Quote Originally Posted by Ramil
8

On the next day Arthur Ovald was permitted to visit his father. Kay in a reclining posture was eating oat gruel. Its taste was just wonderful compared to the warm mineral water which they had allowed him to drink the day before.
“Dad?”
Kay silently handed the plate to a nurse, a red haired girl with a slim figure. He and Arthur looked at each other.
“I’m glad you didn’t put your grandfather’s name into disgrace/didn't bring disgrace on your grandfather's name.” said Kay.
Arthur smiled.
“You look far better, dad.”
“No wonder here.”
Arthur squinted at the nurse and said:
“They got in touch with mom… we were talking. I told her that there was no need for her to come. You’re going to be discharged in three days and we’ll fly home, right?”

That old sly fox Van Curtis, he outsmarted the Service and I really have got a house on Endoria and a wife named Karin…

“We will have to go, son. Someone at our spaceport needs a good scandal. We’ll shake everything out them… for the ship and for all this trouble.
The red-haired nurse smiled as she was turning away. This big guy was very overconfident. The spaceport technical services had become very skilled in such scandals.
Then again, this Endorian is very stubborn and lucky. Perhaps he would be able to squeeze some amount out of them … in a couple of years.
“Arthur, bring me a normal sandwich…” whispered Kay Ovald behind her back. Here he is too. As soon as patients get the ability to move they immediately start dreaming of breaking the rules…

…Luis Nomachi was a man of deceptive appearance. He was plump as a donut and very cheerful. He seemed to be glad at/about anything that happened. His ability to promote his career caused a few raised eyebrows among his colleagues. Luis was regarded as a stool pigeon; there were talks about some high-ranked patrons. But this was not the case. Luis simply could accept any rules of the game. Such as him survived on the occupied planets, persisted beyond resignations of their superiors, and went higher and higher, slowly but steadily. Their growth had been limited by the/their lifespan before but it was their time now, it was their opportunity. They could adapt to everything, sustain victories and losses, they were growing on the body of the Human Empire like a thorny weed. One couldn’t even call them immoral. They just corresponded too well to the current moment.
Nomachi had some/an uncomplicated task this time – the controlling of two Endorians who were presently under a yellow mode – the father and son who made it from the regional aThan office to the spaceport. A lucky miss! Kahl did some initial checking and shuffled the case to him. Some passive surveillance, data checking – what could be easier?
But why had Isabelle Kahl took personal interest in the Endorians? Why had she kept them in the red mode until she could talk to Ovald senior and query information from their home planet? Nomachi lacked Isabelle’s beastly intuition and seventy years of experience. But he trusted someone else’s experience and had persistence that was sooner peculiar to a door-spring rather than a man.
He was crouching at the computer terminal and constantly chewing crackers from the package and opening one file after another from the “Endorians case”. There was a report of the outer perimeter guard lieutenant, a medical report, interrogation transcripts of the boy, a record of conversation between Isabelle and Kay, a report from the Service on Endoria. The average information authenticity evaluation is eighty six percent. Great! The golden middle… not too little and not too much to raise suspicions. They were lying about something, of course. Just like any other honest man would do.
But Isabelle Kahl didn’t entertain doubts about them.
Luis got back to the operative information. Here are the photographs of Kay and Arthur… Stop! They don’t look all that much alike. Karin Ovald cuckolded her husband? Possible… Luis queried the file with Karin’s brief description. The portrait… Well if she was the boy’s mother and Kay was his father… Luis ran a physiognomic analysis.
Firty two percent. Arthur could be the son of them both, he could be born from another man, or he could be adopted. Then again it was an average result. Well, let’s try it differently: what is the probability that Arthur is Karin’s son… what is the probability that Arthur is Kay’s son…?
Twenty percent. Six percent.
Nice. The program found something wrong. The boy that had been the son of Karin and Kay could be neither Kay’s son nor Karin’s son. How extraordinary…
The program could have a glitch. Karin could have cheated on her husband. The adoption bureau could have used the same equipment when it was selecting a baby and picked out a suitable child for the couple and not for Karin or Kay separately. It was totally unnecessary to begin the investigation…
But the spring man couldn’t stop halfway. There were checks on Endoria, there were local checks. What was left out? aThan? An everlasting eyesore of the all-seeing Service. An everlasting shame. They were using aThan on a common basis and sometimes after some mutually successful exchange of fire they were resurrected side by side with their killers. Curtis Van Curtis’s Empire was a state within a state. It was very humiliating to know that all secrets of the Service could be downloaded from the memory of a deceased and generously resurrected executive. In spite of Curtis’s assurances he had been giving/that he had given to the Emperor himself, in spite of its outward friendliness, in spite of its reduced rates aThan continued to keep its secrets…
But even the strongest armor had its weak spots.
Luis made an inquiry for reactivation of the agent that had been recruited from amongst aThan employees. He sent it without motivation, hoping that it would be rejected. He didn’t want to waste time on this case… but he simply couldn’t stand falling back.
His inquiry passed.
“So be it.” said Nomachi to the computer terminal. “Let’s scan you all the way through in due order. You don’t pay taxes for nothing, do you…?”

…Kay was exercising. The body didn’t weaken much; apparently his muscles were stimulated artificially during his illness. Kay was concerned more about possible surveillance so he had to restrain himself. The fact that the gym of the small hospital was perfectly equipped added to his vexation a lot.
Having finished with yet another weight machine Kay looked for Arthur who was sitting on some framework that resembled a torturer’s workplace. His arms were fixed on some hydraulic springs.
“Go, go, go.” encouraged mister Ovald to his son “wet your shirt while we’re paying this lot of/this much money anyway.”
“Uh-huh” promised Arthur as he was slowly raising his arms.
Kay went to the sauna and lied down on the bench feeling as his sweat was drying up. It was against the rules but it was so relaxing. Then he perspired again and waited until this sweat would dry up too.
Arthur came and settled on the lower bench. After a while he said:
“Mom must be worrying. When are we flying home?”
This was a key phrase. Arthur was afraid of something, or just hurried to get to that Graal of his.
“In three days there will be a flight to Ilion. We’ll be a stone's throw away from there.”
“And the flight to Epsilon Volantis flies off tomorrow evening. We can fly it… I counted…It’s going to be faster.”
“We should count money too, son” said Kay in a tutorial manner. “You know what situation we’re in. It will take some time to extract the cash from the skinflints in our spaceport… I’m going to the swimming pool and you stay and sweat duly.”

Sixty kilometers away from the Imperial spaceport, not far away from the aThan compound, Luis Nomachi was speaking to its agent.
“Are you sure our meeting is safe?”
“The screen is secure.” said Luis with contempt.
“You don’t know what our security systems are capable of…”
“Yet you know of ours!”
The golden haired creature of indeterminable sex made its angel-like face and said in a whining tone:
“Such extensive demands… I’m ready to serve the Emperor, but…”
“You have some ‘buts’ for the Emperor?” inquired Luis “I haven’t heard of such things yet.”
The creature went silent.
“I don’t give a damn about your problems. I’m sure that you @@@@ with every other man and woman in that hell-hole of yours. And I’m even surer that the video where you mash the genitals of a bulrathi would just fascinate them.”
“L-listen, you have to u-understand me as one man understands another…”
Luis burst into good-humored laughter.
“What a droll little fellow you are. You should have been born a reusable stretching condom – you would have been in the place you belong to/in a place where you belong.”
“My sexual life has only just begun forming into something stable…” said the thanatologist with a broken voice.
“Form away, and remember the more information you dig up on the Ovalds the longer the period that you will be left alone. My regards to your lovers.”
Luis walked to his flyer. He wasn’t afraid to turn his back on this sort/type of person. It was great that the majority of people find interracial sex unacceptable. This makes the minority very useful for the Service…
As he was getting into the cockpit he thought also that should interracial contacts ever get legalized they would need to indispose the people towards something else: masochism, homosexuality or kisses in/on the lips. These would be nothing more but details.
One cannot afford to lose so convenient a stratum of informants.