“You think maybe someone … something doesn’t want the question answered?”
“The thought had crossed my mind. Which is one reason I’m talking to you. The petition says R.S.V.P. Noplace: Central Panubi. You’ve been on Panubi.”
Zasper, remembering a few times he’d been there, keeps his face expressionless. “Many Enforcers have been on Panubi.”
“That’s true. Unfortunately, few of you have been over the wall to Central Panubi, which should have been explored generations ago!”
The excuse originally given for not having explored Central Panubi before settlement was that there hadn’t been time. The advance of the Gods had been swifter than anticipated. There had been ecological adaptation delays on Elsewhere. There had been the construction of the Great Rotunda to get finished off and a Frickian army to transport and house. There had been staff to hire and settlement protocols to be developed. There had been on-planet Doors to set up for transporting refugees to their provinces. Exploration of Central Panubi, it had then been felt, could wait until all these matters were taken care of. The reasons given now were different ones, but exploration still waited.
Boarmus’s musing over this fact is interrupted by Zasper’s impatient question.
“Provost, what do you want from me?”
“Well, I don’t want the matter talked of here, for one thing. Since you’re going home, you won’t be here to talk about it. We Council members are not people of action. We don’t think that way. We like precedents. We like rules. You, however, you’re a man of action, so you can tell me what a man of action would do under the circumstances. That’s what I want from you.”
“I’d send someone to Central Panubi to find out what’s going on,” says Zasper firmly.
“Well, I have considered that,” Boarmus replies, offended once more. “That seems self-evident, rather. The former Provost and I both considered doing that. But it’s very difficult to send anyone to do anything and keep it secret! One man, maybe. But one man couldn’t be expected to …”
Zasper thinks about it. “You don’t want to mount a major expedition?”
“I don’t. I don’t want the talk. All it takes is the least bit of tittle-tattle and all Tolerance buzzes like a hive, all the charge monitors get themselves in a muddle, and nothing gets done for ages. Work backs up. The status quo is threatened. No, we couldn’t have a major expedition without talk.”
“Well, if I couldn’t send someone to find anything out, then I’d simply wait. You’ve probably noticed that the intervals between messages are getting shorter. Whoever or whatever it is may be growing … less patient. If you wait, the petitioner may come to you.”
“If you had to guess, what would you think this thing means.”
Zasper, well schooled in tactics at the Enforcer Academy, ticks off the possibilities on his fingers: “Agitation, misdirection, misinformation.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning these messages may be mere harassment, attempts to throw you off balance. Or something or someone might be trying to make you look at Central Panubi so hard you don’t see something happening somewhere else. Or perhaps there are beings in Central Panubi who believe they can get us to leave Elsewhere, some of us at any rate, going out where we’d be vulnerable—or who simply believe we ought to; no accounting for some people’s idiocies.” Zasper nodded. Idiocy was one thing Enforcers knew could be counted on.
He went on musingly, “Inasmuch as this thing suggests we turn our attention outside our own system, I could suspect the Hobbs Land Gods have something to do with it. Of course, there is another possibility, which is that the messages are meaningless. They may be created by some entity who’s just fooling around. Maybe even a series of entities. It could have started generations ago with some kid recently brought to Tolerance from Heaven, and then he passed the joke on to succeeding generations.”
Zasper feels this latter alternative is not unlikely. Kids do silly stuff. Even he, as a kid … Well, no matter. Of course (he has to admit this, proud as he is of being what he calls a realist) his feeling that this is foolishness could be just him getting old, losing his resiliency and perceptivity. He doesn’t mention this, however, any more than he mentioned it to the Supervisors when he asked to go back to Enarae and become a mere provincial Enforcer again.
Boarmus frowns thoughtfully. “None of the reasons you mention would require that any of us actually go to Panubi.”
“No,” agrees Zasper. “None of them require that you go there. At least, not right now. Later, maybe. I can’t help thinking that whoever sent that didn’t really expect a response. The message is too enigmatic. Were the others equally so?”
Boarmus nods gloomily.
“Well then, he, she, or it may not expect an answer. The fact it’s so nonspecific really lends weight to the idea that someone’s playing games.”
“Then we should wait, you think?”
“I don’t think what you should do, Provost. That would be presumptuous of me. But it’s what I’d do.”
“Thank you for your opinion, Enforcer.”
“Sir!”
In the other place, on twentieth-century Earth, Bertran and Nela Korsyzczy became bookish, both by necessity and inclination, their fondness for stories stimulated by Marla’s habit of reading to them at bedtime. The comfortable hour she spent each evening sitting beside the twins’ bed holding the pages of a favorite book in the glow of the little lamp with the ruffled pink shade was Marla’s favorite time.
One night, while she was reading Alice in Wonderland, a new edition, with many colored pictures. Bertran broke into the story to ask, “Do you have to read girls’ stories all the time.”
“It isn’t a girl’s story,” Marla said in surprise. “It’s a
