And then came Mark Annuncio, who heard much of all this and was as thrilled at the prospect as any Joe Earthman, but who one day thought of something he had seen while sniffing idly through the “dead-matter” files of the Bureau of Outer Provinces. He had seen a medical report about a colony on a planet of a system whose description and position in space tallied with that of the Lagrange group.
Sheffield remembered the day Mark came to him with that news.
He also remembered the face of the Secretary for the Outer Provinces when the news was passed on to him. He saw the secretary’s square jaw slowly go slack and a look of infinite trouble come into his eyes.
The government was committed! It was going to ship millions of people to Junior. It was going to grant farmland and subsidize the first seed supplies, farm machinery, factories. Junior was going to be a paradise for numerous voters and a promise of more paradise for a myriad others.
If Junior turned out to be a killer planet for some reason or other, it would mean political suicide for all government figures concerned in the project. That meant some pretty big men, not least the Secretary for the Outer Provinces.
After days of checking and indecision, the secretary had said to Sheffield, “It looks as though we’ve got to find out what happened, and weave it into the propaganda somehow. Don’t you think we could neutralize it that way?”
“If what happened, isn’t too horrible to neutralize.”
“But it can’t be, can it? I mean, what can it be?” The man was miserably unhappy.
Sheffield shrugged.
The secretary said, “See here. We can send a ship of specialists to the planet. Volunteers only and good reliable me, of course. We can give it the highest priority rating we can move, and Project Junior carries considerable weight, you know. We’ll slow things up here, and hold on till they get back. That might work, don’t you think?”