Langley deduces that:
the Technon, which controls the Solar Technarchy, secretly founded and still controls the apparently independent Commercial Society and uses it for "'...economic infiltration...'" (CHAPTER EIGHTEEN, p. 167) of extra-solar colonies;
the Thrymans, who really control the League of Alpha Centauri, have infiltrated the Society and use it to feed disinformation to the Technon!
Within this general framework and with very little direct evidence, Langley infers the following particular conspiracy:
the Thrymans misinform the Technon that Holatan telekinesis cannot be artificially duplicated;
therefore, the Technon allows the Centaurians to acquire the Holatan prisoner in the hope that the Centaurians will then waste time trying to duplicate the telekinesis;
thus, the Centaurians will in fact duplicate the telekinesis, then use it to attack Sol and destroy the Solar fleet!
A very neat and tidy set of clandestine control mechanisms stretching across hundreds of light-years and a millennium of future history. Is really history anything like this? Yes, conspiracy theorists claim that it is.
4 comments:
Generally speaking, big wars don't turn on 'secret weapons', and it's very, very difficult to fool scientists much.
Sometimes big wars turn on operational brilliance... but more often than not, they don't.
They're determined by weight of men and metal, if they're at all prolonged. Eg., the World Wars against Germany.
Incidentally, Hitler knew this, and didn't intend to have a WW2; he intended instead a series of short, sharp and separate wars.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Except Hitler was not like Bismarck, who knew when enough was enough, and was satisfied with the gains Prussia/Germany made after defeating France in 1870-71. What might have happened if Hitler, after the Munich agreement, had concluded he had gone as far as he could safely go and been satisfied with what he had gained by then?
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: well, his ambition for his own lifetime was to dominate the whole of continental Europe. That would, he thought, give a sufficient base for his successors to contest for the domination of the world -- he didn't consider it practical to do so himself.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Grandiose ambitions indeed! But the problem was that I don't think Hitler could have dominated "merely" Europe alone--unless he made no major mistakes and it was his enemies who made the blunders. Or Hitler could have been content with setting the stage for his successors to conquer Europe, setting the stage for their successors to aspire for world empire.
Fortunately, Hitler was too impatient for that kind of long range planning.
Ad astra! Sean
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