"Mack Reynolds - Planetary Agent X" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Mack)

III

Ronny learned to love Section G—in moderation.
He was initially taken aback by the existence of the
organization at all. He’d known, of course, of the Department of
Justice and even of the Bureau of Investigation, but Section G was
hush-hush and not even United Planets publications ever
mentioned it.
 The problems involved in remaining hush-hush weren’t as
great as all that. The very magnitude of the UP, which involved
more than two thousand member planets, allowed for departments
and bureaus hidden away in the endless stretches of red tape.
In fact, although Ronny Bronston had spent the better part of
his life thus far in studying for a place in the organization, and then
working in the Population Statistics Department for some years, he
was only now beginning to get the overall picture of the workings
of the mushrooming, chaotic United Planets organization.
It was Earth’s largest industry by far. In fact, for all practical
purposes it was her only major industry. Tourism, yes, but even
that, in a way, was related to the United Planets organization.
Millions of visitors whose ancestors had once emigrated from the
mother planet streamed back in racial nostalgia. Streamed back to
see the continents and oceans, the Arctic and the Antarctic, the
Amazon River and Mount Everest, the Sahara and New York City,
the ruins of Rome and Athens, the Vatican, the Louvre and the
Hermitage.
But the populace of Earth, in its hundreds of millions, were
largely citizens of United Planets and worked in the organization
and with its auxiliaries such as the Space Forces.
Section G? To his surprise, Ronny found that Ross Metaxa’s
small section of the Bureau of Investigation seemed almost as
great a secret within the Bureau as it was to the man in the street.
At one period, Ronny wondered if it were possible that this was a
department which had been lost in the wilderness of boondoggling
that goes on in any great bureaucracy. Had Section G been set up a
century or so ago and then forgotten by those who had originally
thought there was a need for it? In the same way that it is usually
more difficult to get a statute off the lawbooks than it was
originally to pass it, eliminating an office, with its employees, can
prove more difficult than originally establishing it.
But that wasn’t it. In spite of the informality, the
unconventional brashness of its personnel on all levels, and the
seeming chaos in which its tasks were done, Section G was no
make-work project set up to provide juicy jobs for the relatives of
high ranking officials. To the contrary, it didn’t take long in the
Section before anybody with open eyes could see that Ross Metaxa
was privy to the decisions made by the upper echelons of UP.
Ronny Bronston came to the conclusion that the appointment
he’d received was putting him in a higher bracket of the UP
hierarchy than he’d at first imagined.