"Are you still interested in the Beachball?" Furuneo ventured.
"Is there a Caleban in it?"
"Presumably."
"You haven't investigated?" McKie's mental tone said Furuneo had been entrusted with a most crucial operation and had failed because of inherent stupidity.
Now fully alert to some unspoken danger, Furuneo said, "I acted as my orders instructed."
"Orders!" McKee sneered.
"I'm supposed to be angry, eh?" Furuneo asked.
"I'll be there as fast as I can get service - within eight standard hours at the most," McKie said. "Your orders, meanwhile, are to keep that Beachball under constant observation. The observers must be hopped up on angeret. It's their only protection."
"Constant observation," Furuneo said.
"If a Caleban emerges, you're to detain it by any means possible."
"A Caleban . . . detain it?"
"Engage it in conversation, request its cooperation, anything," McKie said. His mental emphasis added that it was odd a Bureau agent should have to ask about throwing a monkey wrench into someone's activities.
"Eight hours," Furuneo said.
"And don't forget the angeret."
***
A Bureau is a life form and the Bureaucrat one of its cells. This analogy teaches us which are the more important cells, which in greatest peril, which most easily replaced, and how easy it is to be mediocre.
McKie, on the honeymoon planet of Tutalsee, took an hour to complete his divorce, then returned to the float-home they had moored beside an island of love flowers. Even the nepenthe of Tutalsee had failed him, McKie thought. This marriage had been wasted effort. His ex hadn't known enough about Mliss Abnethe despite their reported former association. But that had been on another world.