“Not from our side,” Verkan Vall told him. “The Lady Dallona is a scientist, entirely nonpolitical. The Honorable Brarnend is a business man; he doesn’t meddle with politics as long as the politicians leave him alone. And I’m a planter on Venus; I have enough troubles, with the natives, and the weather, and blue-rot in the zerfa plants, and poison roaches, and javelin bugs, without getting into politics. But psychic science is inextricably mixed with politics, and the Lady Dallona’s work had evidently tended to discredit the theory of Statistical Reincarnation.”
“Do you often make understatements like that, Lord Virzal?” Olirzon grinned. “In the last six months, she’s knocked Statistical Reincarnation to splinters.”
“Well, I’m not a psychic scientist, and as I said, I don’t know much about Terran politics,” Verkan Vall replied. “I know that the Statisticalists favor complete socialization and political control of the whole economy, because they want everybody to have the same opportunities in every reincarnation. And the Volitionalists believe that everybody reincarnates as he pleases, and so they favor continuance of the present system of private ownership of wealth and private profit under a system of free competition. And that’s about all I do know. Naturally, as a land-owner and the holder of a title of nobility, I’m a Volitionalist in politics, but the socialization issue isn’t important on Venus. There is still too much unseated land there, and too many personal opportunities, to make socialism attractive to anybody.”
“Well, that’s about it,” Zortan Brend told him. “I’m not enough of a psychicist to know what the Lady Dallona’s been doing, but she’s knocked the theoretical basis from under Statistical Reincarnation, and that’s the basis, in turn, of Statistical Socialism. I think we’ll find that the Statisticalist Party is responsible for whatever happened to her.”
Marnik, the younger of the two Assassins, hesitated for a moment, then addressed Verkan Vall:
“Lord Virzal, I know none of the personalities involved in this matter, and I speak without wishing to give offense, but is it not possible that the Lady Dallona and the Assassin Dirzed may have gone somewhere together voluntarily? I have met Dirzed, and he has many qualities which women find attractive, and he is by no means indifferent to the opposite sex. You understand, Lord Virzal—”
“I understand all too perfectly, Marnik,” Verkan Vall replied, out of the fullness of experience. “The Lady Dallona has had affairs with a number of men, myself among them. But under the circumstances, I find that explanation unthinkable.”
Marnik looked at him in open skepticism. Evidently, in his book, where an attractive man and a beautiful woman were concerned, that explanation was never unthinkable.
“The Lady Dallona is a scientist,” Verkan Vall elaborated. “She is not above diverting herself with love affairs, but that’s all they are—a not too important form of diversion. And, if you recall, she had just participated in a most significant experiment: you can be sure that she had other things on her mind at the time than pleasure jaunts with good-looking Assassins.”