Free Island Worlds by John Maddox Roberts, Eric Kotani Page B

systems and practices. Neither was Thor, for that matter, but this struck close to him. At first he couldn't believe it. It had to be a coincidence. By the end of Fu's presentation, he had to accept the truth of his first hunch.
    The minute the recording ended, Thor keyed Fu's code, hoping he would catch him at home. Fu's apartment appeared and the screen panned to a console where Fu sat, his fingers dancing across a keyboard. He looked up and grinned. "Wasn't expecting to see you again so soon. What's up?"
    "We have to talk. Do you have a few minutes?"
    "Sure," Fu said, puzzlement in his voice. He picked up a cushion and dropped it to the floor, then sat on it crosslegged. The two young men sat almost knee-to-knee. Except for being unable to touch, they might as well have been sitting in the same room.
    "I just finished with your presentation," Thor said.
    "All of it today? Figure you got your money's worth?"
    "Great work. But I spotted something you didn't."
    Fu frowned. "Didn't think I could've missed much."
    "It's not something you'd have been likely to spot. I've found a thread tying all of this stuff together, going right back to the beginnings of the hostile programming, five years ago."
    Fu grinned again. "Hot damn! I love conspiracies. What is it? Closet Earth Firsters among the producers? I checked into that, but it didn't seem to pan out."
    "This is something so weird I couldn't believe it at first. The first of the hostile shows was Defenders of Earth . Do you remember who the sponsor was?"
    Fu's brows knit in thought. "Some dogfood company. Purina?"
    "No, it was Petcuisine, a brand marketed by Mid-America Feed and Grain, Inc."
    "No connection yet," Fu said. "Elucidate."
    "M-A Feed & Grain is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Space Technologies, Inc, which is a McNaughton enterprise."
    "How does the McNaughton cartel happen to own a grain firm?"
    "They did it back when the first hydrocarbon-rich asteroids were discovered. McNaughton wanted to have a lock on developing new high-grade fertilizers and developing new strains of grain to adapt to Ell-Five, lunar and Martian conditions. They figured the easiest way was to have their own grain company and the quickest way was to buy one that was already there. They picked up a faltering firm at a bargain price, pumped new capital into it, and made it pay for itself while they built their labs and did their research. Like most feed and grain firms, M-A ran a sideline in livestock and pet food."
    "Not all of those shows are sponsored by dogfoods," Fu said.
    "No, but the story's still the same. Asteroid is sponsored by Domestic Robots, Inc., which is owned by Space Technologies, Inc., which is a McNaughton firm. Space Cop is sponsored by Atlas Cleaning Products, a subsidiary of Eurochemical, which is owned by guess who. It goes all the way through this. Every last show in the first three years of hostile programming was sponsored by a McNaughton subsidiary. Now that's no longer true, because the trend has been set and everybody's leaping on the bandwagon."
    Fu smiled like a saint who has just been granted beatific vision. "Boy, I can see I'm going to have to make some real changes in this study before I use it in my thesis! There's one real flaw in all this, though."
    "I know," Thor said. "Why the hell would the world's biggest space exploitation company want to torpedo the whole idea of manned settlement of space? They're cutting their own throats."
    "Obviously," Fu said, "we're working from incomplete data. There's a factor or factors that're not in our calculations. It could well be that the answers are not to be had here. It might involve the politico-economic situation in the offworld settlements."
    "That could well be," Thor admitted. "In any case, I'm going to put a few people onto this and see what I can turn up. Do you have pretty good connections in the professional holo community?"
    "I know some people," Fu said. "What do you need?"
    "I'm wondering about the Media