This division was known to only a few people in the company, and no one outside knew it existed. Roald managed this special division, and left the rest of the management to the routine procedures and junior executives.
While the rest of the company was in a state of organized hysteria, with great ships loading from the massive warehouses of food, medicine, and other relief supplies, and heaving into the sky bound for Lyrane, Roald was having a quiet conference with the members of his special division.
Roald's father had known that the cheapest way to relieve an emergency was to alleviate the causes behind it, unless it were a natural disaster. For this reason, he had organized a corps of special agents to penetrate behind the scenes to straighten out the causes and cut short the emergencies that Universal Relief had to pay for.
"Apparently there is a definite force operating on Lyrane," Roald was saying to his elite corps, "that caused these men, who had been living by the standards of that civilization and becoming rich from it, to cease the activity which they had profited by."
"Could it be a religious doctrine?" one of them asked.
"Possibly. It could be anything. The fact is we don't know—and we should. So we're going to Lyrane. For the Main Office, this is a Class A; but for us it is a Class AA!"
Erol Garbin sat on the cool stone terrace of the mountain lodge, gazing out over the small valley with the golden orange sun of Lyrane setting behind the mountains. The cool evening breeze gently rearranged his white hair and brushed over the creased forehead and the worried eyes.
He looked up to see his daughter come out on to the terrace. She was a comely young woman of slight build and apparently sensitive nature as vivified in her piquant features. He gave her a wistful smile, at which she rushed into his arms and buried her head in his shoulder, which was still powerful despite his age. Her body quivered with muffled sobs.
"Yma, my dearest Yma," he said tenderly. "Why didn't you marry, so that you would have none of this? You could be leading your own life, instead of bearing my burden."