“Well, it wouldn’t have happened if you weren’t so slow on the uptake!”
Desperately pulling myself back together, I went back to belaboring Yuri. As for Yuri, just how do you like that? She was gawking at me, her face a picture of dazed stupefaction.
“The problem with you,” I continued, “is that you always pretend as if nothing concerns you at all!”
“But golly,” said Yuri, squirming on the seat. “You just got right up and started quarreling with the policeman, Kei. There wasn’t anything I could do, was there?”
“Humph!”
I was at a loss for words. Oh, for sure, there was a mountain of things I could have said. Like, just what do you mean by that, Yuri? While you were standing there like a lump on a log, I was out there defending our honor all by myself. Boy, you’ve got a lot of nerve! I continued to seethe in rage.
But once Yuri takes that attitude, it doesn’t matter what you say. She just floats away from you, until you wind up feeling like a fool yourself. I gave up throwing hysterics at her, and trained my sights on Merutonan, sitting in the front passenger seat.
“My, my, Mr. Merutonan,” I said, starting him out gently with my velvet touch. “You certainly did take a long time getting to the airport, didn’t you?”
“A— Ah, yes.”
Merutonan turned to look at us over the back of his seat. He was clearly embarrassed.
“As I mentioned in the lobby,” he said, “the police had checkpoints set up all along the highway. Moreover, they were the kind where they thoroughly check each car one by one.”
“Wow! The police were trying to stop you?”
“I don’t know if I was their target or not,” said Merutonan. “But it did strike me as suspicious, so I had some of our staff look into it. Apparently each checkpoint was taken down after I’d gone through.”
“Well that was pretty brazen of them.”
I narrowed my eyes.
“They were scheming to turn us back or something before you arrived.”
“The police were extremely angry when they learned that the Gravas Foundation had taken this incident to the WWWA,” admitted Merutonan. “When they learned that the Dirty—ahem, the Lovely Angels were coming, they quite openly tried to pressure us.”
“Really!”
“But we are, after all, the peerless Gravas Foundation.
“That’s especially true here on Dangle. We opened this planet and developed it just to locate the headquarters of Gravas Heavy Industries here. As far as the government of Dangle is concerned, our word is the law. It was only police pressure. We brushed it off.”
“So that’s why they resorted to force,” I said, nodding to myself, and immediately resumed my questioning.
“But even so, why are they so prejudiced against us? Goodness, you don’t suppose the police are involved in this affair?”
“That is most unlikely,” said Merutonan, dismissing the idea out of hand. “He has a quick temper, but you might call that the flaw in a jewel. In all other respects, Inspector Bayleaf is a capable and honest police officer. As long as he’s involved, it’s safe to assume nothing underhanded is going on. Moreover…”
“Moreover?”
“According to a report by the Gravas Foundation’s own intelligence apparatus, the police are innocent.”
“Intelligence apparatus!”
I cried out despite myself at Merutonan’s words. Yuri made a show of covering her ears. Just go jump in a lake, Yuri!
“Your intelligence apparatus!” I said. “A private organization as big as the Gravas Foundation must have dozens of investigative operations in several senses of the word, right? Just now you mentioned one of their reports.”
“Yes,” agreed Merutonan, tilting his head quizzically. “That’s quite routine.”
“So let me just ask you one thing. According to the rumor mills, at least, the information-gathering capabilities of the Gravas Foundation’s intelligence apparatus easily outstrips that of the United Galactica Space Force Intelligence Bureau Second Section. Is that really true?”
“I can’t speak with absolute confidence, but generally speaking, that’s true,” acknowledged Merutonan readily. “We’re especially strong in economics.”
“Well, then. You petitioned the WWWA after your intelligence apparatus had already done its work. So, what are you really after?”
The overwhelming majority of the cases brought before the WWWA are initiated by national governments. Schematically, the process goes: incident arises—cops investigate—cops can’t cope— cops report to the government—the government petitions the WWWA.
There are some cases, however, that don’t follow this pattern. They’re brought directly to the WWWA’s attention by the private sector. There are times, for instance, when the claimant may be dissatisfied with the outcome of a case the police already consider closed. That was what had happened this time with the Gravas Foundation.
“What are we really after? That’s a bit of an exaggeration,” replied Merutonan serenely. “The greatest reason for our appeal was simply that the conclusions of the police and the contents of the final report prepared by our own intelligence people disagreed.”
“The police concluded it was an accident,” I said. “So, what was your conclusion?”
“Cause unknown.”
“Wha—?” Caught off-guard, my eyes grew round with surprise. Merutonan continued on obliviously.
“Our intelligence people investigated the incident from three angles—one, that it was a simple accident; two, that it was a crime by someone inside the organization; and three, that it was a crime by an outsider. They spent a whole month on it, and in the end were unable to determine which if any of these was the actual cause. But what about the police? After just two weeks of Investigations they concluded that it was an accident. We were disturbed by this discrepancy, and decided to take the matter to the WWWA.”
“I see.”
It all made sense. I was satisfied.
“The fact that we had real reason for concern,” added Merutonan, “is proved by the WWWA’s acceptance of the case. Am I not correct?”
Indeed, it was exactly as Merutonan said.
In the case of a private sector appeal, the WWWA doesn’t just automatically dispatch a Trouble Consultant.
First, it has the claimant and the police turn over all their data. All the evidence is then input into the United Galactica central computer. If there is even the tiniest bit of a contradiction in the police’s conclusions, a Trouble Consultant is dispatched to the scene, no matter how minor the case may seem to be.
The fact we had been sent to Dangle showed more clearly than anything else that more than a simple accident was involved. By the same token, that judgment had branded the police with the infamy of a botched investigation. That’s the reason we always get along so badly with the local police. Even so, the hatred Bayleaf had shown toward us was simply too extreme.
“Well, you certainly have asked me a lot of questions,” said Merutonan with gentlemanly restraint. Perhaps he felt he should bridge the silence now that our conversation had petered out. “Weren’t you told anything at all about the matters I’ve been explaining?”
“That’s it!”
Yuri, who had been completely silent up to that point, suddenly let out a shout. Would you believe it? She’d even raised herself half out of her seat. Merutonan and I gaped at her in surprise.
“That’s the whole point!” she continued. “We were yanked into this affair without even time for that!”
Now I understood what she wanted to say. And of course, I wanted to say it, too.
When the central computer had summoned us we had been on F-Class standby—in other words, on vacation.
We’d been at Sanova Beach on Vanir.
Vanir is one of the Milky Way’s most famous ocean resort planets. Sanova Beach is on the western seacoast of the Suvalean continent, which sprawls along Vanir’s equator. It’s an ocean swimming resort whose greatest claim to fame is its kilometer-long beach, blessed with shallow water far out to sea and covered with crystal-white star sand.
Ah, the limpid water, the gentle waves, the refreshing breeze, the hot, exciting rays of the sun! That was where we’d been passing our time when we got the call. What do you think would normally happen in such a case? Of course, we’d be screaming bloody murder. Ten or even twenty of the choicest words in our vocabulary wouldn’t suffice to relieve our feelings.
But just this once, it was different. You see, this particular F-Class standby had nothing going for it. Yuri had gotten the cramps and nearly drowned. I was nearly run down by a hydrojet boat. The knockout guy we tried to pickup turned out to be gay… In a word, this vacation had been the pits.
That’s when we got the emergency summons from headquarters.
Slewing there with nothing to do, lying around on our backs topless, we’d bounded off Vanir and back into space as if the summons had been a blessing from heaven. Following headquarters’ directions, we’d rushed straight to Dangle.
Nonetheless, the summons was unprecedented. We agreed to go because we just happened to be in a disaster zone at the time, but this one clearly belonged to that category our work rules term “refusable duties.” If we hadn’t wanted to go, we could have said no without any penalty at all.