revealed by the rational processes of applied scientific method. Science alone yields a basis for the formulation of beliefs whose validity can be proved because they predict results that can be tested. And yet . . ." Her voice fell, and she turned her head to include the Terrans sitting around her. "And yet, for thousands of years the races of Earth clung persistently to their cults, superstitions, irrational dogmas, and impotent idols. They refused to accept what their eyes alone should have told them—that the magical and mystical forces in which they trusted and which they aspired to command were fictions, barren in their yield of results, powerless in prediction, and devoid of useful application. In a word, they were worthless, which of course made any consequences harmless. And this, from the Lambian, or Jevlenese, viewpoint, constituted a remarkably convenient situation. It was too convenient to be just a coincidence." Heller turned her head to look coldly at the Jevlenese. "But we know that it was not merely a coincidence. Far from it."

  Danchekker turned an astonished face to Hunt, leaned closer, and whispered, "How extraordinary! I'd never have believed I'd hear her make a speech like that."

  "I'd never have believed it, either," Hunt muttered. "What have you been doing to her?"

  Still looking at the Jevlenese, Heller went on, "We know that the early beliefs in the supernatural were established by miracle workers whom you recruited and trained, and injected as agents to found and popularize mass movements and countercultures based on myth, and to undermine and discredit any tendencies toward the emergence of the rational systems of thought that could lead to advanced technology, mastery over the environment, and a challenge to your position. Can you deny it?" She could read on their faces that her bluff had succeeded. They were standing rigid and unmoving, too numbed with shock to respond. Feeling more confident, Heller looked over at the Thuriens and resumed, "The superstitions and religions of Earth's early cultures were carefully contrived and implanted. The beliefs of the Babylonians, the Mayas, the ancient Egyptians, and the early Chinese, for example, were based on notions of the supernatural, magic, legend, and folklore, to sap them of any potential for developing logical methods of thought. The civilizations that grew upon those foundations built cities, developed arts and agriculture, and constructed ships and simple machines, but they never evolved the sciences that could have unlocked true power on any significant scale. They were harmless."

  Low mutterings and murmurs were rippling among the Thuriens as some of them only began to realize for the first time the full extent of what the Terrans had uncovered. "And what of Earth's later history?" Calazar asked, mainly for the benefit of those Thuriens who had not been as involved in everything as he.

  "The same pattern traces through to modern times," Heller replied. "The saints and apparitions who created legends by conveying messages and performing miracles were agents sent from Jevlen to reinforce and reassure. The cults and movements that perpetuated beliefs in spiritualism and the occult, in paranormal sciences and other such nonsenses that were in vogue in Europe and North America in the nineteenth century, were manufactured in an attempt to dilute the progress of true science and reason. And even in the twentieth century, the so-called popular reactions against science, technology, positive
economic growth, nuclear energy, and the like were in fact carefully orchestrated."

  "Your answer?" Calazar demanded curtly, staring at Broghuilio.

  Broghuilio folded his arms, drew a long breath, and turned slowly to face directly toward where Heller was standing. He seemed to have recomposed himself and was apparently far from conceding defeat yet. He glared defiantly at the Terrans for a few seconds and then turned his head toward Calazar. "Yes, it was so. The facts are as stated. The motive, however, was not as described. Only a Terran mind could conceive of such motives. They are projecting into us their own evils." He threw out an arm to point at the Terrans accusingly. "You know the history of their planet, Calazar. All the violence and bloodthirstiness that destroyed Minerva is preserved today on Earth. I do not have to repeat to you their unending history of quarrels, wars, revolutions, and killing. And that, mark you, was despite our efforts to contain them! Yes, we planted agents to steer them away from the sciences and from reason. Do you blame us? Can you imagine the holocaust that would be sweeping across the Galaxy today if they had been allowed to return into space tens of thousands of years ago? Can you imagine the threat that it would have posed to you as well as to us?" He looked again at where the Terrans were sitting, and scowled distastefully. "They are primitives. Insane! They always will be. We kept their planet backward for the same reason that we would not give fire to children—to protect them as well as ourselves, and you too. We would do the same again. I have no apologies to offer."

  "Your actions betray your words," Frenua Showm retorted. "If you believed that you had pacified a warlike planet, you would have been proud of the achievement. You would not have concealed the fact. But you did the opposite. You presented a falsified picture of Earth that showed it as warlike when in fact it was moving in exactly the direction that you should have considered desirable. You successfully delayed its advancement until its Minervan inheritance had been diluted sufficiently for it to advance wisely. But not only did you conceal that fact, you distorted it. How do you explain that?"

  "A temporary aberration," Broghuilio replied. "Underneath nothing has changed. We altered the more recent developments so that you would not be misled. A final solution to the problem was still called for."

  Heller was thinking rapidly as she listened. The "final solution" had to mean that the Jevlenese had used Earth's belligerence as an excuse to maintain their own military forces as she had suspected. It seemed to support another line of thought that her researches had caused her to wonder about, and here was an opportunity to test it. But to do so she would have to resort to bluff again. "I challenge that explanation," she said. "What I have described so far is only part of what the Jevlenese have been doing." All the heads in the room turned toward her. "By the time of the nineteenth century, it was obvious that Western civilization was rapidly spreading science and industrial technology across the globe in spite of all their efforts. At that point the Jevlenese changed their tactics. They actually began to stimulate and accelerate scientific discovery by leaking information in various quarters that precipitated major breakthroughs." She turned her head a fraction. "Dr. Hunt. Would you like to comment, please?"

  Hunt had been expecting the question. He stood up and said, "The sharp discontinuities and nonlinearities that attended the major breakthroughs in physics and mathematics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been a mystery for a long time. In my opinion, such conceptual revolutions could not have happened in the time they did without some external influence."

  "Thank you," Heller said. Hunt sat down. She looked back at the Thuriens, more than a few of whom appeared puzzled. "Why would the Jevlenese do such a thing when their policy up until then had been to retard their rival? Because they were forced to accept the fact that they would not be able to keep Earth back any longer. Therefore, if Earth was about to become a high-technology planet anyway, the Jevlenese decided to use their already established infrastructure of influence to steer that advancement in such a direction that their rival would eliminate itself. In other words they set out to engineer events in such a way that the sciences which they themselves had helped develop would be used not to eradicate the scourges that had plagued mankind throughout history, but to wage war on a global scale and with unprecedented ferocity." She watched Broghuilio carefully as she spoke, and saw that she had hit the mark. Now was the moment to go for the kill.

  "Deny that it was Jevlenese agents who infiltrated the European nobility at the end of the nineteenth century and created the rash of internecine jealousies that culminated in the horrors of the First World War," she challenged in a suddenly loud and cutting voice. "Deny that it was a Jevlenese-controlled organization that seized control of Russia after the 1917 revolution and developed the prototype for the totalitarian police state. And deny that you set up a Jevlenese group in the wreckage of postwar Germany to resurrect the hatreds that the League of Nations was formed to resolve by peaceful means. They were led by some very carefully selected and trained individuals, weren't they? What happened to the real Adolf Hitler? Or perhaps you operated from behind the throne—Alfred Rosenberg, perhaps?" The three Jevlenese did not have to say anything. Their frozen postures and stunned expressions provided all the confirmation needed. Heller turned her head toward the Thuriens and explained, "World War II was supposed to be nuclear. The necessary scientific, political, social, and economic prerequisites had all been taken care of. It didn't quite work as planned, but it came frighteningly close."

  A new wave of mutterings broke out among the Thuriens. Heller waited for it to subside and then concluded in a quieter voice, "The tensions continued for over half a century, but despite the continuing Jevlenese efforts, the global catastrophe that they sought never quite took place." The next part was pure guesswork, but she continued without any change of tone. "They concluded that one day they would have to confront their rival themselves, and so embarked on a program of exaggerating Earth's wars and armament developments to justify to the Thuriens their creation of a `protective' strength of their own. At the same time they reversed their policy on Earth and used their network to defuse tensions, promote disarmament, and permit its people to develop their talents and resources creatively in the ways they had always wanted to. The object of this, of course, was to turn Earth into a defenseless target. To maintain the justification for increasing their own armed forces, they supplied the Thuriens with what gradually became a total fantasy manufactured inside jevex."

  Heller paused again, but this time there was no sound. She wheeled around to point at the Jevlenese, and her voice rose to an accusing shout. "They accuse us of killing each other, when all the time they know full well that their agents have orchestrated the worst episodes of havoc and bloodshed in Earth's history. They have murdered more people than all the leaders of planet Earth put together." Her voice fell to an ominous whisper. "But the unexpected arrival of the Shapieron threw all those plans into confusion. Here was a group of Ganymeans who would expose the lie if they were allowed to make contact with Thurien. Now we see the real reason why its existence was never disclosed." The color was draining from Broghuilio's face. Wylott had turned scarlet and seemed to be having difficulty breathing, while on Broghuilio's other side Estordu was dripping with perspiration and shaking visibly. Across the room Garuth, Shilohin, and Monchar were sitting forward tensely as they sensed the moment approaching for them to reveal themselves.

  "And now we come to the question of the Shapieron," Heller said. Her tone was almost soft, but menace was glittering in her eyes as she fixed them upon the Jevlenese. "We heard earlier a suggestion that Earth had sabotaged it. The suggestion is based on what we have seen to be lies. The Shapieron was never in any jeopardy at any time during the six months it was on Earth. On the contrary, our relationship with the Ganymeans was very friendly. We have ample records to prove that." She paused for a second. "But we do not have to rely on those records to prove that Earth did nothing to harm that ship or its occupan
ts. We have far more convincing evidence than that." Across the room Garuth and his companions stiffened. Calazar was about to give the instruction to visar.

  And the Jevlenese vanished.

  The floor where they had been standing was suddenly empty. Surprised murmurs broke out on all sides. After a few seconds visar announced, "jevex is cutting all its links. I have no access to it at all. It is ignoring requests to reconnect."

  "What do you mean?" Calazar asked. "You have no communications to Jevlen at all?"

  "The whole planet is isolating itself," visar replied. "All the Jevlenese worlds are disconnecting. jevex has detached and become an independent system. No further communications or visits within its operating zone are possible."

  The consternation breaking out among the Thuriens meant that something very unusual was happening. Hunt turned to meet an inquiring look from Danchekker and shrugged. "It looks as if jevex has broken off diplomatic relations," he said.