Chapter III

The Guesser had been fighting the Misfits for twenty years, and hating them for as long as he could remember. The idea that he could ever become one of them had simply never occurred to him. Even the idea of going to one of the Misfit Worlds was so alien that the very suggestion of it was shocking to his mind.

And yet, the suggestion that the Sixer woman had made did require a little thinking over before he accepted or rejected it.

The Misfits. What did he really know about them, anyway?

They didn’t call themselves Misfits, of course; that was a derogatory name used by the Aristarchy. But the Guesser couldn’t remember off hand just what they did call themselves. Their form of government was a near-anarchic form of ochlocracy, he knew--mob rule of some sort, as might be expected among such people. They were the outgrowth of an ancient policy that had been used centuries ago for populating the planets of the galaxy.

There are some people who simply do not, will not, and can not fit in with any kind of social organization--except the very flimsiest, perhaps. Depending on the society in which they exist and the extent of their own antisocial activities, they have been called, over the centuries, everything from “criminals” to “pioneers.” It was a matter of whether they fought the unwelcome control of the society in power or fled from it.

The Guesser’s knowledge of history was close to nonexistent, but he had heard that the expansion to the stars from Earth--a planet he had never been within a thousand parsecs of--had been accomplished by the expedient of combining volunteers with condemned criminals and shipping them off to newly-found Earth-type planets. After a generation had passed, others came in--the civilizing types--and settled the planets, making them part of the Aristarchy proper.

(Or was the Aristarchy that old? The Guesser had a feeling that the government at that time had been of a different sort, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember what it was. Perhaps it had been the prototype of the Aristarchy, for certainly the present system of society had existed for four or five centuries--perhaps more. The Guesser realized that his knowledge of ancient history was as confused as anyone’s; after all, it wasn’t his specialty. He remembered that when he was a boy, he’d heard a Teacher Exec talk about the Geological Ages of Earth and the Teacher had said that “cave men were not contemporary with the dinosaur.” He hadn’t known what it meant at the time, since he wasn’t supposed to be listening, anyway, to an Exec class, but he had realized that the histories of times past often became mixed up with each other.)

At any rate, the process had gone along smoothly, even as the present process of using Class Sevens and Declassified citizens did. But in the early days there had not been the organization that existed in the present Aristarchy; planets had become lost for generations at a time. (The Guesser vaguely remembered that there had been wars of some kind during that time, and that the wars had contributed to those losses.) Some planets had civilized themselves without the intervention of the Earth government, and, when the Earth government had come along, they had fought integration with everything they could summon to help them.

Most of the recalcitrant planets had eventually been subdued, but there were still many “hidden planets” which were organized as separate governments under a loose confederation. These were the Misfits.

Because of the numerical superiority of the Aristarchy, and because it operated in the open instead of skulking in the darkness of space, the Misfits knew where Aristarchy planets were located, while the Aristarchy was unable to search out every planet in the multimyriads of star systems that formed the galaxy.

Thus the Misfits had become pirates, preying on the merchantships of the Aristarchy. Why? No one knew. (Or, at least, The Guesser corrected himself, he didn’t know.) Such a non-sane culture would have non-sane reasons.

The Aristarchy occupied nearly all the planets of the galaxy that could be inhabited by Man; that much The Guesser had been told. Just why Earth-type planets should occur only within five thousand light-years of the Galactic Center was a mystery to him, but, then, he was no astrophysicist.

But the Sixer woman said she had heard that the Aristarchy was holding back facts; that there were planets clear out to the Periphery, all occupied by Misfits; that the legendary Earth was one of those planets; that--

A thousand things. All wrong, as The Guesser knew. But she was firmly convinced that if anyone could get to a Misfit planet, they would be welcomed. There were no Classes among the Misfits, she said. (The Guesser dismissed that completely; a Classless society was ridiculous on the face of it.)

The Guesser had asked the woman why--if her statements were true--the Misfits had not conquered the Aristarchy long ago. After all, if they held the galaxy clear out to the Periphery, they had the Aristarchy surrounded, didn’t they?

She had had no answer.

And it had only been later that The Guesser realized that he had an answer. Indeed, that he himself, was a small, but significant part of that answer.

The Misfits had no Guessers. That was a fact that The Guesser knew from personal experience. He had been in space battles with Misfit fleets, and he had brought the Naipor through those battles unscathed while wreaking havoc and destruction among the massed ships of the Misfits. They had no Guessers. (Or no trained Guessers, he amended. The potential might be there, but certainly the actuality was not.)

And it occurred to him that the Misfits might have another kind of trained talent. They seemed to be able to search out and find a single Aristarchy ship, while it was impossible to even detect a Misfit fleet until it came within attacking distance. Well, that, again, was not his business.

But none of these considerations were important in the long run; none of them were more than minor. The thing that made up The Guesser’s mind, that spurred him into action, was the woman’s admission that she had a plan for actually reaching Misfit planets.

It was quite simple, really; they were to be taken prisoners.

“They spaceships got no people inside, see you,” she said, just as though she knew what she were talking about. “They just want to catch our ships, not kill ‘em. So they send out a bunch of little ships on they own, just to ... uh ... cripple our ships. It don’t matter, they little ships get hit, because they no one in them, see you. They trying to get our ships in good shape, and people in them and stuff, that’s all.”

“Yes, yes,” The Guesser had said impatiently, “but what’s that to do with us?”

She waved a hand, as though she were a little flustered by his peremptory tone. She wasn’t, after all, used to talking with Class Threes as equals, even though she knew that in this case the Three was helpless.

“I tell you! I tell you!” She paused to reorganize her thoughts. “But I ask you: if we get on a ship, you can keep it from shooting the Misfit ships?”

The Guesser saw what she was driving at. It didn’t make much sense yet, but there was a glimmer of something there.

“You mean,” he said, “that you want to know whether it would be possible for me to partially disable the fire-control system of a spaceship enough to allow it to be captured by Misfit ships?”

She nodded rapidly. “Yes ... I think, yes. Can you?”

“Ye-e-es,” The Guesser said, slowly and cautiously. “I could. But not by just walking in and doing it. I mean, it would be almost impossible to get aboard a ship in the first place, and without an official position I couldn’t do anything anyway.”

But she didn’t look disappointed. Instead, she’d smiled a little. “I get us on the ship,” she said. “And you have official position. We do it.”

When she had gone on to explain, The Guesser’s mind had boggled at her audacity--at first. And then he’d begun to see how it might be possible.

For it was not until then that the woman had given The Guesser information which he hadn’t thought to ask about before. The first was her name: Deyla. The second was her job.

She was a cleaning woman in Executive territory.

And, as she outlined her plan for reaching the Misfits, The Guesser began to feel despair slipping from his mind, to be replaced by hope.

The Guesser plodded solemnly along the street toward the tall, glittering building which was near the center of Executive territory, his feet moving carefully, his eyes focused firmly on the soft, textured surface of the pavement. He was clad in the rough gray of a Class Six laborer, and his manner was carefully tailored to match. As he was approached by Fours and Fives, he stepped carefully to one side, keeping his face blank, hiding the anger that seethed just beneath the surface.

Around his arm was a golden brassard indicating that he was contracted to a Class One, and in his pocket was a carefully forged card indicating the same thing. No one noticed him; he was just another Sixer going to his menial job.

The front of the building bore a large glowing plaque which said:

VIORNIS EXPORT CORPORATION

But the front entrance was no place for a Sixer. He went on past it, stepping aside regularly for citizens of higher class than his own assumed Six. He made his way around to the narrow alley that ran past the rear of the building.

There was a Class Five guard armed with a heavy truncheon, standing by the door that led into the workers entrance. The Guesser, as he had been instructed by Deyla, had his card out as he neared the doorway. The guard hardly even glanced at it before wagging a finger indicating that The Guesser was to pass. He didn’t bother to speak.

The Guesser was trembling as he walked on in--partly in anger, partly in fear. It seemed ridiculous that one glance had not told the guard that he was not a Class Six. The Guesser was quite certain that he didn’t look like a Sixer. But then, Fives were not very perceptive people, anyway.

The Guesser went on walking into the complex corridors of the lower part of the building, following directions that had been given him by Deyla. There was no hesitation on his part; his memory for things like that was as near perfect as any record of the past can be. He knew her instructions well enough to have navigated the building in the dark.

Again, The Guesser found himself vaguely perturbed by the relative freedom of Sixers. As long as they got their jobs done there was almost no checking as to how they spent their time. Well, actually, the jobs to which they were suited were rather trivial--some of them were actually “made work.” After all, in a well-run society, it was axiomatic that everyone have basic job security; that’s what kept everyone happy.

Of course, there were plenty of Sixers working in construction and on farms who were kept on their toes by overseers, but cleaning jobs and such didn’t need such supervision. A thing can only be so clean; there’s no quota to fill and exceed.