Between the Stars Read Online Free PDF

planet had been squandered to provide for the growing, unproductive surplus population. The long-promised development of the Third World with its attendant employment opportunities never occurred.
    Catastrophe might have been averted had population been controlled. It had been assumed that education and growing sophistication would take care of the problem. In the late twentieth century, a sudden, unforeseen resurgence of primitive religion had changed everything. The priests, mullahs, imams, evangelists and whatnot condemned birth control as unnatural. Alarmed at the booming population of Third World countries and afraid of being swamped, First World nations encouraged larger families, while decrying everybody else's lack of restraint.
    After several nightmare decades during which even a modest, conventional war could kill hundreds of millions without putting a significant dent in the birth rate, the iron-fisted rule of Earth First had descended, slowing the deterioration without stopping it. There had been a sort of recovery during the Space War years, but the war had ended inconclusively. It was significant that those slightly less miserable years were being looked back on with nostalgic longing.
    Carstairs glanced up as she entered his Greenwich office. As usual, he wasted no time. "Evening, Val. Special assignment this time—maybe the most important you've ever had."
    "Alien artifact?"
    His eyes widened slightly. In all of known space, she was one of the few people who could still surprise him. "Christ, you haven't been idling, have you now?"
    "I heard some talk about it before I left Armstrong. Serious talk from people who don't fall for con games. You don't have many agents who can work in the Belt."
    "Right you are, love. Have a seat." He took a bottle of Glenfiddich from his desk and poured two gills. "Official word reached here two days ago. The U.N. Academy was informed that something strange as all hell was found on Rhea. It's being studied. They promise to share all data with us. The trick is, they have the bloody thing and we don't, so do we trust them to tell us everything they find?"
    "Have we any choice?" She let the smoky taste of the Scotch roll over her tongue.
    "That's where you come in. I'm sending you out there. I want you to get close to whoever's analyzing the thing and report back to me. It's more complicated than it sounds, but we'll get to that in a minute."
    Her stomach tightened. An assignment in the Belt! She had smuggled herself out to the Confederate asteroids on two occasions, but only to train and learn how to pass as a native. She had never had an assignment there.
    "Our esteemed Secretary General made a brief statement to the media this morning," Carstairs went on. "Made a bloody fool of himself by calling Rhea one of Jupiter's moons, but who notices these days? Now Secretary Larsen's in the act. This came across about an hour ago." He waved a hand and a wall of the room ran a holo display. From his office in the Geneva Complex, Secretary for Planetary Security Aage Larsen was addressing a flock of unseen reporters. Like Shevket, the Dane was the opposite in appearance from what one would guess. He was a small, dapper man with shiny black hair and a dark-complected face dominated by enormous brown eyes. His small mouth made a prim line below a pencil-thin mustache.
    Valentina heard Carstairs chuckle. "Bastard's had those basset-hound eyes surgically enlarged. Thinks it makes him look more compassionate and humanitarian." Valentina said nothing. Surgical alteration to fit a role made perfect sense to her.
    "Today," Larsen began, "we received notification from the Confederacy of Island Worlds that an artifact of extraterrestrial origin has been discovered. There seems no reason to doubt the truth of the find. The scanty data we have been provided thus far, if accurate, indicate that the Confederates are in possession of a secret of cosmic significance. If Object X, as it is being called, is