Chapter 2

In something under two hours Hoddan was ushered into the ambassador’s office. He’d been refreshed, his torn clothing replaced by more respectable garments, and the places where stun-pistols had stung him soothed by ointments. But, more important, he’d worked out and firmly adopted a new point of view.

He’d been a misfit at home on Zan because he was not contented with the humdrum and monotonous life of a member of a space-pirate community. Piracy was a matter of dangerous take-offs in cranky rocket-ships, to be followed by weeks or months of tedious and uncomfortable boredom in highly unhealthy re-breathed air. No voyage ever contained more than ten seconds of satisfactory action--and all space-fighting took place just out of the atmosphere of a possibly embattled planet, because you couldn’t intercept a ship at cruising speed between the stars. Regardless of the result of the fighting, one had to get away fast when it was over, lest overwhelming force swarm up from the nearby world. It was intolerably devoid of anything an ambitious young man would want.

Even when one had made a good prize--with the lifeboats darting frantically for ground--and after one got back to Zan with a captured ship, even then there was little satisfaction in a piratical career. Zan had not a large population. Piracy couldn’t support a large number of people. Zan couldn’t attempt to defend itself against even single heavily-armed ships that sometimes came in passionate resolve to avenge the disappearance of a rich freighter or a fast new liner. So the people of Zan, to avoid hanging, had to play innocent. They had to be convincingly simple, harmless folk who cultivated their fields and led quiet, blameless lives. They might loot, but they had to hide their booty where investigators would not find it. They couldn’t really benefit by it. They had to build their own houses and make their own garments and grow their own food. So life on Zan was dull. Piracy was not profitable in the sense that one could live well by it. It simply wasn’t a trade for a man like Hoddan.

So he’d abandoned it. He’d studied electronics in books from looted passenger-ship libraries. Within months after arrival on a law-abiding planet, he was able to earn a living in electronics as an honest trade.

And that was unsatisfactory. Law-abiding communities were no more thrilling or rewarding than piratical ones. A payday now and then didn’t make up for the tedium of labor. Even when one had money there wasn’t much to do with it. On Walden, to be sure, the level of civilization was so high that many people needed psychiatric treatment to stand it, and neurotics vastly outnumbered more normal folk. And on Walden electronics was only a trade like piracy, and no more fun.

He should have known it would be this way. His grandfather had often discussed this frustration in human life.

“Us humans,” it was his grandfather’s habit to say, “don’t make sense! There’s some of us that work so hard they’re too tired to enjoy life. There’s some that work so hard at enjoying it that they don’t get no fun out of it. And the rest of us spend our lives complainin’ that there ain’t any fun in it anyhow. The man that over all has the best time of any is one that picks out something he hasn’t got a chance to do, and spends his life raisin’ hell because he’s stopped from doing it. When”--and here Hoddan’s grandfather tended to be emphatic--”he wouldn’t think much of it if he could!”

What Hoddan craved, of course, was a sense of achievement, of doing things worth doing, and doing them well. Technically there were opportunities all around him. He’d developed one, and it would save millions of credits a year if it were adopted. But nobody wanted it. He’d tried to force its use, he was in trouble, and now he could complain justly enough, but despite his grandfather he was not the happiest man he knew.

The ambassador received him with a cordial wave of the hand.

“Things move fast,” he said cheerfully. “You weren’t here half an hour before there was a police captain at the gate. He explained that an excessively dangerous criminal had escaped jail and been seen to climb the Embassy wall. He offered very generously to bring some men in and capture you and take you away--with my permission, of course. He was shocked when I declined.”

“I can understand that,” said Hoddan.

“By the way,” said the ambassador. “Young men like yourself-- Is there a girl involved in this?”

Hoddan considered.

“A girl’s father,” he acknowledged, “is the real complainant against me.”

“Does he complain,” asked the ambassador, “because you want to marry her, or because you don’t?”

“Neither,” Hoddan told him. “She hasn’t quite decided that I’m worth defying her rich father for.”

“Good!” said the ambassador. “It can’t be too bad a mess while a woman is being really practical. I’ve checked your story. Allowing for differences of viewpoint, it agrees with the official version. I’ve ruled that you are a political refugee, and so entitled to sanctuary in the Embassy. And that’s that.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Hoddan.

“There’s no question about the crime,” observed the ambassador, “or that it is primarily political. You proposed to improve a technical process in a society which considers itself beyond improvement. If you’d succeeded, the idea of change would have spread, people now poor would have gotten rich, people now rich would have gotten poor, and you’d have done what all governments are established to prevent. So you’ll never be able to walk the streets of this planet again in safety. You’ve scared people.”

“Yes, sir,” said Hoddan. “It’s been an unpleasant surprise to them, to be scared.”

The ambassador put the tips of his fingers together.

“Do you realize,” he asked, “that the whole purpose of civilization is to take the surprises out of life, so one can be bored to death? That a culture in which nothing unexpected ever happens is in what is called its Golden Age? That when nobody can even imagine anything happening unexpectedly, that they later fondly refer to that period as the Good Old Days?”

“I hadn’t thought of it in just those words, sir--”

“It is one of the most-avoided facts of life,” said the ambassador. “Government, in the local or planetary sense of the word, is an organization for the suppression of adventure. Taxes are, in part, the insurance premiums one pays for protection against the unpredictable. And you have offended against everything that is the foundation of a stable and orderly and damnably tedious way of life--against civilization, in fact.”

Hoddan frowned.

“Yet you’ve granted me asylum--”

“Naturally!” said the ambassador. “The Diplomatic Service works for the welfare of humanity. That doesn’t mean stuffiness. A Golden Age in any civilization is always followed by collapse. In ancient days savages came and camped outside the walls of super-civilized towns. They were unwashed, unmannerly, and unsanitary. Super-civilized people refused even to think about them! So presently the savages stormed the city walls and another civilization went up in flames.”

“But now,” objected Hoddan, “there are no savages.”

“They invent themselves,” the ambassador told him. “My point is that the Diplomatic Service cherishes individuals and causes which battle stuffiness and complacency and Golden Ages and monstrous things like that. Not thieves, of course. They’re degradation, like body lice. But rebels and crackpots and revolutionaries who prevent hardening of the arteries of commerce and furnish wholesome exercise to the body politic--they’re worth cherishing!”

“I ... think I see, sir,” said Hoddan.

“I hope you do,” said the ambassador. “My action on your behalf is pure diplomatic policy. To encourage the dissatisfied is to insure against universal satisfaction--which is lethal. Walden is in a bad way. You are the most encouraging thing that has happened here in a long time. And you’re not a native.”

“No-o-o,” agreed Hoddan. “I come from Zan.”

“Never mind.” The ambassador turned to a stellar atlas. “Consider yourself a good symptom, and valued as such. If you could start a contagion, you’d deserve well of your fellow citizens. Savages can always invent themselves. But enough of apology from me. Let us set about your affairs.” He consulted the atlas. “Where would you like to go, since you must leave Walden?”

“Not too far, sir--”

“The girl, eh?” The ambassador did not smile. He ran his finger down a page. “The nearest inhabited worlds, of course, are Krim and Darth. Krim is a place of lively commercial activity, where an electronics engineer should easily find employment. It is said to be progressive and there is much organized research--”

“I wouldn’t want to be a kept engineer, sir,” said Hoddan apologetically. “I’d rather ... well ... putter on my own.”

“Impractical, but sensible,” commented the ambassador. He turned a page. “There’s Darth. Its social system is practically feudal. It’s technically backward. There’s a landing grid, but space exports are skins and metal ingots and practically nothing else. There is no broadcast power. Strangers find the local customs difficult. There is no town larger than twenty thousand people, and few approach that size. Most settled places are mere villages near some feudal castle, and roads are so few and bad that wheeled transport is rare.”

He leaned back and said in a detached voice:

“I had a letter from there a couple of months ago. It was rather arrogant. The writer was one Don Loris, and he explained that his dignity would not let him make a commercial offer, but an electronic engineer who put himself under his protection would not be the loser. He signed himself prince of this, lord of that, baron of the other thing and claimant to the dukedom of something else. Are you interested? No kings on Darth, just feudal chiefs.”

Hoddan thought it over.

“I’ll go to Darth,” he decided. “It’s bound to be better than Zan, and it can’t be worse than Walden.”

The ambassador looked impassive. An Embassy servant came in and offered an indoor communicator. The ambassador put it to his ear. After a moment he said:

“Show him in.” He turned to Hoddan. “You did kick up a storm! The Minister of State, no less, is here to demand your surrender. I’ll counter with a formal request for an exit-permit. I’ll talk to you again when he leaves.”

Hoddan went out. He paced up and down the other room into which he was shown. Darth wouldn’t be in a Golden Age! He was wiser now than he’d been this same morning. He recognized that he’d made mistakes. Now he could see rather ruefully how completely improbable it was that anybody could put across a technical device merely by proving its value, without making anybody want it. He shook his head regretfully at the blunder.

The ambassador sent for him.

“I’ve had a pleasant time,” he told Hoddan genially. “There was a beautiful row. You’ve really scared people, Hoddan! You deserve well of the republic! Every government and every person needs to be thoroughly terrified occasionally. It limbers up the brain.”

“Yes, sir,” said Hoddan. “I’ve--”

“The planetary government,” said the ambassador with relish, “insists that you have to be locked up with the key thrown away. Because you know how to make deathrays. I said it was nonsense, and you were a political refugee in sanctuary. The Minister of State said the Cabinet would consider removing you forcibly from the Embassy if you weren’t surrendered. I said that if the Embassy was violated no ship would clear for Walden from any other civilized planet. They wouldn’t like losing their off-planet trade! Then he said that the government would not give you an exit-permit, and that he would hold me personally responsible if you killed everybody on Walden, including himself and me. I said he insulted me by suggesting that I’d permit such shenanigans. He said the government would take an extremely grave view of my attitude, and I said they would be silly if they did. Then he went off with great dignity--but shaking with panic--to think up more nonsense.”

“Evidently,” said Hoddan in relief, “you believe me when I say that my gadget doesn’t make deathrays.”

The ambassador looked slightly embarrassed.

“To be honest,” he admitted, “I’ve no doubt that you invented it independently, but they’ve been using such a device for half a century in the Cetis cluster. They’ve had no trouble.”

Hoddan winced.

“Did you tell the Minister that?”

“Hardly,” said the ambassador. “It would have done you no good. You’re in open revolt and have performed overt acts of violence against the police. But also it was impolite enough for me to suggest that the local government was stupid. It would have been most undiplomatic to prove it.”

Hoddan did not feel very proud, just then.

“I’m thinking that the cops--quite unofficially--might try to kidnap me from the Embassy. They’ll deny that they tried, especially if they manage it. But I think they’ll try.”

“Very likely,” said the ambassador. “We’ll take precautions.”

“I’d like to make something--not lethal--just in case,” said Hoddan. “If you can trust me not to make deathrays, I’d like to make a generator of odd-shaped microwaves. They’re described in textbooks. They ionize the air where they strike. That’s all. They make air a high-resistance conductor. Nothing more than that.”

The ambassador said:

“There was an old-fashioned way to make ozone...” When Hoddan nodded, a little surprised, the ambassador said: “By all means go ahead. You should be able to get parts from your room vision-receiver. I’ll have some tools given you.” Then he added: “Diplomacy has to understand the things that control events. Once it was social position. For a time it was weapons. Then it was commerce. Now it’s technology. But I wonder how you’ll use the ionization of air to protect yourself from kidnapers! Don’t tell me! I’d rather try to guess.”

He waved his hand in cordial dismissal and an Embassy servant showed Hoddan to his quarters. Ten minutes later another staff man brought him tools such as would be needed for work on a vision set. He was left alone.

He delicately disassembled the set in his room and began to put some of the parts together in a novel but wholly rational fashion. The science of electronics, like the science of mathematics, had progressed away beyond the point where all of it had practical applications. One could spend a lifetime learning things that research had discovered in the past, and industry had never found a use for. On Zan, industriously reading pirated books, Hoddan hadn’t known where utility stopped. He’d kept on learning long after a practical man would have stopped studying to get a paying job.

Any electronic engineer could have made the device he now assembled. It only needed to be wanted--and apparently he was the first person to want it. In this respect it was like the receptor that had gotten him into trouble. But as he put the small parts together, he felt a certain loneliness. A man Hoddan’s age needs to have some girl admire him from time to time. If Nedda had been sitting cross-legged before him, listening raptly while he explained, Hoddan would probably have been perfectly happy. But she wasn’t. It wasn’t likely she ever would be. Hoddan scowled.

Inside of an hour he’d made a hand-sized, five-watt, wave-guide projector of waves of eccentric form. In the beam of that projector, air became ionized. Air became a high-resistance conductor comparable to nichrome wire, when and where the projector sent its microwaves.

He was wrapping tape about the pistol grip when a servant brought him a scribbled note. It had been handed in at the Embassy gate by a woman who fled after leaving it. It looked like Nedda’s handwriting. It read like Nedda’s phrasing. It appeared to have been written by somebody in a highly emotional state. But it wasn’t quite--not absolutely--convincing.

He went to find the ambassador. He handed over the note. The ambassador read it and raised his eyebrows.

“Well?”

“It could be authentic,” admitted Hoddan.

“In other words,” said the ambassador, “you are not sure that it is a booby trap--an invitation to a date with the police?”