Ultima Thule by Mack Reynolds (best books to read now .TXT) 📗
- Author: Mack Reynolds
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Ronny noted that his badge wasn't really bronze. It had a certain sheen, a brightness.
Jakes said, “Here, look at this.” He tossed his own badge to the new man. Ronny looked down at it in surprise. The gold had gone dull.
Jakes laughed. “Now give me yours.”
Ronny got up and walked over to him and handed it over. As soon as the other man's hand touched it, the bronze lost its sheen.
Jakes handed it back. “See, it's tuned to you alone,” he said. “And mine is tuned to my code. Nobody can swipe a Section G badge and [pg 022] impersonate an agent. If anybody ever shows you a badge that doesn't have its sheen, you know he's a fake. Neat trick, eh?”
“Very neat,” Ronny admitted. He returned the other's gold badge. “Look, to get back to this Tommy Paine.”
But the red light flickered again and Jakes brought forth from the delivery drawer a hand gun complete with shoulder harness. “Nasty weapon,” he said. “But we'd better go on down to the armory and show you its workings.”
He stood up. “Oh, yes, don't let me forget to give you a communicator. A real gizmo. About as big as a woman's vanity case. Puts you in immediate contact with the nearest Section G office, no matter how near or far away it is. Or, if you wish, in contact with our offices here in the Octagon. Very neat trick.”
He led Ronny from his office and down the corridors beyond to an elevator. He said happily, “This is a crazy outfit, this Section G. You'll probably love it. Everybody does.”
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 of 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 over-all 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 [pg 023] 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, in the same manner 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.
His indoctrination course was a strain such as he'd never known in school years. Ross Metaxa was evidently of the opinion that a man could assimilate concentrated information at a rate several times faster than any professional educator ever dreamed possible. No threats were made, but Ronny realized that he could be dropped even more quickly than he'd seemed to have been taken on. There were no classes, to either push or retard the rate of study. He worked with a series of tutors, and pushed himself. The tutors were almost invariably Section G agents, temporarily in Greater Washington between assignments, or for briefing on this phase or that of their work.
Even as he studied, Ronny Bronston kept the eventual assignment, at which he was to prove himself, in mind. He made a point of inquiring of each agent he met, about Tommy Paine.
The name was known to all, but no two reacted in the same manner. Several of them even brushed the whole matter aside as pure legend. Nobody could accomplish all the trouble that Tommy Paine had supposedly stirred up.
To one of these, Ronny said plaintively, “See here, the Old Man believes in him, Sid Jakes believes in him. My final appointment depends on arresting him. How can I ever secure this job, if I'm chasing a myth?”
The other shrugged. “Don't ask me. I've got my own problems. O.K., now, let's run over this question of Napoleonic law. There are at least two hundred planets that base their legal system on it.”
But the majority of his fellow employees in Section G had strong enough opinions on the interplanetary firebrand. Three or four even claimed to have seen him fleetingly, although no two descriptions jibed. That, of course, could be explained. The man could resort to plastic surgery and other disguise.
Theories there were in plenty, [pg 024] some of them going back long years, and some of them pure fable.
“Look,” Ronny said in disgust one day after a particularly unbelievable siege with two agents recently returned from a trouble spot in a planetary system that involved three aggressive worlds which revolved about the same sun. “Look, it's impossible for one man to accomplish all this. He's blamed for half the coups d'états, revolts and upheavals that have taken place for the past quarter century. It's obvious nonsense. Why, a revolutionist usually spends the greater part of his life toppling a government. Then, once it's toppled, he spends the rest of his life trying to set up a new government—and he's usually unsuccessful.”
One of the others was shaking his head negatively. “You don't understand this Tommy Paine's system, Bronston.”
“You sure don't,” the other agent, a Nigerian, grinned widely. “I've been on planets where he'd operated.”
Ronny leaned forward. The three of them were having a beer in a part of the city once called Baltimore. “You have?” he said. “Tell me about it, eh? The more background I get on this guy, the better.”
“Sure. And this'll give you an idea of how he operates, how he can get so much trouble done. Well, I was on this planet Goshen, understand? It had kind of a strange history. A bunch of colonists went out there, oh, four or five centuries ago. Pretty healthy expedition, as such outfits go. Bright young people, lots of equipment, lots of know-how and books. Well, through sheer bad luck everything went wrong from the beginning. Everything. Before they got set up at all they had an explosion that killed off all their communications technicians. They lost contact with the outside. O.K. Within a couple of centuries they'd gotten into a state of chattel slavery. Pretty well organized, but static. Kind of an Athenian Democracy on top, a hierarchy, but nineteen people out of twenty were slaves, and I mean real slaves, like animals. They were at this stage when a scout ship from the UP Space Forces discovered them and, of course, they joined up.”
“Where does Tommy Paine come in?” Ronny said. He signaled to a waiter for more beer.
“He comes in a few years later. I was the Section G agent on Goshen, understand? No planet was keener about Articles One and Two of the UP Charter. The hierarchy understood well enough that if their people ever came to know about more advanced socio-economic systems it'd be the end of Goshen's Golden Age. So they allowed practically no intercourse. No contact whatsoever between UP personnel and anyone outside the upper class, understand? All right. That's where Tommy Paine came in. It couldn't have taken him more than a couple of months at most.”
Ronny Bronston was fascinated. “What'd he do?”
“He introduced the steam engine, and then left.”
[pg 025]Ronny was looking at him blankly. “Steam engine?”
“That and the fly shuttle and the spinning jenny,” the Nigerian said. “That Goshen hierarchy never knew what hit them.”
Ronny was still blank. The waiter came up with the steins of beer, and Ronny took one and drained half of it without taking his eyes from the storyteller.
The other agent took it up. “Don't you see? Their system was based on chattel slavery, hand labor. Given machinery and it collapses. Chattel slavery isn't practical in a mechanized society. Too expensive a labor force, for one thing. Besides, you need an educated man and one with some initiative—qualities that few slaves possess—to run an industrial society.”
Ronny finished his beer. “Smart cooky, isn't he?”
“He's smart all right. But I've got a still better example of his fouling up a whole planetary socio-economic system in a matter of weeks. A friend of mine was working on a planet with a highly-developed feudalism. Barons, lords, dukes, counts and no-accounts, all stashed safely away in castles and fortresses up on the top of hills. The serfs down below did all the work in the fields, provided servants, artisans and foot soldiers for the continual fighting that the aristocracy carried on. Very similar to Europe back in the Dark Ages.”
“So?” Ronny said. “I'd think that'd be a deal that would take centuries to change.”
The Section G agent laughed. “Tommy Paine stayed just long enough to introduce gunpowder. That was the end of those impregnable castles up on the hills.”
“What gets me,” Ronny said slowly, “is his motivation.”
The other two both grunted agreement to that.
Toward the end of his indoctrination studies, Ronny appeared one morning at the Octagon Section G offices and before Irene Kasansky. Watching her fingers fly, listening to her voice rapping and snapping, O.K.-ing and rejecting, he came to the conclusion that automation could go just so far in office work and then you were thrown back on the hands of the efficient secretary. Irene was a one-woman office staff.
She looked up at him. “Hello, Ronny. Thought you'd be off on your assignment by now. Got any clues on Tommy Paine?”
“No,” he said. “That's why I'm here. I wanted to see the commissioner.”
“About what?” She flicked a switch. When a light flickered on one of her order boxes, she said into it, “No,” emphatically, and turned back to him.
“He said he wanted to
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