The World Swappers Read Online Free PDF Page B

the eleventh floor clear across Rio to the edge of the sea. Afternoon sun was glimmering on a seeming infinity of windows in the lower buildings within his view.
    Matter transmitter … The concept ticked through Bassett’s mind. With instantaneous transport of goods, how enormously complex a trading empire might be built up; how much more of the visible universe might be delivered into the hands of man!
    He grew aware that he was stretching Lecoq’s limited ability to remain silent beyond its capacity. He turned back to face his assistant across the vast bare top of his enormous desk.
    “You panic, Lecoq,” he said bluntly. “As you say, it is disturbing to discover that there exists a group of persons with such resources that they can not only employ devices we believed to be purely hypothetical, but can also forecast the failure of a plan we believed to be reliable.”
    “Disturbing!” Lecoq snapped. “It means that we’ve been made monkeys of!”
    “Nonsense. If this group, whoever they are and wherever they may operate from, were powerful enough for us to need to fear them, actively fear them, then they would not feel a need to remain hidden from us. Obviously, they do wish to stay concealed. This argues that they have considerable resources of knowledge, but not of effective forces. Yet it is reassuring that they have not succeeded in remaining in hiding. Up till the other day, we had heard the vaguest rumours of such a group. Now we know a good deal about them. Logically, I deduce that we have worried them out of their preferred pattern of behavior. Good. Let’s do it again. Soon.”
    Lecoq scowled gloomily. “How? We still don’t know where they operate, who their members are. I’ve consulted a dozen of our staff physicists, and none of them can define a method of detecting the operation of a matter transmitter, so we can’t locate them that way.”
    “How?” said Bassett, ignoring the last part of Lecoq’s remark. “Why, by taking them at their word and capitalizing on their suggestion about Ymir.”
    “You’re not seriously proposing to follow that up, are you?” Lecoq demanded. “Ymir! It’s the least likely of the outworlds to afford a solution to our problems.”
    “They were right about our failure on Boreas, weren’t they?” Bassett countered. “You’re not going to tell me they rigged our own company computers to give us a false answer. No, we got adequate confirmation on that score as soon as we processed our data. Boreas is out. It looked obvious. This suggests to me that we probably weren’t even asking the right questions. But that’s beside the point. If this mysterious group has such exact knowledge of my personal movements, for example, that they can have a man waiting for me in mid-Pacific within half a mile of the place where my ship comes down–”
    “They probably extrapolated from its entry into the atmosphere and transmitted the man there a moment before we arrived.” Lecoq plainly did not think highly of the achievement.
    “I don’t care how he got there.” Bassett hunched himself forward in his chair and rested his elbows on the desk. “The important fact is that they did have someone waiting to meet me on my arrival on Earth, which argues a close study and pretty full knowledge of my recent activities. No one except ourselves knew just when we were returning to Earth, nor that I was proposing to put down in mid-Pacific instead of coming direct to the South Atlantic off Rio, as might have been expected. That’s point one.
    “Point two: They knew in advance, and our computers have agreed with them, that Boreas was a stupid place to look for an answer to our problems.
    “Point three: Despite their vaunted pretensions to be able to solve the Ymiran problem, they took the trouble of arranging an elaborate and impressive means of telling me about it. This could well imply that they are in fact looking to me for the solution which they can’t find, even though