Freya said perceptively, "Until they do, you're going to stay suspicious. Of the whole Newcolonizedland settlement. Aud and vid signals are not good enough to convince you — because you know how easily they can be faked." She gestured at the deck running the tape at this very moment.
"A client," Matson corrected her. "Who on a nonverbal level, what our Reich friends call thinking with the blood, suspects that if he takes his one remaining inter-stellar worthy flagship, the — " What was it called? "The Navel," he said. "The Omphalos; that's what that lofty Greek word means, by the way. Takes the Navel direct to Fomalhaut, that after eighteen years of weary deep-sleep which is not quite sleep, more a hyponagogic, restless tossing and turning at low temp, slowed-down metabolism, he will arrive at Whale's Mouth, and oddly it will not be beer and skittles. It will not be happy conapt dwellers, smiling children in autonomic schools, tame, exotic, native life forms. But — "
But just what would he find?
If, as he suspected, the aud and vid tracks passing from Whale's Mouth to Terra via von Einem's Telpor mechanisms were covers — what really lay beneath?
He simply could not guess, not when forty million people were involved. The dog-food factory? Are, god forbid, those forty million men, women and children dead? Is it a boneyard, with no one there, no one even to extract the gold from their teeth — because now we use stainless steel?
He did not know, but — someone knew. Perhaps entire New Whole Germany, which, having cornered the lion's share of power in the UN, hence ruled throughout the nine planets of the Sol system; perhaps as a totality it, on a subrational, instinctive level, knew. As, in the 1940s, it had intuited the existence of the gas chambers beyond the cages of twittering birds and those high walls that kept out all sight and sound... and except for that oddly acrid smoke from chimneys all day long —