MARTIN LORAN
This is a light, satirical science fiction story based on a theme close to most Australian writers—literary censorship. It attempts, by removing the problem to an imaginary situation where it is distorted and some of the basic inconsistencies considerably expanded, to see the phenomenon of censorship in a social and cultural context. The fact that this story appeared in the top-paying and world’s top-ranking sf magazine indicates that, as a story at least, it came off.
“Martin Loran” is the pen-name of a team of two local magazine writers. They have so far sold two novelettes in the same series as “An Ounce of Dissension”, both of them to Analog magazine, and anticipate the sale of a novel on this theme later. This story is something of a landmark; Australian writers had never previously placed material in this magazine nor penetrated so decisively the highly competitive American market.
Source: Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, July 1966.
* * * *
Stephen Quist switched on the last of the transparencies and began listing details in the book before him.
7. General view, inhabitant Dubhe IV. Aquatic, tentacular.
Classification 6—B—114p. Social structure . . .
The statistics went on for another eight lines. As he wrote, the green eyes looked down at him in a long frozen stare. It was a three-dimensional image, and a convincing one. Most men might have felt uneasy with such a creature watching them, even as a mere photograph, but not Quist. He had seen every imaginable type of life, experienced every possible biological permutation. There was no being in the whole huge bestiary of the universe weird enough to suprise a Librarian.
He noted down the last row of figures in his neat round hand, put the quill pen into the ink pot and leaned back. His muscles ached with the strain of an hour spent painstakingly writing by hand, but he didn’t mind that. He could have used a voice writer or even had all the data processed and filed automatically, but there was something particularly satisfying about having done it himself.
The ship trembled slightly as one of the ion jets made a slight adjustment in its course, and the feather of his pen quivered briefly. Quist smiled, glancing down at the ink-stained first finger of his right hand. If the Controller could see him now! There would be a lecture for him, at the very least—perhaps a fine. On Earth they were very sensitive about what they chose to call “reversion”. Would it help, Quist wondered, to explain that of all the writing implements available only the natural quill pen worked efficiently in null-gravity? He decided that it would not.
The heads of the Library Service on Earth had very little practical experience of spaceship life, and the Rule Book was written accordingly. For the first few months most Junior Librarians kept to the rules. They got up according to the book, catalogued and filed and serviced the machines according to the book. In the “afternoon” they followed one of the approved study courses and boned up on something interesting like “Tensor Mechanics” or “Ancient History (Earth)”. Then, at the proper time according to the book, they went to bed. Often they didn’t even dare to clear the view-port and look out at the stars unless the book told them to.
Naturally the system never lasted long, though as far as Quist or any of the other Librarians were aware none of the Earth Controllers knew this. Or perhaps they knew but didn’t really care. It wasn’t important. What was important was that the Librarians were allowed to handle their lives in their own way. They could play chess with the computer, or read, or just sleep. They could get drunk, read pornographic novels—or write them, if they wanted to. A few, like Quist, could spend their time picking up odd skills and bits of knowledge, such as handwriting, the only noticeable quality of which was that they were engagingly useless. Under these conditions, it wasn’t at all a bad life.
Quist boosted himself out of the chair and swam for the hand grip placed on the ceiling above his chair. There was no need to be on null-gravity. The twist of a knob and he could walk about as naturally as he did on Earth. But there was something particularly enjoyable in the sensation of floating. At the end of every trip, in the first dreadful days of readjustment to gravity, he made a resolution to act in future like a sensible adult human, and for the first few days of a new voyage he usually kept to it, clomping righteously around the ship, feeling glum and very clumsy. On the third or fourth day, he woke, reached muzzily for the hand grip, jerked, and landed on the floor with a bone-cracking thud. From then on, it was null-gravity until the last day in space.
The transparency was still projected on the screen. Hovering in the air before the image, he examined it critically. It was, he thought, exceedingly horrible—and yet, intellectually, he could find quite a few points worthy of praise. Those eyes, for instance. They had the melancholy wetness of a spaniel he had owned once, as a child. And the skin looked remarkably supple, like good synthetic leather. One might almost . . .
“Bookworm,” he called out.
There was no answer.
Quist boosted himself to the port wall and took a heavy volume from the thousands that covered it. It was a book of Carlyle’s essays. He had never liked Carlyle. Bracing himself against the wall he took aim and hurled the heavy volume at the panel of the computer whose banks occupied the greater part of the ship’s mass. He had thrown things at the computer before and knew just where to aim. The book sailed cleanly to its target and crashed into the machine in precisely the right place, just below the embossed legend “Bookworm, Mark 18”. The machine hiccupped once and its lights came on.
“Is there something wrong with your audio circuits again?” Quist asked.
The machine buzzed for a moment, then spoke.
“Sorry, Quist. I was thinking of something else.”
The Librarian wondered whether it had been a good idea to give the Bookworm such a strikingly academic voice. It always reminded him of an absent-minded bespectacled professor who had taught him Ancient English back in University. But it fitted the Bookworm’s rather vague “personality” and, in a way, that was important. It was better not to be reminded too often that the only other voice you heard for most of the trip was that of a machine and not another human being. He looked again at the transparency of the alien from Dubhe IV.
“Has anybody ever written a poem about an alien?” he asked.
The machine buzzed again.
“Of course,” it said. “What sort did you have in mind? Humanoid? Arachnid? Gestalt?”
“Aquatic,” Quist said, “and octopoid.”
The Bookworm considered for a moment. “I have one possible on file,” it said, a trifle doubtfully.
Quist was disappointed. Only one?
“Let’s hear it.”
The Bookworm began to recite in its dry old voice:
“Strange beauty, eight-limbed and eight-handed,
Whence earnest to dazzle our eyes?
With thy bosom bespangled and banded
With the hues of the seas and the skies;
Is thy home European or Asian, O mystical monster marine?
Part Molluscous and partly Crustacean,
Betwixt and between.”
“That’s awful!” Quist said.
“Isn’t it?” the Bookworm agreed. “Actually, it’s supposed to be pretty horrible. It’s a parody by A. C. Hilton of the English poet Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909) entitled ‘Octopus’. Swinburne, a minor poet of the late nineteenth century, is noted for ...”
“I know all about Swinburne,” Quist said.
“. . . popularizing the type of poetry known generally as Pre-Raphaelite imagist. His best poem is probably ‘Atalanta in Calydon’, written . . .”
Quist kicked the machine hard in the same spot at which he had thrown the book. It hiccupped again.
“... in 1854 and dedicated to . ..”
* * * *
While the dry old voice droned on about Swinburne, Quist went looking for his tool kit. The memory banks were jammed open again. It was a common fault, and one which the interference mechanism programmed to occur regularly at least once every trip. There was nothing wrong with the Bookworm. Somewhere inside the machine, in a case which even the most energetic and mechanically minded Librarian could not penetrate, there was a small mechanism devoted exclusively to the task of making things go wrong. The idea was to keep the Librarians active and their mechanical skills in good order by forcing them every few weeks to perform some trivial but complicated repair to the computer. There was no point in swearing about it. It had to be done, and the best way was to do it quickly so that it wouldn’t interfere with the more important work when it came.
Before he started tearing the machine down, Quist pressed the emergency answer button. There was a momentary pause in the machine’s monologue on English verse of the nineteenth century.
“Before I start taking you apart, how long before we reach the next system?”
“A day and a half. Thirty-four hours, to be precise.” The voice was distant. “The system is that of unnamed star NGC 5548, known locally as New Sol. The system has one colonized planet, occupying the fourth position in a roughly Earth-type orbit. It is known locally as Rayer, after its discoverer and first colonist. The colony has been out of touch with Earth for one hundred and forty-four years, but last reports indicated a degree of development roughly equal with that of Europe in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The climate is temperate and...”
“I know all about Rayer, too,” Quist said.
“. . . aside from unusually heavy rainfall in the wet season, Rayer enjoys ...”
Quist started undoing the computer’s main console panel. He wished he had stuck with Swinburne. He seemed to recall that the poet’s private life had been somewhat more interesting that the statistics on Rayer’s climate.
Some people think that all planets are the same, and so they are—in the sense that all people are the same. There is a ninety-nine per cent resemblance between all planets, but the remaining one per cent can vary enough to make each world completely distinguishable from its neighbour. Quist had seen more worlds than most, but he had yet to see two alike. He looked down on Rayer with a connoisseur’s eye, measuring it against his experience. Not an unattractive world, he decided. It had the deep green hue of all Earth-type planets, but the cloud pattern was unusually bright. Bands of white alto-cirrus flowed across the greenness like milky streaks in a white opal, now masking, now revealing the mottled surface. An opal world then, and yet something of the emerald…
The autopilot bonged twice.
“Check time,” the Bookworm said.
Quist turned from the viewport and switched on the check screen. On its grid surface he saw Rayer as a round black shadow striated with white lines. The radiation recorders were picking up all traces of electrical and nuclear energy escaping from the planetary atmosphere. There were many such traces, sticking closely to the traditional pattern. Rayer had apparently prospered since Earth had established a colony there. The main spaceports stood out as clear red patches, showing that the radioactive tracer compounds incorporated in their surface material had not been disturbed or built over. Quist checked the general population distribution as indicated by the degree of radiation in the various areas, chose the port nearest to the largest concentration and fed the details to Bookworm. Then he went back to the window and watched the green-white surface of Rayer rise towards him.
From the ground, Rayer looked less attractive than it had from a hundred miles up. The spaceport was like all spaceports, a bleak grey expanse of concrete with weeds sprouting from the cracks and weathered bits of paper scudding before the wind across its depressing surface. It was drizzling. Quist stood in the air-lock door and looked out at his opal planet. He felt cheated. In the distance he could see a city. It was an industrial complex with a forest of chimneys spouting rank black smoke. The road leading to the city was overgrown, but he could see two cars driving along it towards him. He went inside and waited for them to come. There was nothing to look at around the spaceport, and he needed time to think. He was already forming theories about the situation he would find on Rayer, but it would be a few minutes before any of them would be confirmed.
When he went to the door again, the delegation had already arrived. Five men were marching across the concrete towards him, their clothes plastered to their bodies by the wind and rain. In the background he could see their cars; blunt black vehicles with an unpleasant military look about them. The glass windows were thick; probably armoured. Yes, very unpleasant indeed. He studied the five walking towards him. The one in front was pale and thin. He had a beaky nose and old-fashioned spectacles on the end of it—a bureaucrat, Quist decided. The four others were easier to categorize. All carried guns, all wore metal helmets. Soldiers.
“Don’t come any closer,” Quist said, raising his voice to fight the wind.
The man in front looked up and sniffed, but kept walking. The others followed.
Quist waited until he was nearly to the foot of the ladder, then glanced down at the circle of concrete where the ship’s rockets had seared a smoking circle in the greyness. Small drops of rain landing on it hissed angrily. The bureaucrat was standing squarely on the hot area. Quist sniffed. There was a smell of burning. A second later the man winced, looked quickly down at the concrete and stepped back with alacrity. He left behind two neat footprints that smoked. The soldiers didn’t smile. That was a bad sign. Soldiers who didn’t laugh at the discomfort of a superior were too military for Quist’s liking.
“What can I do for you?” he asked.
“What are you doing here?” the thin man snapped. “We haven’t had a ship on Rayer for fifty years.”
Quist indicated the emblem of the Library Service on the side of the ship beside the air lock.
“Cultural Ambassador,” he explained. “Quist’s the name— Stephen Quist. We travel around the isolated colonial planets and keep them up to date on what’s going on back home. We distribute educational materials, art and reading matter, packaged libraries and such. It’s been a long time since we were last in this area, so perhaps you haven’t heard of us. It takes a great deal of subjective time to make a circuit.”
He turned his back to the men and put his foot on the top rung of the ladder.
“The idea is to pass on the—”
“If he takes one more step,” the thin man said, “shoot him.”
Quist stopped. Slowly he stepped back onto the air-lock platform and turned around, keeping his hands well away from his body. The four soldiers had their weapons leveled at him.
“Move back,” the thin man said.
Quist stepped into the air lock. He could run back into the ship if he wanted to, or close the air-lock door with one twist of the control on the wall beside him, but he did neither. Instead he stood in the lock and listened to the man’s feet scuffling on the rungs of the ladder. A moment later the thin face came into view and he boosted himself shakily onto the platform. There were more steps on the ladder. Apparently he didn’t trust Quist because soon one of the soldiers had joined him. Together they went into the ship.
The thin man looked around with interest at the cabin and at the books on the wall. The soldier didn’t move, but his eyes travelled restlessly along the ranked spines of Quist’s library. He seemed disturbed, and Quist was beginning to realize why. The thin man went to the shelves and took down a book. He riffled through it once, then stopped at one page and read a few lines. He nodded, and then dropped the book deliberately to the floor. It landed half open, with some of its pages crumpled under the weight of the rest. Quist bent automatically to pick it up, then stopped as the soldier moved his gun.
The man took the next book, riffled through it and dropped it to the floor—and the next—and the next. After the first six he merely glanced at each title, but they all ended up on the floor. At the end of the shelf he looked at the other shelves ranked up to the roof, and at the pile of books on the floor.
“Burn the lot,” he said to the soldier.
Quist smiled.
If the thin man had expected some other reaction, he did not show it. Picking up an armful of books, he walked to the air lock and dropped them out. At the foot of the ladder two soldiers picked up the fallen volumes and carted them almost to the edge of the landing field where they proceeded to build a large bonfire of them.
Quist watched them for a while, admiring the ant-like devotion to duty exhibited by all concerned. It made him feel lazy and rather superfluous to stand on the sidelines, taking no part in the activity. Choosing a moment when the regular procession to and from the shelves was temporarily interrupted, he grabbed an armful for himself, walked to the air lock and dropped the books on top of those already dumped there. One of the soldiers, halfway up the ladder when Quist dumped his load, looked up to curse the clumsy colleague who had nearly dropped Volume 86 of the Encyclopedia Galactica on his head, saw who had thrown it and nearly fell off in surprise. The other soldiers were equally astonished at Quist’s sudden participation in their labour but, glad of the assistance, they said nothing to the thin man.
* * * *
It took them twenty minutes to clear out all the shelves. When they were finished the pile was ten feet high and covered a large area. One of the soldiers lit a match and set it to a page. The flames licked up, but the rain soon quenched them. He lit another, and another. The same thing happened.
Quist wondered if he had ever seen such a sorry lot of book-burners and decided that, even by the dubious standards of that activity, the men of Rayer rated very low indeed. He went back into the ship and drew a quart of rocket fuel from the emergency rocket tank. Carrying it carefully down the ladder —a drop could have burned a hole in his clothes and probably his skin—he took it to the pile and dribbled it liberally over most of the books at ground level.
One of the soldiers nodded gratefully and, standing well back, tossed his match onto the pile. There was a sudden puff of flame and fire began to eat hungrily into the paper and cardboard. Inside three minutes there was nothing left but a pile of ash. The men stood around and looked with satisfaction at the remains.
Quist walked round the pile to where the thin man was surveying the results of his evening’s work. He cleared his throat with what he hoped was a deferential attempt to attract attention.
“Can I have permission to land now?” he asked.
The thin man turned over one last page with his foot and watched the smoldering ash devour it.
“No,” he said shortly. “You will depart at once.”
“That may take some time,” Quist said. “There’s the problem . . .”
“At once,” the man repeated. Motioning for the guards, he walked quickly towards the cars parked on the grassed edge of the field. A moment later they drove off.
Quist stood looking after them for a moment. Then he held out his hands to the ash and, when they were warmed, went back to the ship. It was bare without the books. The shelves looked like rifled graves. Quist rolled down the shutters that kept the books in place during planet fall. He couldn’t stand their accusing look.
“Did you get all that?” he asked.
“Every bit,” the Bookworm said. “Full colour and stereo. It isn’t every day you see a real honest-to-goodness book burning.”
The Bookworm sounded almost happy about what had just happened. Even Quist couldn’t help seeing its humorous side. Odd that some people still thought that when a book was burned the ideas in it were also destroyed.
Rummaging around in one of the lockers, he found a rain cloak and put it around his shoulders. Then he went out into the drizzle. From the air lock it had not looked a very great distance into the city, but once he stood on the concrete landing pad the mileage seemed to stretch alarmingly. He pulled the cloak about him, sealed it down the front and set off doggedly along the rutted dirt road.
* * * *
It was a miserable journey. After two miles the road became quite muddy and irregular. There were signs that big vehicles came by occasionally. From the width of the spiked tread and the way they had torn up the road, Quist guessed they were military vehicles—armored trucks perhaps. He looked around cautiously but there was no sign of anything bigger than a stunted tree. He was glad. The soldiers he had already seen were disconcertingly professional.
Another mile and he struck civilization, of a kind. A cluster of huts stood by the road, windblown and ramshackle. They seemed to have been cobbled together out of any material the owners could find; scraps of metal and wood, old tins, stones and rotting canvas. A child sat in front of one hut. It was the only human being in sight. Quist stopped for a moment, closing his nostrils against the stink of excrement and decay. The child was frail and dirty, its stomach distended from starvation. It looked at Quist incuriously and went back to its game in the mud. The Librarian filed the picture away in his mind and went on towards the city.
Within another mile he was in the suburbs, most of which were just vertical extensions of the huts he had seen earlier. They were the worst sort of slum, haphazard, dirty and grossly overcrowded. Nobody seemed to notice him as he walked steadily through the narrow unpaved streets. Nobody was curious on Rayer, though whether it was through fear or indifference Quist didn’t know. He guessed indifference. All the people he saw seemed to share the same air of acceptance. As he walked down the centre of the street they got out of his way automatically. Even when he accidentally splashed a man with muddy water his automatic apology was ignored. The man he had splashed seemed not even to realize anything had happened. He just didn’t care.
The centre of the city was little better than the outskirts. There was no planning of any kind. Factories with huge brick chimneys were crowded against houses and large public buildings without any regard for order. There were no footpaths. People brawled their way along the streets, fighting for space with noisy road vehicles, horse carts, dogs and children. It was like a mad combination of seventeenth and twentieth century London with the hygiene standards of the fifteenth thrown in. Quist had long since lost his capacity for despair, but twinges of it stirred inside him at the sight of this appalling mess.
To create some sort of order out of it all was a task which he realized was almost beyond him. But he had to start. His pride demanded it. Methodically he considered all the plans suggested by Central for situations of this sort, and equally methodically discarded the lot of them. There was, however, one approach of his own which might have some possibility of success. He looked over the crowd, seeking a suitable subject. He let two well-dressed men go by; there wasn’t anything he could offer the rich. He needed a poor man, but an intelligent one. Unfortunately Rayer seemed well endowed with poverty but poor in intelligence. He had to wait for almost ten minutes before a possible candidate came by.
He was a young man, thin, almost emaciated. His clothes were shabby but neat enough to suggest he had some pride in his appearance. Quist didn’t need to look for inkstains on his fingers to see that he spent a lot of time writing. A young clerk, perhaps, or a student, either one ideal for his purpose. Drawing back into an alley, Quist waited until the young man was within earshot. He plucked at his sleeve.
“Psst!” he said urgently. “Want to buy any filthy pictures?”
The young man froze in mid stride, turned and blinked.
“I beg your pardon?” he said.
“Filthy pictures,” Quist said. “Do you want to buy any? Smutty books? Pornography?”
The young man was baffled. “I don’t follow you,” he said. “What did you have in mind?”
Quist was beginning to have doubts about his plan and his choice of subject. The boy had looked intelligent enough, yet he was behaving with a denseness the Librarian had never encountered before. He had expected him to be ignorant of calculus, but even an idiot knew something about pornography.
“Filthy pictures,” Quist said again, only slower. “Erotic photographs, salacious literature. You understand?”
“Not really,” the other replied. “Well, I mean, I know what you’re talking about, but why should I want to buy them from you? I can get them in any shop. This sort of thing, you mean?”
He groped in his jacket and pulled out a wad of cards, handing them to Quist. He looked at the top one, then at the second, going on with rising interest to the last. Even Earth’s sophistication had produced nothing as bizarre as these. He looked at the back of one card. There was a printed legend on it. “Department of Information,” it said. “Education Division. Set 114.”
Quist handed them back, his mind working at top speed. Now that he thought about it, the idea of a government-published pornography was not surprising. Most totalitarian governments had used it at one time or another, usually to reinforce a particular drive against a specific enemy. The government of Rayer had merely carried it to its logical conclusion.
Then he had an idea.
“What about books?” he asked.
The young man’s reaction was the copybook one. He blushed, looked furtive and shuffled his feet.
“Have you got books?” he whispered, glancing over his shoulder. “Where did you get them?”
Glancing keenly at Quist, he noticed for the first time the clothing under his cloak. His manner became more furtive still.
“You’re the Earthman!” he said. “I thought they ordered you off.”
“They did. After they burned all my books.”
The young man looked depressed. “I thought it was too good to be true,” he said. “They wouldn’t let books onto this planet.”
“How did you know about me?” Quist asked.
“The radio. It was announced that you had landed and been refused permission to stay. It’s government policy to have no contact at all with outside systems, and especially Earth.”
“I guess they wanted to drive their point home,” Quist said. “Don’t worry about it. I have a few more books up my sleeve. Are you really interested in getting hold of them?”
“Yes! I’ll do anything! There are a few books in circulation with the underground, but only a few. How many do you have?”
The underground. That sounded promising. Quist decided to explore further—if the boy was still around, of course. He was so excited that his eyes kept shifting in their sockets as if he were expecting a truck to come bearing down on him at any moment.
“About this underground,” Quist whispered. “Perhaps you could introduce me to your leader?”
The youth looked at him nervously.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s very dangerous. We’re not supposed ...”
“Books!” Quist said quietly. ‘You said you’d do anything.”
In the boy’s eyes duty fought a losing battle against greed.
“All right,” he said. “Meet me in the Alley of Kings in two hours.”
Quist watched him move off through the crowd. He was still not sure exactly what he had commited himself to, but the events of the last few minutes had borne out his theory about people. The forbidden was always attractive. Told not to do something, most people immediately went out of their way to disobey orders. He had been wrong about the sort of thing that was forbidden on Rayer, but not about the universal intransigence of the human race. He caught two people looking at him and checked his smile quickly. His expression assumed the disinterested and gloomy characteristics of the others in the crowd and he moved off quickly into the nearest side street.
* * * *
The Alley of Kings lived up to the combination of seediness and tattered grandeur that its name suggested. Once, the buildings had been luxurious, but now the street was dirty, crumbling and crooked. As he squeezed around a congested corner, Quist wondered what sort of maniac could have built a street so careless of the rules of town planning. It looked as if the plan had been drawn freehand and somebody had jiggled the artist’s elbow. Shouldering his way through the almost impenetrable crowds, the Earthman looked up with unease at the decaying buildings above him, each one apparently held up by its neighbours. Which one of these held the headquarters of the underground? It came to him, belatedly, that the boy had not told him where in the Alley of Kings to wait. Resigning himself to more discomfort, he pushed on, jostled by the crowds but, as he had come to expect by now, unnoticed.
It was ten minutes before the underground made itself known to him. As he passed a narrow passageway a whisper penetrated the mutter and shuffle of feet. He turned quickly and slipped into the dark alley. The passage was really a crack between two buildings where the walls had sagged apart with weariness. On one side there was some kind of warehouse, while the other held a dark and smoke-filled place that Quist, sorting about in his knowledge of ancient Earth customs, was able to identify tentatively and with distaste as a fish shop. Turning away from the smell of fat and old fish he quickly followed the dark shape in front of him down the passage, not without a twinge of unease. Still, the dealer in banned books must expect to indulge in activities of this sort.
At the end of the passage a flight of rickety wooden stairs led up to a door in the rear of the warehouse. The two men clattered up the steps and Quist’s guide pulled the door open. They slipped inside. The room was dimly lit. Behind a square burlap-covered table that might have been an overturned packing case sat a grim-faced man with black hair and an air of businesslike efficiency about him. The guide pushed back his hood, revealing the face of the young man he had met on the street. Quist smiled encouragingly, but the boy glanced nervously at the man at the table before essaying a wan grin.
There was no smile from the other man.
“You have books?” he said shortly.
Quist looked him over. About thirty years old, he guessed, and very thin. His face was narrow, seeming to come to a point at his large nose. He looked intelligent behind his scowl. He was probably nervous, Quist decided.
“Who are you?” Quist asked.
“We don’t give names here.”
“My name’s Quist. I’m a Librarian—Cultural Ambassador, really. Our young friend here suggested you might like to have some books and I’m in a position to supply them.”
“You’re from Earth,” the man broke in. “Why should you want to give us books?”
“It’s my job. I told you. I’m .. .”
“How much do you want for them?”
“Nothing. It’s a free service. If you just let me explain . . .”
“How do I know I can trust you?”
Quist leaned wearily against the edge of the table and discovered that it was a packing case. The setting was perfect. They were revolutionaries, true enough. He wondered if they made bombs in the back room. Though judging by their feeble tries at intrigue he wondered if they knew much about even so basic a rebel activity. Well, he could teach them that easily enough. He thumbed through the catalogue in his mind. Yes, Bell’s On Explosives would probably be the basic text. He made a note to look it up when he got back to the ship. But first, he had to establish just how far they would go, what sort of following they had, and how far they had gone already.
“Can we establish a few things first? For instance, you are plotting against the government, aren’t you?”
The dark man looked across at the youth standing by the door. They exchanged a glance that seemed to Quist to be rather odd.
“We’re interested in your books,” the man said. “We don’t have to discuss anything else.”
“You do if you want the books,” Quist said shortly. “Tell me why you’re against the government. What will you do if you get into power?”
The man rubbed his chin.
“Everyone is against the government,” he said cautiously. Or was it caution?
“Yes, but why?” Quist pressed.
“Because of Rogo.”
“Rogo?”
“The leader.”
“I see. And he’s a bad man?” Quist tried to keep his voice neutral, avoiding any hint of sarcasm.
“He’s a monster!” the man cried. His fist banged on the table and the youth stood straighter and scowled. “Everyone is poor because of him. Taxes are ruinous. We live like animals; no. Worse than animals, because our books are confiscated and burned, our movements watched all the time. We are slaves to Rogo.”
Quist nodded. “I see,” he said. “And what will you do when you succeed in overthrowing him?”
The man looked puzzled. “You mean—when he dies?”
“Well, yes. When you kill him, I mean.”
The thin man blinked as if he had been hit hard between the eyes.
“When we kill Rogo!” he said.
Quist looked carefully at him. He seemed intelligent enough. But if his reaction was not stupidity, then what was it? A suspicion began to form in his mind.
“What exactly does this underground movement of yours plan to do? What are your aims?”
“We circulate books. Didn’t Jonrad . . .” the name slipped out, “... uh, didn’t my friend explain the nature of our organization to you?”
Quist stared at him with what he hoped was not an insulting degree of disbelief. “You mean your underground is a circulating library?”
“Of course.” The man spread his hands and leaned back in his chair. Quist saw for the first time that it, too, was made from a small wooden crate. “That’s why we want those books you mentioned. It’s our duty to keep alive the individuality of the people of Rayer. Of course, we’re only a small group but there are members in many countries. Why, only last week .. .”
“But surely you have some political aims,” Quist said desperately. “Wouldn’t you like to overthrow the government, set up your own administration?”
“Certainly,” the man said, leaning forward. “But listen . . . about these books, can we really have them?”
Quist looked at the youth staring eagerly at him from across the room, then back to the expression on the face of the dark man.
“Yes,” he said. “You can have them.”
“Good,” the man said, unable to repress a smile. “Good.”
“There’s only one condition I’ll insist on,” Quist said.
“What’s that?”
Quist smiled grimly. “The selection,” he said, “will be mine.”
* * * *
It was cold crouching in the bushes at the edge of the spaceport. An icy wind flowed over the little group, flapping their cloaks against their chilled limbs. Quist eased his weight from one leg to the other and winced at the pain of his cramped knee.
“Don’t you think you’re being a little overcautious?” he whispered to Jonrad.
“Cassill thinks it best.”
“The place was empty when I left. And nobody could have got into the ship. They probably still think I’m inside.”
“It doesn’t do to take risks,” Jonrad said. “Cassill says . . .”
Quist reflected on what a sad lot of potential revolutionaries they were and settled down to wait.
Five minutes later Cassill, the dark man, wriggled back through the grove to their side.
“It’s lucky we checked,” he whispered. “There’s a whole platoon of guards on the ship.”
Quist started up, then sat back again.
“I told you something like this would happen,” Cassill said. “If Rogo ordered you off the planet, he expected you to go, and quickly.”
“Well, what now?” Jonrad asked.
“I don’t know,” Cassill replied. “It’s his ship.”
He turned to Quist.
“I don’t see how you can possibly expect to get past so many guards.”
The comment stung Quist. He had so far been more than smart enough to beat Rogo’s men. He would continue to be so, somehow.
“How many men are there?” he asked.
“Twenty, maybe twenty-five.”
“Officers with them?”
“A lieutenant, a couple of sergeants too.”
A lieutenant. That was a stroke of luck. Quist saw a plan forming already.
“How far to the edge of the landing ground?”
“Fifteen yards perhaps.”
“Right. Now I want you to wriggle as close as you can to the edge and stay there. Is there cover?
“If we stay well down,” Cassill said. “But why get closer?”
“Trust me,” Quist said, “and do exactly what I tell you.”
Two minutes later, the guards on the ship were surprised to see a figure emerge from the shadows at the edge of the field and walk briskly towards them. A light speared out towards the newcomer and blazed on his face.
“It’s the Earthman,” somebody said. “He’s not in the ship.”
The lieutenant ceased his tattoo on the wall of the ship and scrambled down the ladder as quickly as he could manage without losing his dignity. This necessitated a slow descent so that Quist had to wait a full ten seconds at the base of the ladder before confronting the superior officer. He used the time well, looking over the group of soldiers like a general inspecting a shabby contingent of civilian militia at a country outpost. He tried to make the inspection as cool as possible on the theory that gall succeeded where brains failed. With the soldiers, it worked. They straightened up visibly under his gaze.
“Who’s in charge here?” he asked, superfluously, in view of the lieutenant now on the last few rungs of the ladder.
“I am,” the officer shouted, almost falling in his haste to take control once again of his troops. He was a young man, cast very much in the military mould with a stocky body and round hairless head. Quist knew immediately that here was an adversary hardly worth the trouble of deflating. The knowledge gave him confidence.
“Why are there armed guards on my ship?” he demanded. “I am an accredited representative of the Earth government and as such entitled to full diplomatic immunity. That also applies to my ship. Remove your men at once.”
Taken aback by this frontal attack, the lieutenant was at a disadvantage from the start.
“You were directed to be off this planet immediately,” he said. “Why are you still here?”
“That is entirely my business,” Quist said loftily. “But surely it must be evident even to you that there is a great deal involved in spacing-out a ship. Due to an unwarranted and illegal confiscation and destruction of certain goods from my ship this morning, it will be necessary for the entire balance of the ship to be altered. Cargo must be restacked, the engines re-set. As soon as this is done, it will be possible to leave.”
Faced with a choice between seeing Rogo’s orders obeyed and losing face before his men, the lieutenant made a decision, the speed of which was a tribute to the fear the dictator inspired in his minions.
“What must be done?” he asked.
“Well, if I remove some of the cargo and restore the balance…”
“Get on with it then,” the lieutenant ordered, stepping back and gesturing up the ladder. Quist went up as quickly as possible, hoping the officer would not change his mind. The plan, as he had expected, was working well.
The main lock had not been disturbed. He keyed it with his thumb-print, slipped inside and relaxed for the first time that day. Even the guard panting up the ladder behind him was only a slight dampener on his spirits. The ship was Quist’s home ground. Nobody could beat him here, and especially not a dumb dogface with a rifle.
He turned on the lights in the main cabin, checked the Bookworm’s console and threw the full emergency switch. Bookworm went into top efficiency, every memory bank quivering in anticipation of sophisticated and complex problems. But there was still the soldier to deal with. Quist opened the locker where he kept his food supplies and indicated the boxes of concentrate piled there.
“You,” he said, imitating as accurately as he could the lieutenant’s unpleasant tone. “Move these over to the edge of the landing field. I want them far away from the ship.”
The soldier, supremely weary, put down his rifle, picked up a box and exited. Quist almost ran to the Bookworm.
“Run me a full biblio on type 5 revolutionary procedures plus supplementary reading. Quick.”
Bookworm, for the first time Quist could remember, did not comment on the order. Circuits began closing with dizzying speed and a stream of tiny microbook templates poured into the receiving box. He left the machine bubbling to itself and hurried to the locker next to that where the food was stored. He had perhaps another thirty seconds before the lieutenant realized that his prisoner had been left unguarded and came to see what was happening. The estimate was a little off. It took him fifteen seconds to take out one of the portable kits from the stock of fifty that all Librarians carried, another twenty seconds to go to the Bookworm, take out the package of templates and put them into the kit, lock it and put it with the other loose equipment. When the lieutenant arrived, Quist was prepared. He picked up the kit, handed it to the officer, hefted a box of concentrates onto his own shoulder and walked past the lieutenant to the top of the ladder.
“Just follow me,” he said over his shoulder. “I’ll show you where to put it. I must say I appreciate your co-operative attitude, old man.”
At the bottom of the ladder Quist passed the box to a soldier and pointed to the perimeter of the field.
“Over there somewhere, please,” he said.
Just then the lieutenant reached the ground, still holding the grey metal kit case. He did not quite seem to know what he was doing with it, but he was carrying the thing and that was all Quist wanted to see.
“Just put it with the others,” he said lightly as he passed the bemused man and went back up to the air lock.
At the top he drew back into the shadows and watched the officer walk to the edge of the field. He put the case down beside the box of concentrate already placed there and walked back towards the ship. As Quist watched, a long pale arm reached silently out, grabbed the case and dragged it into the bushes. There was no sound and no other movement.
Quist went back into the cabin and programmed the Bookworm for space-out.
“Scare those goons off,” he ordered.
A hooter roared, scattering the soldiers like frightened sheep. Relays clicked, bulkheads were sealed as the ship made ready to take off. Quist belted himself into his seat, hit the firing button and, as a last touch, pressed another smaller switch. Just before the ship rose slowly on its jets, a panel opened up near the nose and hundreds of sheets of paper were scattered by a small explosive charge over the crowd of terrified soldiers now distributed around the edge of the field.
The leaflets were a little touch of Quist’s which had proved very effective in other similar cases. As he went up through the atmosphere more of them would be thrown out until a large proportion of Rayer’s population would have a copy.
As the papers fluttered down around the troops, one soldier reached out and grabbed one. His lips moved painfully as he groped his way through the few printed words. It was a standard text.
“Hail... the ...” He turned to the lieutenant. “Excuse me, sir, but what’s a . . .” He consulted the paper again, “... a rev-o-lution?”
* * * *
It promised to be a good revolution. Possibly a bit amateurish, Quist conceded, but out of the best possible motives at least. Freedom, economic equality, political representation—the list was endless, the rhetoric universal. Undoubtedly it would succeed. Not immediately, of course, but that didn’t matter. The seeds had been sown, and Rayer would never be quite the same again.
Quist sat at the computer transcribing his written report. The computer would digest it and whirl it away to the section in its memory banks where all such things were kept, to be regurgitated later at the end of the circuit when the Board would examine the reports and call him in for commendation or, as was usual in Quist’s case, a stormy accounting. He gave all the details of his initial reception; his contact with the “underground”, and the final plot to smuggle the portable press and microbooks to Jonrad and his men. Although it was not strictly necessary, he included a list of the books with his report; a pointed reminder to the Board members that he had supplied them with only the standard texts on political and economic theory, revolutionary tactics and so on, together with the vital percentage of works on literature, religion and language. He said that he had not, as on one disastrous occasion a few years ago, smuggled in a quantity of westerns, ghost stories and mild erotica. They would be pleased to see that he had adhered to the approved line.
Fired with a kind of masochistic glee, he added the sort of terminal paragraph that Controllers dream about.
“In view of the facts listed heretofore, it is my conclusion that I have successfully implanted the seeds of creative thought and knowledge once more on this planet with the result that the creative dynamics of social change should now once more be allowed to function in what had become a stagnant society wasteful of human resources. This, after all, is the essential purpose of the Library Service.”
He laid the microphone down.
“They’ll love that, Bookworm,” he said.
“Yes, Quist,” the machine said. “I think you loved it a little yourself.”
Quist looked at the ceiling. There was always this moment at the end of a job, the turnaround when nostalgia met expectation in a misty limbo where everything was neat and clean, and the life of a Librarian seemed almost a desirable one.
“Bookworm, do we still have the old indoctrination tape? The ‘Ideas Are Dangerous’ thing?”
“I’ve got everything they ever put into me,” the machine said. “I’m the original junk yard.”
“Give me that first part again.”
In the machine, a relay closed and the tired old voice of the past trickled out into the ship.
“Remember that as Librarians you carry with you a sacred trust, the future of the human mind. It does not matter if the race lives forever if its ideals do not live with it. Those ideals will only live on if they are called continually into question, exercised, disputed, fought over and died for. Stasis is death. Never forget that.
“And never forget this: Ideas are dangerous. When you go out to the lost worlds, you are carrying with you a weapon more terrible than a plague bacillus, or a neutron bomb. The censors who try to suppress thought are perfectly right to do so. An idea can destroy a civilization as surely as any war. Remember all that separates you from the people who would enslave men’s minds is your conscience—and devotion to the ideals and ethics of the Library Service. Whether a race moves forwards or backwards, to glory or to the grave, is a decision that rests with you alone.”
Quist felt the familiar shiver along his spine. Then, abruptly, he jerked himself back to reality.
“O.K., Bookworm,” he said briskly. “File the report and…”
“I expect you to keep these precepts always in mind, gentlemen,” the old voice went on. “But, on a mundane level, I must also ask you to remember certain other matters, equally important. There has been an increasing tendency among young Librarians to ignore certain rules, such as those pertaining to switching off the gravity shields during flight, smoking on board ship, fraternizing with the inhabitants of certain worlds and other items. For your information I am now going to read you the relevant passages of the official regulations . . .”
“No, Bookworm!” Quist shouted. “Not the whole speech!”
“. . . pertaining to these matters, and I must ask you . . .”
Hurriedly, Quist reached for his tool kit. There were two whole hours of the speech. Two hours! This time he had to get those memory banks put right.