Duval looked disappointed.
“Well, I suppose I have mentioned that once or twice before. But there’s one other thing—”
“What’s that?”
“When you are caught, I didn’t know what you wanted the gear for.”
“What, after all the fuss you once made about the scientist’s social responsibility for his inventions? Really, Pierre, I’m ashamed of you!” Stormgren laid down the thick folder of typescript with a sigh of relief.
“Thank heavens that’s settled at last,” he said. “It’s strange to think that these few hundred pages hold the future of mankind. The World State! I never thought I would see it in my lifetime!”
He dropped the file into his brief-case, the back of which was no more than ten centimetres from the dark rectangle of the screen. From time to nine his fingers played across the locks in a half-conscious nervous reaction, but he had no intention of pressing the concealed switch until the meeting was over. There was a chance that something might go wrong: though Duval had sworn that Karellen would detect nothing, one could never be sure.
“Now, you said you’d some news for me,” Stormgren continued, with scarcely concealed eagerness. “Is it about—”
“Yes,” said Karellen. “I received a decision a few hours ago.”
What did he mean by that? wondered Stormgren. Surely it was not possible for the Supervisor to have communicated with his distant home, across the unknown numbers of light years that separated him from his base. Or perhaps — this was van Ryberg’s theory — he had merely been consulting some vast computing machine which could predict the outcome of any political action.