First: Keep clear of me. I am maneuvering with difficulty.
Then: Keep off. No mechanical science allowed in this co-ordinate system.
They looked at one another under beetled brows. They wondered, at first privately and then openly if that Junior E had blown his stack. They had looked at many a problem finally solved by the E's, but never before had such a ridiculous situation come up.
And right at the time, too, when the civil government had decided to place a curb on E.H.Q.'s freedom of movement, its control over the experimental phases of planet development. The injunction to halt a Junior E from taking over the Eden problem fooled none of them. They knew that Gunderson wasn't concerned for those colonists out there, that he was merely using the public furor to advance his own personal power. They knew that the police worked unremittingly, unceasingly, always and ever to bring every phase of human activity under their control. They knew it was a centuries-old tactic to wait for the right situation to arise, so that the lawmakers could be stampeded into passing some law which seemed only to apply to this given condition but in actuality broadened police powers over a wide area of man's actions.
Yes, there was far more at stake here than the fate of fifty colonists. In a sense E.H.Q. itself was the stake. The whole science of E was at stake.
And E McGinnis had played right into Gunderson's hands. It was he who had been the E influence in deciding to allow a Junior to handle the problem in the first place. It was he who was standing off from the planet, not landing and taking over things as he should.
There was obviously no danger. By his own report, the people on Eden were in good health, and from their apparent actions, not even distressed.
This message about no mechanical science being allowed, for example. Did the Junior mean the colonists wouldn't allow it? Must mean that. What else could prevent it? But when an E, a real E, took charge in an experimental colony, the colonists had nothing further to say about the matter. True, when the five-year experimental period was over and the three-generation colonists took over a planet, then it came more under civil control, and E.H.Q. largely withdrew with the provision that it could step back in at any time the problem seemed not to have been solved after all.
But while under the five-year test ... The E was the final word, or should be. The colonists knew it. The E knew it, or should know it. Obviously then it was weakness on the part of the Junior if he allowed the colonists to dictate that there could be no mechanical science. Proof of his inability to handle the job.
A perfect setup for Gunderson!