Brannad Klav stared for a moment at
the circle of concrete floor from whence it had disappeared. Then he
turned to Verkan Vall.
"I still can't believe it," he said. "Why, those fellows were First
Level paratimers. So was that priest, Ghromdur: the one you rayed."
"Yes, of course. They worked for your rivals, the Fourth Level Mineral
Products Syndicate; the outfit that was trying to get your Proto-Aryan
Sector fissionables franchise away from you. They operate on this sector
already; have the petroleum franchise for the Chuldun country, east of
the Caspian Sea. They export to some of these internal-combustion-engine
sectors, like Europo-American. You know, most of the wars they've been
fighting, lately, on the Europo-American Sector have been, at least in
part, motivated by rivalry for oil fields. But now that the
Europo-Americans have begun to release nuclear energy, fissionables have
become more important than oil. In less than a century, it's predicted
that atomic energy will replace all other forms of power. Mineral
Products Syndicate wanted to get a good source of supply for uranium,
and your Proto-Aryan Sector franchise was worth grabbing.
"I had considered something like this as a possibility when Stranor,
here, mentioned that tularemia was normally unknown in Eurasia on this
sector. That epidemic must have been started by imported germs. And I
knew that Mineral Products has agents at the court of the Chuldun
emperor, Chombrog: they have to, to protect their oil wells on his
eastern frontiers.
Pages:
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58