Gift From The Stars by James Gunn

of business.”
    Makepeace looked down at his bony hands. “A good bureaucrat can always find work. A good bureaucrat is someone who does his job efficiently and quietly, accepts blame for whatever fails, and passes along any credit to his superiors. Now I serve the Energy Board.”
    Nobody paid attention to the administration of utilities as long as whatever they supplied was cheap and uninterrupted. But Frances had heard of the Energy Board. She remembered vaguely that it was governed by five Chairs representing his or her continent and overseeing its distribution of the energy stolen from the sun.
    “You asked me if I was pleased with what we had done, Adrian and I, and I presume you mean the world we created when we released the alien designs. And my answer is that the world has managed to absorb alien technology without a tremor.”
    “Proving that you were right and the rest of us were wrong,” Makepeace said.
    “So it would seem. Has the world ever been in better shape? Energy is being broadcast from mountain-top receiving stations, global warming is being reversed, pollution is being cleaned up, and the quality of life around the world is being raised to Western standards. People everywhere are happy and prosperous, education is universal, the arts are flourishing, the ghettos are being depopulated and demolished, the birthrate has dropped to a supportable level—what’s not to like?”
    “A virtual paradise,” Makepeace said, as if in agreement.
    Frances looked at Makepeace. “Virtual? Maybe that’s the right word: utopia may not be here yet, but it isn’t unimaginable. The only thing on which we haven’t made any progress is spaceflight. No matter what we do, nobody will let us build a ship.”
    “You can’t expect people to get excited about space when they have everything they need here on Earth,” Makepeace said.
    “That’s one of the problems with paradise, isn’t it?” Frances observed. “No one wants to leave.”
    The ceiling lights above them went dark. Frances twitched, but Makepeace sat unmoved, as if the occurrence were commonplace. The only light came through the windows behind him.
    “If it’s paradise,” Makepeace said, “why are violent crimes and acts of terrorism on the increase?”
    “That’s news to me.”
    “And to most people. In good times bad news seems to drop below the horizon. Nobody notices.”
    The overhead lights came on again.
    “Or maybe it doesn’t get reported,” Frances said.
    “Censorship, Mrs. Farmstead?” Makepeace said. When he shook his head, it looked as if it might fall off his pipe-stem neck. “No need, and no means. The Energy Board is in the business of distributing energy, and it has no facilities for controlling the media. And even if it could, so much is available on the Internet that omissions in the media would be obvious. The answer is that nobody is paying attention.”
    “Except you.”
    Makepeace nodded carefully. “A few bureaucrats like me are paid to keep track and to ask why these things are happening.”
    “You didn’t bring me here to get my opinion,” Frances said flatly.
    “Adrian Mast has disappeared,” Makepeace said.
    “So I found out. And there is no proof he ever existed.”
    “No electronic proof,” Makepeace said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “It’s not easy to delete physical evidence, written documents, files, that sort of thing,” Makepeace said. “No one can work magic. But we’ve become dependent on electronic information, and a search program with instructions to eliminate anything it finds can remove the most available evidence of a life. But why would anyone do that?”
    “I thought it was you,” Frances said. She made a sweeping gesture that included the office and the bureaucracy it represented.
    Makepeace shook his head. “Maybe it was Adrian himself.”
    Now it was Frances’ turn to look skeptical.
    “Aliens?” Makepeace suggested.
    “That doesn’t make sense,” Frances said. “Why