Mid-Flinx by Alan Dean Foster Read Free Book Online Page A

about this business of physically measurable evil existing in a specific cosmic location?”
    Banadundra shrugged. “Mildly interesting from a theological point of view. I don’t see that it has anything to do with our division.”
    “I ran a follow-up. For hundreds of years it was generally supposed there was nothing in that location. That it was a big, fat, empty space, a vast section of sky devoid of nebulae, stars, or interstellar hydrogen. Just a lot of dark matter.”
    “So?”
    “Most theories of universal creation call for a relatively even distribution of matter throughout the cosmos. This place is an anomaly. A big one. No quadrant of space that big is supposed to be that empty.”
    “Again: so?”
    “According to the updated file of Papers, Astronomy, being prepared for general distribution, a couple of months ago a team based on Hivehom found a source of strong radiation deep within the region. They can’t see it, of course. It’s hidden by all the dark matter. But they’re convinced it’s there. From what I was able to make of it, there may be some unique electromagnetic properties involved.”
    Banadundra smiled. “Like evil?”
    “I have no idea. What intrigues me is how this young man,” and she tapped the hardcopy, “knows about it.”
    “We don’t know that he does.”
    “He claims to know about
something
out there. You read the printout. He says he’s been there. Just not physically.”
    “Right.” Banadundra’s smiled widened. “His ‘soul,’ or whatever, went there. Or maybe he died and went there and came back.”
    “Thranx researchers don’t release experimental data until they’re sure of their results. No one is conversant yet with the conclusions of this particular research group. They haven’t appeared in the general scientific literature, and this preliminary report has only just been passed along to the Church’s Science Department. How did this person Father Bateleur talked with, whoever he is, find out about it?”
    Banadundra was growing impatient. He had other work to attend to. “I don’t know, Misell, but if he actually does know anything, I find it easier to believe that he had contact with this thranx group than that he traveled a couple of million light-years by some kind of wacky astral projection, or whatever. A search of the tabloid media would probably yield a thousand similar stories.”
    “Such fictions rarely include discussions of the nature of subatomic matter.”
    “All right, a couple of dozen stories, then. The numbers mean nothing, just as the interview signifies nothing.”
    “Shikar, did you ever hear of the Meliorare Society?”
    He blinked. “The renegade eugenicists who were wiped out a few years ago? Sure. Everybody in the department remembers that one. What of it?”
    Father Sandra tapped the hardcopy. “You remember some trouble involving a radical antidevelopment group on a colony world called Longtunnel?”
    Banadundra nodded slowly. “I think so. It was properly taken care of, wasn’t it? I don’t follow colonial politics.”
    “If the computer correlations are correct, this young man was present there as well. He became involved with the group. Also with a gengineer working for a company called Coldstripe. Her name,” Sandra checked the printout again, “was Clarity Held. At the conclusion of the confrontation she filed a report of her own with the appropriate regulatory authorities. It includes mention of a young man whose description closely matches that of Father Bateleur’s interviewee.”
    “You’re losing me, Misell.”
    “When the last known adherents of the Meliorare Society were destroyed, it was on a world called Moth.”
    “Never been there,” he told her. “Heard it’s an interesting, wide-open sort of place.”
    “I sweated correlation. Not easy when you’ve got the whole Commonwealth to cover. There are records of a young man named Philip Lynx. Credit tallies through a trading concern called the