Probability Space Read Online Free PDF

military seeking to understand the only Faller enemy ever captured alive. That Faller had died, but not before Dr. Thomas Capelo had learned from it the information that had changed the whole feel of the war.
    All that had occurred on World, where Marbet had met Lyle Kaufman. Where together they had wrecked a civilization.
    Marbet no longer tried to talk to Lyle about his guilt. Her talk had made no impression. Only going back to World might do that. If the authorities ever let them.
    Those authorities had kept dose watch on Kaufman for the last few years, just as they undoubtedly had on Marbet Grant and Thomas Capelo. All three knew too much about the dead Faller. So of course the room was bugged. General Stefanak’s power depended on information as much as on the army presence steadily and inexorably increasing on Mars. It was an army fanatically loyal to Stefanak. The general had spent a decade building that fanaticism: promoting certain officers, transferring others to the colonies, manipulating all-important budget allocations. Some—many—said Stefanak was building to a dictatorship, under cover of martial law made “necessary” by the war. During the last year, fewer had dared say it too openly.
    Marbet picked up the handheld—the hotel room didn’t even possess a proper voice-activated house system—to flick on the news, and there he was, Sullivan Stefanak, Supreme Commander, Solar Defense Alliance Council, “—here tonight only because the danger to all Solar citizens is so great. A danger not from the enemy, but from our own people. The antiwar faction known as ‘Life Now’ represents—”
    “Here we go again,” Marbet said. Kaufman stayed expressionless, and knew that to Marbet he was not. His feelings about Stefanak were still confused. Kaufman was—had been—a soldier, and Stefanak was the greatest soldier of his generation. It was his leadership that had kept the Fallers, humanity’s technological superior, from already winning the war. It was also Stefanak that was destroying the republican structure of the Solar System alliance, a structure inevitably fragile since Mars, not the more populous Earth, controlled the Council. Mars controlled the space tunnels. That was all it took. Mars—
    “What did he just say?” Marbet said. Kaufman had not been listening. One look at her face and he began.
    “—cowardly kidnapping of a civilian. Dr. Thomas Capelo, as you all know, is the Solar System’s preeminent scientist, the man who deciphered for us the Protector Artifact that keeps our precious homeworlds safe from the enemy sworn to destroy every last vestige of human life. Life Now has finally gone too far! Dr. Capelo, father of two daughters, respected professor at UAF’s venerable university of Harvard, was not even a combatant. Many regard him as a savior, and indeed—”
    “When?” Kaufman said.
    “Last night. SShhhh…”
    “—grateful his family was not at home at the time—”
    Kaufman thought rapidly. It could have been Life Now, yes. They were gaining strength. Their core of idealists was backed by some very powerful families and corporations with a lot to lose if Stefanak became dictator. But Life Now wasn’t the only candidate for kidnapper. Kaufman had been stuck commanding a backwater space station for the last year of his military service. He was out of touch with Solar politics. But before that, he had been a military strategist in the Solar Alliance Defense Army. It wasn’t inconceivable that some faction of the government itself, some faction bitterly opposed to Stefanak, had kidnapped Capelo. But why? Or …
    He said to Marbet, “Do you know what Tom was working on now?”
    She made a face. “Lyle, physics is so complicated now that I don’t think even most of Tom’s colleagues understood what he was working on. Maybe Tom himself didn’t really know. It wouldn’t be the first time.” Her expression changed. She said, “I feel ill, Lyle. That food at lunch, I