Masters of Everon Read Online Free PDF

"Busy as I am, paperwork isn't always something I can check on personally. And those clerks back at Corps headquarters will go making mistakes now and then."
    "Then you're saying it isn't there, after all?"
    "Did I say that?"
    Jef gave up on that tack.
    "All right," he said. "Maybe you'll tell me then why you're being so helpful to us? Whether you knew who I was or not, you've gone to some trouble for us twice. I appreciate it, but I'd like to know why you did it. We don't know each other and I've no claim on you. Or are you going to play games with me about that, too?"
    "Oh, I don't think so," said Martin. He nodded at the wall that the living room of his suite shared with Jef's room. "That's a valuable maolot you've got over there. The only one ever raised away from its native world."
    "Oh, you know that, do you?"
    "It hardly takes knowing. Research would hardly have given you a grant to bring him here if your situation and that of your beast wasn't unique. Well, you might say I'm unique, too—here and now, on this world at least, I'm the only John Smith there is. It could be that our two uniquenesses would find a profit in working together."
    He paused, looking at Jef.
    "Go on," said Jef.
    "Very well," said Martin. "But how could I work with your maolot unless the two of you were free and clear to be about the business you'd come to do? So naturally I stepped in when the other passengers seemed to be building a threat against him, and did so again when Mr. Armage seemed about to act in a manner somewhat drastic."
    "So it's Mikey you want," Jef said. "What do you want him for? What kind of use could you have for him?"
    "Why, none that specific to mention, just at the present moment," said Martin. "I'm only keeping an eye to the future, so to speak, on the basis of my past experience with work on worlds such as this. Maybe you don't know that someone like myself has the absolute obligation of checking out newly planted planets from time to time, to see that the humans on them are using the resources properly, and not wasting them. Habitable, Earth-like worlds, within a reasonable distance of old Sol, are not that easy to come by; as everyone should know these days. If I find something wrong here, I might be obliged to recommend quarantine; and then Everon'd be cut off from all interstellar travel for fifty or a hundred years."
    "I know all that," Jef said. "But I don't see how Mikey can help you make your inspections, which I take it is what you'll be doing."
    "Well now," said Martin, stretching his legs out and gazing thoughtfully at the white-painted ceiling above them. "Inspecting is indeed a good part of a John Smith's work, true enough. But that's only when the world in question is essentially conformable to Corps regulations and intent. When it is honestly trying to abide by the law; and all there is to be found, perhaps, are a few, unconscious violations of good ecological practice. But it's another story altogether when there are deliberate law-breakers there, when there might be a conspiracy to misuse the world for personal gain. That sort of situation in which the slash-and-burn mentality has gotten out of hand, you might say; and there are some who figure to take with a ruthless hand what they can and carry their profits from it off to some other new world."
    Jef stared hard at Martin. It was impossible to be sure if the other man was being serious or not. But the long speech he just heard had been delivered without a smile. If it had not been so hard to believe in Martin as a John Smith, perhaps it would have been easier to take what he had just said at its face value.
    "You think there are ecological criminals on Everon?" he said.
    "Who knows?" Martin shrugged. "But can I take it for granted there are none?"
    Jef felt his interior bitterness like a heavy pressure inside him.
    "What kind of an answer is that?" he said. "I asked you a straight question. If you don't think there's something ecologically criminal