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The Colonizing of Tharle

by James P. Hogan

Records from the colony's founding years stated that the town of Ferrydock had grown from an early base established near the river mouth, where a motorized pontoon raft had provided the crossing to the peninsula. With its rocky prominences, dunes, and beaches, the peninsula—later named Strandside—was an attractive place for walks and swims or just lazing around to get away from the routine of the settlement for a while. Later, it acquired some stores, a bar, restaurant, and a small hotel to become one of the more popular recreation spots. Although Ferrydock was now a fair-size town, and a low, sleek bridge of concrete spans with a raisable center section—sitting on incongruously ornate steel piers reminiscent of nineteenth-century ideas of aesthetics—crossed the river, a ferry still ran alongside. Not everybody was in enough of a hurry to need the road, one of the locals had explained to Duggan and another official with the mission sent from Earth to reestablish relations with Tharle. And besides, the kids liked the water ride. Notions of cost effectiveness didn't seem to count for much here—and that fitted with the other bizarre notions of economics that had taken root here, which the theorists up in the orbiting mother ship Barnet had already decided were probably the major factor responsible for the planet's evident regression in many ways from the levels of technological and political capability possessed by the founders.

Duggan stood in the square at the heart of Ferrydock's central district—an open space really too irregular to justify its name geometrically, bordered by narrow, erratic streets and buildings of the peculiarly curved architectural style reveling in orange-brick walls and green- or blue-tiled roofs that brought back childhood memories of an illustrated edition of Oz. The Tharleans seemed to delight in turrets and towers too, which was also odd, since there was no history of militancy or defense needs to have inspired them. Simply another of their odd whims and fancies expressing itself, Duggan supposed.

It was apparently market day. The stalls around the square were heaped with assortments of unfamiliar fruits, vegetable-like offerings, and other plant forms that grew under the purple-tinted sky. There were refrigerated racks of strange fish, joints of meat, tanks of live fish, and cages containing furry and feathered animals of various kinds, whether intended for food or as pets, Duggan didn't know. And there were tables displaying tools and other hardware, ornaments, art works, kitchenware, haberdashery, household goods, and clothing—much the same as market places anywhere, anytime. Duggan watched a tall, weathered-looking man in a gray shirt and loose blue jacket examining a pair of ceramic sculptures in the form of elongated feminine heads with a suggestion of styled Oriental features.

"How much for these?" he asked the graying-haired lady in charge of the stall. She was sitting in a folding alloy-frame chair, a many-colored, open-weave blanket pulled around her shoulders. A shaggy, yellow-haired creature with a huge-eyed, owl-like face studied the man alertly from the top of an upturned box next to her.

"Ten draks," the woman replied.

The dialect had drifted to a degree that now sounded quaint; or was it that English as spoken on Earth had progressed? Schooling in Tharlean pronunciations, usage, and idioms had been required of all the delegates on the contact mission, and after a few days on the surface Duggan found he was experiencing few problems.

The man turned one of the sculptures over in his hands again and pursed his lips. "I'll give you fifteen."

The woman smiled in the kind of way that said it was a good try. "What do you think I am, destitute or dysfunctional or something? They're not worth that."

"Hey, come on, gimme a break and let me help you out a little. We've all got our pride."

"Eleven, then."

The man shook his head. "I can manage more than that. How about fourteen?"

They eventually settled on twelve. Duggan turned away, mystified, and shook his head. The two armed troopers that regulations required escort him when away from the surface lander at Base 1 beyond the far edge of the town looked back at him unhelpfully. "A strange way of playing poker," Duggan commented.

"They're all crazy," one of the troopers offered.

Then Duggan noticed the woman in a shirt of leafy design on white and bright red shorts, standing a few yards away in front of a mixed, chattering group of people but apparently not with them. Farther back, others among the crowd had stopped and were staring at Duggan and his escorts unabashedly. The woman was perhaps in her mid thirties if Earth standards were anything to judge by, with wiry, shoulder-length hair that varied between being auburn and orange depending how it caught the light, and the bronzed skin with a hint of metallic sheen that the blue-shifted light from Xylon-B evoked among Tharleans generally. Her body was slim and lithe, her face tapering to a pointy chin, with a straight nose, dimpled cheeks, and a mouth that was hovering on the edge of wanting to smile but at the same time hesitant, as if she were unsure how it might be taken. Instead, she let her eyes interrogate him silently. They were deep, brown, intelligent, and mirthful, the kind that could arouse immediate interest in possibilities and prospects—especially in a new and strange, yet-to-be-explored place, after an excruciatingly uneventful voyage dominated by routine and officiousness. Duggan's features softened. He let his mouth pucker in the way of one of two people unsure of their ground offering to meet halfway.

"I didn't mean to gape," the woman said. "But I haven't seen anyone from the Earth ship this close before. I was just curious."

"Oh, I wouldn't worry about it," Duggan answered. "I've seen plenty of people from Tharle. The only trouble is, I haven't managed to talk to too many of them."

"They're curious too, but trying to mind their own business. It's considered good manners. . . . Some of them are worried about what the soldiers are doing here, too."

"So what makes you different?"

She shrugged. "I just wanted to see for myself what you were like—try to talk to some of you. I hear what other people say, but I never know whether to believe it."

"What do they say?" Duggan asked.

The woman thought for a few seconds, her mouth twisting wryly in the way of someone searching for a safe answer. "They call you Pinkies," she said finally.

He stared at her, then laughed. The barrier of tension they had both been reacting to revealed itself as an illusion and came tumbling down. "Paul Duggan," he said.

"My name's Tawna."

"So . . . hi."

"Hi."

The feelings coming back at him were good. She was looking at him directly and openly with an expectant expression, fears allayed, eager to learn more. Duggan turned his head and lowered his tone to mouth at the escorts. "Why don't you guys get lost for a half hour? Take a walk around; get yourselves a coffee or something."

"Can't. Orders," one of the troopers replied woodenly.

Duggan sighed and turned back to Tawna. "I'm with what the mission calls its Office of Exorelations. That means we're the ones who are supposed to deal with whoever's in charge of things here. But we're not having much luck finding anyone. That's why I decided to come out and walk around the town. Nothing we got over the communications channels made any sense."

Tawna looked puzzled. "I can't see why that should be a problem. There are people in charge of things everywhere."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, it depends what you're looking for. In charge of what, specifically? The Waterfront Agency looks after the harbor installations and the docks. The Power Company produces power. The highway companies consolidated into the Road Services League because tolls got to be such a hassle. . . ."

Duggan waved a hand. "But above those—the works, all of it. Who runs the whole system?" Tawna seemed to want to be helpful, but she appeared honestly not to know what he meant. "The laws," he said. "Who makes the laws here?"

"Laws?" she repeated, as if hearing a new word in the language for the first time.

"What you can do, what you can't. How you're allowed to treat each other. Who tells you the rules?"

"Tells us? . . . Nobody. . . . Why would they?"

"Then where do they come from?"

Tawna showed a hand helplessly. "They don't come from anywhere. They're just . . . there. Who tells you rules for how to breathe air or how to grow older? Nobody needs to. You already know. You just do it."

Duggan glanced again at the two troopers. Trying to pursue the subject further in a place like this, and under these circumstances, would be impossible. But he felt that at last he'd made some rapport and found a line that could lead somewhere eventually—and conceivably in more senses than one. "So what do you do here?" he asked Tawna, abandoning the tack for the time being.

She seemed relieved. "Me? Oh, I'm a dance teacher most of the time—keeps me fit. And I'm also a musician and help organize shows. I've tried writing a couple of plays too, but they weren't very good. I probably let myself get paid too much for them."

It was the same illogic that Duggan had been hearing all over the place. He didn't want to go any further into it now, he decided, anymore than trying to find out who ran the system. "Is Ferrydock where you're from originally?" he asked instead.

They chatted for a while. She had grown up in a farming area on the far side of the mountains standing distantly in the purplish haze to the northeast, and moved here to be with friends. She was curious about Earth and would maybe have kept them both there for the rest of the day with her questions, but her knowledge of its affairs was dated, reflecting the politics and geography of the period around a century ago, before the colony world of Tharle had become isolated.

"We need to talk some more," Duggan said when he spotted the scout car from Base 1 coming to collect him. "Somewhere different from this—where it's quieter, more private."

"I'd like that," Tawna said.

"How can I get in touch with you?"

She gave him the call codes for her personal phone, which turned out to consist of the blue-jeweled ear rings with silver mountings and matching pendant that she was wearing. Duggan would never have guessed. He gave her one of his official departmental calling cards with contact details. Communications engineers aboard the Barnet had already programmed the ship's system to interface with the planetary net. Tawna waved brightly after them as people parted to let him and his two escorts through to the waiting car.

Duggan stared out at the town's busy sidewalks and pedestrian precincts as they began the short drive back. The last problem anyone had anticipated the mission would come up against in reestablishing contact with the colony's government when it got to Tharle was finding a government. He looked down at the compak that he was still holding in his hand, where he'd stored Tawna's call codes. Electronics so advanced that he hadn't even recognized it; technology to put satellites aloft; sophisticated air travel available when the need arose. And yet, at the same time, the deep-space-going capability that the founders brought had gone into decline; people spent much more time getting around than they needed to, sailing in ships or plain walking; and the supposedly fundamental laws of market trading somehow worked backwards.

Nothing made sense.

Nobody knew who the "Barnet" was or had been, whom the ship was named after. Typically, it would have been some long-forgotten bureaucrat from an extinct department. Duggan sometimes wondered if it might have been the one responsible for the blunder that had resulted in Tharle's disappearing from the records for almost a hundred years. Two rival sections of the Colonial Affairs Administration had each recorded that the other was responsible for handling Tharle, out at Xylon-B, and a hundred years was how long it had taken for the realization to dawn that nobody was. Contact was established, and the Barnet and its mission hastily despatched to reintroduce formal diplomatic relations. In the furious exchanges of messages and memoranda, accusations and denials, evasions of blame and attempts to direct it elsewhere that followed discovery of the fiasco, it apparently escaped everyone as significant that in all that time nobody on Tharle had chosen to draw Earth's attention to its omission.

Back aboard the orbiting Barnet, Pearson Brose, head of the mission's Office of Exorelations and Earth's designated ambassador-to-be if a government could be found that wanted one, was getting impatient for results. "Of course they have to exist," he fumed at the review meeting of his staff, including Duggan, gathered in the conference room of his unit's offices in the Planetary Department section of the Administrations deck. He had a florid face with long, wispy white hair that flailed like a stormy sea when he jerked his head about—which he did a lot at times like this. "They're probably paranoid and gone underground for reasons best know to themselves. Why? What reason have we given them to do that? Have we made threats? Are their cities quavering under weapons that we have deployed? I see no weapons. We've shown nothing but reasonableness and a desire to advance our common interests. So what have I missed? Where am I going wrong? Somebody tell me."

Everybody knew that Brose hadn't gone wrong anywhere. The melodramatic flourishes were his way of reminding the world of how much his responsibilities required him to endure and suffer. Zeebron Stell, with his hefty build, swarthy skin, short-cropped black hair and shaggy mustache, almost an inverse of Brose, brought them back on track. He was supposed to be Duggan's colleague and virtual opposite number, but they seemed to end up at odds over everything. "Well, I did get to talk with that scientific group up north. They're into a new line on catalyzed nuclear processes that will need a high-energy installation and big bucks."

Brose forgot his lamentations and became interested. "Ah yes, the research institute. So where does the funding come from. Did we find out?" He always said "we" if the prospective news was good. It was taken for granted that such a source would be some branch or other of government, the uncovering of which would hopefully lead to the rest.

"Not really," Stell answered. "That is, nothing that you'd be interested in. The bread comes from all kinds of places: a bunch of corporations, as you'd expect; an amazing number of individuals; even a school science club. But none of it was like what we were looking for." Brose looked at him sourly, as if asking why he had bothered bringing it up if that were the case. Stell went on, "But the way they were going about it says to me that they don't deal with anyone in the government anyway."

"How do you mean?" Brose asked.

Stell showed his hands and turned from side to side in an appeal to the others that he wasn't making this up. "When we asked them about procedures, they started telling us that their biggest problem is arguing grants down to less than the sources want to give them—as if that was obviously what anyone would do. They thought that accepting too much would make them look incompetent. Who ever heard of a government funding agency that would have problems dealing with people like that?" A baffled silence engulfed the room. Then Milford Grimes from Research Resources pronounced what was going through all their minds.

"That's insane."

Amelia Jonkin, another of the Exorelations staff, looked from one to another as if inviting any better ideas before voicing the only one she could come up with. "Maybe they're a second-rate outfit. It could be an indication of lack of self-esteem there, or that they have an inferior image of themselves." She didn't sound as if she really believed it.

"The stuff they were doing looked right-on to me," Stell said. "And Dransel Howess who was with us thought so too. Nuc-cat is his line, and he was big-time impressed."

Duggan shifted in his seat. He had been quiet for a long time. "I saw the same thing when I was down in Ferrydock," he told the room. "They've got a marketplace there in the town, and people haggle. Except they try to sell lower and buy higher. I tried getting some of them to explain it, but nobody could. They couldn't understand what was so strange that needed explaining."

"It just shows that they're all simpletons," somebody from the Planning Group said. "We can't let people like that get the better of us, surely." The tone was facetious.

"Perhaps we should look for the big houses," Amelia mused. "The real rulers in any society always live in the biggest houses."

And that seemed to exhaust the suggestions. Brose looked around for further comment. After a second or two of more silence, it came from the commander of the mission's military contingent, General Rhinde, who was sitting in and so far had maintained silence with visibly rising impatience.

"This nonsense has gone on long enough. You're not going to get anywhere creeping around like tourists frightened of giving offence, and asking polite questions." He glowered around, challenging anyone to disagree. Nobody dared. "The people you're talking about will be all office clerks, anyway, even if you find them. The true government of a country, planet, whatever, is whoever defends it. The way you find them is make them come to you. Just march in, say you're taking over, and wait to see who appears. If nobody does, then you know who the government is anyway. It's you."

Nobody was prepared to argue. But at the same time, it was clear to everyone except Rhinde that nothing that drastic was a candidate for the time being. Ever the able and resourceful organization man, Brose tabled the proposal for further consideration and appointed someone to form a subcommittee to look into it.

After the meeting adjourned, Duggan approached Brose privately in his office at the Executive Suites end of the Planetary Department. "I'd like approval to roam around freely down there, without escorts," he said. "There isn't any threat, and the presence of weapons inhibits the Tharleans. It's a barrier to further progress in getting through to them."

"You really think it's likely to make much difference?" Brose queried. His conviction seemed distinctly far short of total. "I mean, what progress at all is there to take further? Have you, for instance, met anyone who looks even remotely capable of being gotten through to?"

"I think so, maybe. Yes."

"Hm." Brose sniffed. "And what if we have to scrape you up out of an alley one morning, and it gets back that I waived regulations. How would I be supposed to explain it?"

"Well, we'd better come up with something before Rhinde gets his way and ends up starting a war," Duggan said. "Would you rather have to explain that?"

Duggan got his request approved—on signing a disclaimer that it was at his own instigation, and against the advice of his superior. "I'm doing it to give you a chance to rack up some points for promotion to subsection supervisor when we get back," Brose murmured confidentially as he signed the paper. "I think you'd be more suited to it, Paul." Duggan had little doubt that Brose was saying similar things to Stell too, who was also a candidate for the slot. Fostering a healthy competitive spirit between rivals was encouraged as part of the Department's management style. It was considered the astute way to develop human resources. They were what at one time had been called "people."

"I'll be coming back down tomorrow," Duggan told Tawna when he called her a half hour later. "No guards to get in the way this time, so we can have that talk. Tell me a good place to meet."

The bronzed, orangey-haired face on the screen looked genuinely pleased. "That's wonderful! Then you can tell me all about Earth." She must have caught a hint of a reaction in his face. "And talk about other things too, naturally. What did you want to do down here?"

Duggan frowned, realizing that he had been unprepared. He thought rapidly. "I want to find out who lives in the biggest houses," he told her.

They met and had breakfast in a cafe by the river, on a terrace at the rear, overlooking the water. It was a fair, sunny day, and there were a lot of small boats about—some sporty and powered, others curvy and delicate with strange-shaped sails, reminiscent in ways of Arab dhows. It was the same incongruous blend of ancient and new existing happily side-by-side that Duggan had been noticing everywhere. A large blimp passed overhead, heading south, maybe following the coast. Tawna explained that on days when the weather permitted, those who could afford it often preferred them to regular jets. By this time, Duggan was surprised to hear that for once the price of something should actually reflect how it was valued. It turned out that what Tawna meant was those who could afford the time.

As he listened, Duggan found himself being captivated by her openness. She played none of the mind games that he was accustomed to in this kind of situation, no jockeying for one-up points to decide who had a controlling advantage. And in a way that he realized was a new concept to him, her absence of deviousness absolved him from any need to reciprocate. He could actually be himself and say what he thought, without having to calculate implications and consequences. It felt liberating and refreshing. Yes, there had been a man that she'd lived with for a while when she moved to Ferrydock. His name had been Lukki. But in the end it hadn't worked out. No, there was no one in particular at present.

The people they were going to meet were called Jazeb and Maybel Wintey, and kept what Tawna described as a "huge" house in a foothill region of the mountains northeast of Ferrydock. She didn't know them personally but had known of them for a long time, and contacted them through an agent in town who provided their domestic staff. Hardly surprisingly, a mention that somebody from the Earth ship wanted to meet them was all it had taken. In her non-questioning, accepting way, Tawna hadn't asked Duggan why he wanted to know who lived in the big houses. When Duggan inquired casually what Wintey did, Tawna replied in an uncharacteristically vague kind of way, that he "collected things." It didn't sound much like what Duggan had been hoping for. But he could hardly change his mind now.

Back outside the front of the cafe, Tawna stopped to run her eye over the assortment of vehicles in the parking area. Tharlean ground autos were generally simpler and less ostentatious than Terran designs, though with the same proclivity for curviness that was evident in the architecture and the boats; a couple looked almost like Aladdin slippers on wheels. She led the way across to a pale blue, middle-of-the-range model, unpretentious but comfortably roomy for two. As they got in, Duggan commented that he'd thought she wasn't sure which car was hers. It wasn't hers, he discovered, but belonged to a common pool that anyone could use, rather like a public comlink booth back home. She started it by inserting a plastic tag that seemed to combine the functions of pay card and driver's license. People who needed to owned their own, but most didn't bother, Tawna said—adding that it was the kind of thing Jazeb Wintey would do. She seemed to find it humorous. Duggan wasn't sure why.

They drove out of the town to an airport that Duggan knew of from the Barnet's reconnaissance views, where large commercial planes came and went from all over, and parked outside a building serving an area to one side used by smaller craft. Tawna just took her card from the slot in the car's dash panel and walked away. Inside the building, they rented a personal six-seat flymobile that she had reserved, and soon, with the vehicle practically flying itself, were skimming low along the river valley, toward the mountains outlined in the distant purplish haze.

Tawna hadn't been exaggerating when she described the Wintey house as "huge." It would have qualified as a mansion by Terran standards, with a healthy profusion of Tharlean towers and turrets, and stood amid an estate of outbuildings and grounds enclosed by high walls and wire fences. The flymo landed on a gravel courtyard in front of the house and was met by a retinue of household staff who conducted Duggan and Tawna to the portico-framed entrance. Duggan noticed as they crossed the court that the main gate and the fence were protected by armed guards.

His first impression as they threaded their way through the hall inside between barricades of furniture was of being in a cross between a museum and a home goods warehouse. Enormous, glass-fronted cabinets standing from floor to ceiling, jammed with porcelains, chinaware, glassware, and figurines, lined the walls, while the ceiling was all but invisible behind rows of hanging buckets, pots, pans, basins, metalware, and jugs. The room beyond had tiers of shelves carrying all manner of ornaments, decorated boxes, and bric-a-brac, and furnishings wedged, sometimes inaccessibly, between pedestals laden with pottery and vases, ponderous columns and other carvings, and padlocked cubicles of indeterminate nature. Jazeb Wintey received them in an inner redoubt at the center of more wooden and upholstered fortifications overlooked by walls tiled with pictures and prints. He was small and gnomish, with a ruddy bald head, cantankerous expression, and a fringe of whiskers girding his chin like a sunflower. His dress of frock coat and gaitered britches was impossibly stuffy and formal for a Tharlean, and would have been eccentrically antiquated even on Earth. He shook Tawna's hand stiffly and rapidly as if it were a pump handle and repeated the process with Duggan, the sternness of his features remaining unchanged.

"From Earth! About time! It took you long enough! Maybe we'll see some sense and sanity restored to this place then, before much longer."

So much for social pleasantries. If plunging straight in was the way here, Duggan would follow suit. "Why? What's wrong with things here?" he asked.

Wintey looked at him as if he might have just woken up after a thousand-year sleep. "Pah! No ethics, no standards. Things like that all got lost after the colonists stopped building space-goers. Everything's degenerated. Why do you think we have to live walled up in a fortress like this? Envy and malice all around. It's because I'm the only one around here who's got a notion of business." He cast an arm about to indicate the surroundings. For the first time, a hint of a satisfied smile crossed the berrylike countenance. "See what I mean?" He tapped his temple meaningfully. "Takes acumen to accumulate that kind of worth, young fella. Brains and acumen. People here wouldn't even know what that means."

As Wintey stumped his way ahead of them, between display cases filled with silverware, gold plate, and jewelry, Tawna caught Duggan's eye and sent him an apologetic shrug that seemed to say, well, it was what he'd wanted.

"They don't like us, you know," Wintey went on, as if Tawna were not present. "Try to conspire to drag me down. Outside, among themselves, they do each other favors. But no staff willing to work for reasonable pay ever get sent here. They send me all the beggars and ne'er-do-wells. . . . Thieves, too, if they had half the chance, I'd be bound. Can't even find reliable guards."

They met Maybel Wintey in a sitting area off the dining room draped with silks, cushions, and rugs like movie depictions of a sultan's bridal chamber. One corner constituted a bar, stocked high with racks and shelves of bottles that no longer came as a surprise. Jazeb introduced his wife perfunctorily. She was withered and austere, but glittering with jewels from fingers and chest to a filigreed tiara, worn with a pale green gown suggesting, with a mild touch of absurdity, the robe of a classical goddess.

"What do they want?" she asked frostily, when Jazeb let up on his harangue long enough for a steward to take orders for drinks. "Everyone who comes here wants something."

"Mr. Duggan is from Earth," Jazeb reminded her. "Perhaps we'll see things being put back in order now."

"Well, that's something. At least we won't have to be buying people off to get some peace."

Lunch was a lavish affair, naturally, over which Jazeb continued in much the same vein. Finding peers to develop a satisfying social life with wasn't easy. Tharleans who had something to show for themselves, the ones you'd think would qualify, inevitably proved to be fools when it came to trade, and annoyed him—but he wasn't going to turn them down if they insisted on being gypped. The ones who knew how to bargain were from the bottom of the pile, and fraternizing with them would be out of the question too, of course—which was a shame because if they'd only learn to do something with what they had, Jazeb admitted, he could have had some time for them. It was all beyond him. He only hoped that the administration Earth was presumably going to set up would get things straightened out soon.

Afterward, they toured an entertainments room that reminded Duggan of the command deck aboard the Barnet, a gymnasium that could have kept a regiment of space assault troops in good shape, a games room, and a workshop equipped with every form of gadget, widget, and power tool imaginable, none of which showed much sign of having been used. And sure enough, as Tawna had guessed jokingly, there was a shed at the rear housing a collection of polished and gleaming ground autos, along with several flyers. Throughout it all, the domestic staff remained easygoing and cheerful, despite Jazeb and Maybel's constant grumbles and criticisms. Duggan found himself harboring the uneasy suspicion of watching inmates of an asylum being humored. When he and Tawna finally left, the thought of getting back among the people of Ferrydock seemed like a breath of sanity and fresh air.

"I warned you it would be a bit strange, but it was what you asked for," Tawna said as they flew back above the valley's deepening shadows. She waited a few seconds, then looked across the cabin when Duggan didn't answer. "What's up?"

Duggan returned from his realm of distant brooding. "Those two back there. It was just going through my mind . . . Back where I come from, that would be close to most people's ideal. That's how they want to be."

Tawna paused long enough to be polite. "Yes," she said hesitantly. "I thought it might be something like that."

Duggan could have added that now, perhaps, he thought he knew why the Tharleans had looked askance at the guards who had accompanied him around Ferrydock. He decided he didn't want to go into it.

Zeebron Stell had come down from the mother ship when Duggan got back to Base 1 late that evening. They had coffee in the mess room at the back of the gate guard hut, and then Stell suggested a walk in the night air around the perimeter fence. He waited until they were out of earshot of anybody, then switched from casual chat to a lowered, conspiratorial tone.

"Dug, these people are clueless here. They're set up to be taken. Ask 'em for anything you want; they hand over. Tell 'em what you want done; they do it. If you were ever looking for the place to make out like you never imagined, man, this has to be it.

Duggan paused to look out through the wire at the colored lights over Ferrydock's center. The blimp—or another—was making the return trip, lit up like a Christmas tree gliding silently through the night. "I'm not sure I know what you mean," he said.

Stell edged a pace closer. "Think about it. . . ." he breathed. "Wealth and power: that's what it's all about, eh? What else do we bust our asses year in, year out for, thinking we're gonna get a bigger share of—and put up with jerks like Brose? Well, here you're not talking about waiting years and then maybe watching some operator steal it all from under you anyway. It's already made, right now. All you gotta do is have the balls to take it."

"Take what? How?" Duggan asked guardedly.

"All of it."

"Zeeb, what, exactly, are you proposing?"

"This is were we stay and get rich; get a chance to be somebodies."

"You mean jump ship? Stay behind when the mission leaves. Is that it?"

"Why not, Dug? I'm starting to believe what we've been seeing here—or not seeing. There's nobody to stop you." Stell gestured to indicate both of them. "You and me—" The amused look on Duggan's face checked him. "Hey, all that was another time and place, okay? We can leave it behind. There's a planet full of enough of everything to keep both of us happy."

"Well, that's an abrupt change of tune for you, Zeeb," Duggan said. "I thought you were going for the sub-supervisor slot when we get back. Brose seems to think so. He'll be disappointed. Who will he have to play carrot and stick games with now and boost himself up the ladder?"

Stell snorted. "Oh, don't tell me you're not as tired of all that crap as I am. . . . Look, I'll let you in on a secret. I've rented a place in town to use as a kind of startup base, and already in one afternoon I've got enough stuff in there to fit out a penthouse. I'm telling you it's a steal, man. But you need someone of your own kind too, know what I mean? We could live like a couple of kings. What do you say, huh?"

"I'm not sure. Have you really figured it through as to how things are here?"

"What's there to figure, Dug? I'm telling you, you don't hit on a deal like this more than once in a lifetime." Stell's eyes were insistent in the light from the town, his expression intense. He clearly wasn't prepared to accept no as an answer.

"Okay, I'll think about it," Duggan promised.

Several days passed by, during which more expeditions returned unsuccessful from different parts of Tharle. A flurry of impatient demands for reports on progress, and replies that the situation was more complicated than expected sizzled back and forth between the Barnet's higher echelons and the supervisory directorate on Earth. Duggan filed a report on his visit to the Winteys, which was absorbed into Pearson Brose's growing collection without significant reaction or comment. Duggan took this to mean that those who knew best were too preoccupied with affairs more befitting of their rank and calling to be distracted by lower-echelon menials and their trivia. Being a conscientious department man, he did his best to help by staying out of their way and making the most of the opportunity that Brose's dispensation had opened up for him to follow up informally on possible local leads. Since Tawna had already shown herself to be a willing and capable guide, this coincidentally meant their spending more time with each other.

Through the early part of the evening, Duggan had watched a rehearsal for one of Tawna's shows. The Tharleans handled their personal affairs in the same way as their financial ones, he noticed: when asked for help, they gave more; when offered a favor, they settled for less. Afterward, he and Tawna joined a group from the cast and supporting staff for a dinner of salad and a taco-like dish of bread, meats, and spicy fillings at a cellar bar along the street. Then the company gradually broke up in ones and twos. After staying to finish a bottle of one of the locality's wines—vaguely Rhônish, but with the ubiquitous Tharlean purple touch—Duggan and Tawna found themselves leaning on a parapet of the downtown riverbank among the nighttime strollers, staring out across the water toward the distant lights of the Strandside bridge. "I can't imagine it," Tawna said. "You mean they just try to keep on accumulating more and more, like the Winteys?" She searched for an analogy. "That would be like eating all day. Obviously, you need to have enough to keep you going. But once that's satisfied, other things in life become more important. You make it sound as if how much people own is the only measure of what they're worth. . . . Why, that would be as ridiculous as everybody being judged solely by weight and competing to be the heaviest!"

Financial obesity, Duggan thought to himself. Not a bad way to put it. It was hardly the first time in history for such an observation to be made; but the trouble with giving handouts to the ones inevitably left behind in the race had always been that it produced more and more free riders who eventually brought down the system. Somehow the Tharleans seemed to have solved the problem of restraining excess without perpetrating injustices or undermining initiative. How, then, did it work with power?

"So who makes judgments and decisions?" he asked. "You have to have disputes, the same as anyone else. Who has the final say when nobody involved can agree?"

"It's true. Somebody has to do it." Tawna made it sound like cleaning the sewers or defusing bombs. "They have a kind of lottery, and the losers get appointed. It's only for a year—and people are sympathetic, so they try to be supportive."

"You mean it's a lousy job. Nobody wants it?"

"Well, of course. Why would anyone . . ." Tawna stopped as she registered the astonishment in Duggan's voice. "You mean that on Earth . . ."

He nodded. "Having power over people is considered a big thing. They fight each other for it. Okay, now go ahead and tell me: you thought maybe it would be something like that."

Then he realized that she was giving him a long, contemplative look that held little real interest in such things just at the moment. He forgot about the subject and held her eye quizzically. "You're different from Lukki," she said. "He was like a child, never questioning anything. You do. You see things, and you think about them. It makes you . . . interesting." She slid closer along the rail of the parapet. Her fingertip traced over his arm. Duggan turned toward her. Her hair and skin shone softly golden in the light from the embankment lamps . . .

Beep . . . Beep . . . Beep . . . Beep . . .  

Duggan cursed under his breath and tugged the compak from his shirt pocket. The caller was Brose's assistant aloft in the Barnet. All ship's personnel were recalled to base immediately. General Rhinde had finally gotten his way and announced plans to take over Ferrydock as a military demonstration. The occupation force had begun mobilizing aboard the Barnet and would descend from orbit at dawn.

Four flights of assault shuttles made synchronized landings at key points and deployed with alacrity to seize and secure the prime means of access and communications. Two task forces sealed the main highway and rail links north and south, another commandeered the airport, while the last took the Strandside bridge and sent a column into Ferrydock to occupy the broadcasting stations and news bureaus. Meanwhile, special details sped through the town to install military administrators and technicians in the offices responsible for transportation, power generation and distribution, and communications. By midday the operation was completed as per the timetable. At noon precisely, General Rhinde went on the air to inform the inhabitants of Ferrydock that their town was now under Terran military jurisdiction and subject to the laws of its governing council. Communications and public services were under control of a colonial administration reporting to an appointed governor, and regulations concerning the conduct of business and finance would be announced shortly.

The townspeople seemed to think it was a great idea. An enthusiastic crowd in the central square greeted the news, relayed through their personal phones or from loudspeakers set up for the occasion, and by early afternoon representatives from the sanitation, harbor facilities, and water supply services were appearing at the governor's downtown headquarters offering their organizations for takeover too. Meanwhile, the management at places the Terrans had declared themselves to be in control of were resigning or taking a holiday to disappear to the beaches at Strandside, visit with grandchildren, or spend time on their hobbies. By next morning, the town was in chaos. Half the communications were down, the airport was barely functioning, and services languished as employees took breaks to line up enthusiastically in hundreds to be issued newly introduced permits and licenses. In the end, Rhinde's officers were forced to send out squads to track down essential professionals and bring them back at gunpoint to carry out tasks which until yesterday they had performed readily and willingly. That was when Duggan began getting his first strong intuition that this wasn't going to work out in the way that had been envisaged.

When all-out war failed to materialize, the restrictions confining non-occupation personnel to base were eased. Duggan was standing on a street corner with Tawna, watching two troopers shouldering assault rifles and clad in riot gear, posted to protect the Municipal Services Building from a gaggle of curious onlookers, when Zeebron Stell called from the office suite he'd rented as a trading base. He sounded agitated.

"Dug, where are you?"

"A few blocks away from you on Johannes Street. You know, Zeeb, I think Gilbert and Sullivan could have done a lot with this."

"Is Tawna with you?"

"Yes, she is. What's up?"

"I've got problems. People here don't seem to understand that I'm running a business, not a thrift store. Can you get over? Maybe she'd be able to do a better job of getting the message across."

"It's Zeeb, from his emporium," Duggan murmured to Tawna. "He's having some kind of trouble with the locals. Wants us over there to see if you can maybe talk to them. Is that okay with you?"

"Sure."

"We're on our way, Zeeb."

A miscellany of vehicles was parked outside the building in which Stell had his premises, including a beat-up truck. Inside, they found him remonstrating with a dowdily dressed woman who seemed interested in some toilet preparations that he had amassed a stack of in one of the rooms. Elsewhere, a couple with two small children were examining a shelf of electronics appliances, while a small, bespectacled, bearded man, wearing a tweed jacket with deerstalker-like hat and waving a list of some kind, hopped about, trying to get Stell's attention. "No! You're outta your mind," Stell told the woman. "How is that supposed to be doing me a favor? It's not even what I paid." Then, to the man, "Look, I told you I'm not interested. I don't even know who any of those people are. How in hell do you figure you're helping me?" Another man appeared in a doorway at the rear, smiling and holding an elaborate wrist unit of some kind that had a miniature screen. Stell groaned, then caught sight of Duggan and Tawna and steered them gratefully back into the entrance hallway.

"There's some kind of victimization conspiracy," he told them. "With each other, they're real generous. I know. I watched 'em. But when they come here, they try and rip me off with pennies and buttons. It's almost like they think I owe them. And Sherlock Holmes's brother back there keeps pestering me with every hard-luck story in town. One guy's house got flattened in a mudslide. Somebody else's baby needs surgery. I even had a lady in earlier, asking if I wanted to put something into an education fund. What's going on?"

Tawna nodded. "Of course. These are people who really do need help . . ."

"But they're talking about helping me!" Stell protested.

"Well, yes . . . that too." Tawna obviously still couldn't see anything strange.

"How do they figure that?" Stell demanded.

"Well . . ." Tawna hesitated in the way of somebody reluctant to spell out what should have been clear. "To enjoy pride and self-esteem, the way everyone wants to," she said. "The more wealth and material things you acquire, the more you can make things easier for those going through hard times. Once you're reasonably comfortable yourself, it starts to mean more, right?" She glanced at Duggan. "It's like what we were saying the other day about eating all day. Beyond a certain point, any more doesn't make sense."

Stell's eyes bulged. "You mean they'll hassle me like this forever here?"

"Oh, no. Only until you learn to judge for yourself what share to put back in, like everyone else. Since you don't know how it works yet, they're probably just trying to help. It might take a little time."

"Well, suppose I don't want them telling me. What if I put my own guards on the place and keep 'em away?"

"That would be up to you, of course. . . . But why would anyone want to?" She looked at Duggan again and caught the resigned expression on his face. "Okay, don't tell me, Paul. Back home they're all like that. Yes?"

General Rhinde's measures weren't having the intended effect. In a closed-door meeting of the political and military chiefs aboard the Barnet, it was agreed that the citizens of Ferrydock were undergoing too little violation of their freedoms and rights to provoke whoever was supposed to defend them into coming out and doing so. Accordingly, since there was no set precedent at Tharle to say how far these things should be taken, the governor was instructed to issue a declaration stating that to facilitate improved control and efficiency, the Terran administration now owned everything in the name of everybody and was taking charge of manufacture, distribution, employment, and other services directly.

But the populace seemed happy to let them take it. A mood of festivity spread as virtually the whole of Ferrydock shut up stores and offices and took to the boulevards or sat back in the sun to await decisions and directions. Very soon, surface landers were shuttling frantically between the Barnet and Base 1, bringing extra details of planners and controllers to relieve the harried supervisory offices, now working around the clock. Meanwhile, ostensibly to bolster the security of all by setting up a centrally managed disaster relief agency—in reality, to get faster results through imposed austerity—huge stocks of food, fuel, clothing, materials, and other supplies were impounded and locked up in a large warehouse near the airport requisitioned for the purpose and officially renamed the "Federal Emergency Relief Repository." (Use of the word "federal" was a bit premature since as of yet there were no political entities other than Ferrydock to federate with it, but the planners were already shaping up grand schemes and visions of the future.) The repository was duly furnished with a ten-foot wire fence, traffic barrier and checkpoint at the gate, and a billet of armed guards.

However, the harassed Terran administrators were like innocents in a Casbah bazaar before the demands of Tharleans taking them at their word that they were now responsible for everything, and in a short space of time just about everything of utility or value had vanished from the stores and the streets. By the terms under which the Repository had been established, the circumstances qualified as a disaster deserving of relief, and the officer in charge dutifully commenced handing back to the town, at enormous cost in overhead and added effort, the goods that had been confiscated at comparable cost in the first place. Eager to help Terran officialdom find satisfaction and self-esteem by the terms of their own morality, the Tharleans didn't take long to exhaust the stocks completely. Since there was nothing in the regulations that said otherwise, the guards continued, befuddled but doggedly, patrolling outside to protect the contents of the empty warehouse. The only threatening incident they had to deal with, however, was when a small procession of trucks from some outlying farms arrived full of vegetables and other produce that the growers didn't know what else to do with—only to be turned away again because there were no orders for dealing with anyone trying to bring things in.

By this time, the political opponents of the mission's incumbent regime, seeing ammunition here to unseat their rivals, formed a dissident faction to fire off a joint protest to Earth, giving all the facts and details. A directive from Colonial Affairs Administration terminating the Barnet's mission and recalling the ship forthwith arrived within forty-eight hours.

* * *Γ Γ Γ

Base 1 was an abandoned shell, unsightly with the litter left by departing military anywhere. Children in makeshift helmets and carrying roughly fashioned imitation rifles marched each other to stations at the main gate guard posts. Duggan stood with his arm around Tawna's waist among a crowd watching the last shuttle out climb at the top of a pillar of light through scattered, purple-edged clouds. If the figure he'd heard was correct, he was one of forty-six who would have been unaccounted for when the muster lists were checked, and whose compaks hadn't answered calls or returned a location fix.

"No reservations or second thoughts, Dug?" she asked him. "No last-minute changes about everything, like Zeeb? I hope not. It would be a bit late now." Stell hadn't been among them at the end, after all. Driven to distraction under the pressures of trying to give things away, he had turned a complete about-face and stormed back up to the ship, berating anyone who would listen that he couldn't get back to Earth fast enough.

Duggan shook his head. "Not me." He gave her a squeeze, savoring the touch of her body through the light dress she was wearing. "My future's cut out right here. Everything I want."

"So Zeeb will probably get that promotion you told me about. I hope he'll be pleased."

"Oh, I'm sure he'll fit right back in," Duggan said. Brose had as good as come out and said that he favored Duggan for the subsection supervisor position and would back him. Duggan had seen it as a pretty transparent ploy to recruit support in the political maelstrom that Brose knew they'd be heading back to, and had no doubt that Brose had told Zeeb the same thing, and for the same reason. It felt like a reprieve from a life sentence to know he was out of all that. "In any case," Duggan added, "I wouldn't have gotten the job. The screening application that Brose made me put through was turned down." Brose had been as stunned as Duggan was pleased when the assessment back from Earth read: Doesn't display the competitiveness and aggressiveness that success in this appointment would require. It meant that Duggan had done something right.

"I'm surprised," Tawna said, sounding defensive on his behalf. "I'd have thought that even if you decided . . ." She caught the amused twist of his mouth. "Dug, what happened? What did you do?"

"I filled it in the Tharlean way," he told her.

"What way's that?"

"I have to tell you?" Duggan frowned in mock reproach. "I said I didn't need as much pay as they were offering, and I told them I could do more than they were stipulating. I guess they couldn't hack it." He shrugged. "But Zeeb will do okay. He, Brose, and the System are made for each other."

Tawna pulled close and nuzzled the side of her face against his shoulder. "And you'll do just fine here too," she promised.

For that was the simple principle that underlay the entire Tharlean worldview and way of life: Give a little more; take a little less. At least, with those who reciprocated. Anyone who didn't play by the rules wasn't treated by the rules. That was how they curbed excess. But how did a Tharlean know when enough was enough? By being a part of the culture they had evolved and absorbing its ways and its values from the time they first learned to look at the world, walk around in it, listen and talk.

Every one of them.

That was why nobody from Earth had had any success finding lawmakers—at least, if what they were looking for was a few making rules to be forcibly imposed on the many. The government had been there all along, everywhere, staring them in the face. For on Tharle, all made the law, and all enforced it. Every one of them, therefore, was government.

Now Duggan would learn to become a member of a planetary government too. And that sounded a much better promotion to him than anything the Colonial Affairs Administration was likely to come up with, even if he were to carry on fighting and clawing his way up the ladder for the next hundred years.

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Framed

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The Colonizing of Tharle

by James P. Hogan

Records from the colony's founding years stated that the town of Ferrydock had grown from an early base established near the river mouth, where a motorized pontoon raft had provided the crossing to the peninsula. With its rocky prominences, dunes, and beaches, the peninsula—later named Strandside—was an attractive place for walks and swims or just lazing around to get away from the routine of the settlement for a while. Later, it acquired some stores, a bar, restaurant, and a small hotel to become one of the more popular recreation spots. Although Ferrydock was now a fair-size town, and a low, sleek bridge of concrete spans with a raisable center section—sitting on incongruously ornate steel piers reminiscent of nineteenth-century ideas of aesthetics—crossed the river, a ferry still ran alongside. Not everybody was in enough of a hurry to need the road, one of the locals had explained to Duggan and another official with the mission sent from Earth to reestablish relations with Tharle. And besides, the kids liked the water ride. Notions of cost effectiveness didn't seem to count for much here—and that fitted with the other bizarre notions of economics that had taken root here, which the theorists up in the orbiting mother ship Barnet had already decided were probably the major factor responsible for the planet's evident regression in many ways from the levels of technological and political capability possessed by the founders.

Duggan stood in the square at the heart of Ferrydock's central district—an open space really too irregular to justify its name geometrically, bordered by narrow, erratic streets and buildings of the peculiarly curved architectural style reveling in orange-brick walls and green- or blue-tiled roofs that brought back childhood memories of an illustrated edition of Oz. The Tharleans seemed to delight in turrets and towers too, which was also odd, since there was no history of militancy or defense needs to have inspired them. Simply another of their odd whims and fancies expressing itself, Duggan supposed.

It was apparently market day. The stalls around the square were heaped with assortments of unfamiliar fruits, vegetable-like offerings, and other plant forms that grew under the purple-tinted sky. There were refrigerated racks of strange fish, joints of meat, tanks of live fish, and cages containing furry and feathered animals of various kinds, whether intended for food or as pets, Duggan didn't know. And there were tables displaying tools and other hardware, ornaments, art works, kitchenware, haberdashery, household goods, and clothing—much the same as market places anywhere, anytime. Duggan watched a tall, weathered-looking man in a gray shirt and loose blue jacket examining a pair of ceramic sculptures in the form of elongated feminine heads with a suggestion of styled Oriental features.

"How much for these?" he asked the graying-haired lady in charge of the stall. She was sitting in a folding alloy-frame chair, a many-colored, open-weave blanket pulled around her shoulders. A shaggy, yellow-haired creature with a huge-eyed, owl-like face studied the man alertly from the top of an upturned box next to her.

"Ten draks," the woman replied.

The dialect had drifted to a degree that now sounded quaint; or was it that English as spoken on Earth had progressed? Schooling in Tharlean pronunciations, usage, and idioms had been required of all the delegates on the contact mission, and after a few days on the surface Duggan found he was experiencing few problems.

The man turned one of the sculptures over in his hands again and pursed his lips. "I'll give you fifteen."

The woman smiled in the kind of way that said it was a good try. "What do you think I am, destitute or dysfunctional or something? They're not worth that."

"Hey, come on, gimme a break and let me help you out a little. We've all got our pride."

"Eleven, then."

The man shook his head. "I can manage more than that. How about fourteen?"

They eventually settled on twelve. Duggan turned away, mystified, and shook his head. The two armed troopers that regulations required escort him when away from the surface lander at Base 1 beyond the far edge of the town looked back at him unhelpfully. "A strange way of playing poker," Duggan commented.

"They're all crazy," one of the troopers offered.

Then Duggan noticed the woman in a shirt of leafy design on white and bright red shorts, standing a few yards away in front of a mixed, chattering group of people but apparently not with them. Farther back, others among the crowd had stopped and were staring at Duggan and his escorts unabashedly. The woman was perhaps in her mid thirties if Earth standards were anything to judge by, with wiry, shoulder-length hair that varied between being auburn and orange depending how it caught the light, and the bronzed skin with a hint of metallic sheen that the blue-shifted light from Xylon-B evoked among Tharleans generally. Her body was slim and lithe, her face tapering to a pointy chin, with a straight nose, dimpled cheeks, and a mouth that was hovering on the edge of wanting to smile but at the same time hesitant, as if she were unsure how it might be taken. Instead, she let her eyes interrogate him silently. They were deep, brown, intelligent, and mirthful, the kind that could arouse immediate interest in possibilities and prospects—especially in a new and strange, yet-to-be-explored place, after an excruciatingly uneventful voyage dominated by routine and officiousness. Duggan's features softened. He let his mouth pucker in the way of one of two people unsure of their ground offering to meet halfway.

"I didn't mean to gape," the woman said. "But I haven't seen anyone from the Earth ship this close before. I was just curious."

"Oh, I wouldn't worry about it," Duggan answered. "I've seen plenty of people from Tharle. The only trouble is, I haven't managed to talk to too many of them."

"They're curious too, but trying to mind their own business. It's considered good manners. . . . Some of them are worried about what the soldiers are doing here, too."

"So what makes you different?"

She shrugged. "I just wanted to see for myself what you were like—try to talk to some of you. I hear what other people say, but I never know whether to believe it."

"What do they say?" Duggan asked.

The woman thought for a few seconds, her mouth twisting wryly in the way of someone searching for a safe answer. "They call you Pinkies," she said finally.

He stared at her, then laughed. The barrier of tension they had both been reacting to revealed itself as an illusion and came tumbling down. "Paul Duggan," he said.

"My name's Tawna."

"So . . . hi."

"Hi."

The feelings coming back at him were good. She was looking at him directly and openly with an expectant expression, fears allayed, eager to learn more. Duggan turned his head and lowered his tone to mouth at the escorts. "Why don't you guys get lost for a half hour? Take a walk around; get yourselves a coffee or something."

"Can't. Orders," one of the troopers replied woodenly.

Duggan sighed and turned back to Tawna. "I'm with what the mission calls its Office of Exorelations. That means we're the ones who are supposed to deal with whoever's in charge of things here. But we're not having much luck finding anyone. That's why I decided to come out and walk around the town. Nothing we got over the communications channels made any sense."

Tawna looked puzzled. "I can't see why that should be a problem. There are people in charge of things everywhere."

"How do you mean?"

"Well, it depends what you're looking for. In charge of what, specifically? The Waterfront Agency looks after the harbor installations and the docks. The Power Company produces power. The highway companies consolidated into the Road Services League because tolls got to be such a hassle. . . ."

Duggan waved a hand. "But above those—the works, all of it. Who runs the whole system?" Tawna seemed to want to be helpful, but she appeared honestly not to know what he meant. "The laws," he said. "Who makes the laws here?"

"Laws?" she repeated, as if hearing a new word in the language for the first time.

"What you can do, what you can't. How you're allowed to treat each other. Who tells you the rules?"

"Tells us? . . . Nobody. . . . Why would they?"

"Then where do they come from?"

Tawna showed a hand helplessly. "They don't come from anywhere. They're just . . . there. Who tells you rules for how to breathe air or how to grow older? Nobody needs to. You already know. You just do it."

Duggan glanced again at the two troopers. Trying to pursue the subject further in a place like this, and under these circumstances, would be impossible. But he felt that at last he'd made some rapport and found a line that could lead somewhere eventually—and conceivably in more senses than one. "So what do you do here?" he asked Tawna, abandoning the tack for the time being.

She seemed relieved. "Me? Oh, I'm a dance teacher most of the time—keeps me fit. And I'm also a musician and help organize shows. I've tried writing a couple of plays too, but they weren't very good. I probably let myself get paid too much for them."

It was the same illogic that Duggan had been hearing all over the place. He didn't want to go any further into it now, he decided, anymore than trying to find out who ran the system. "Is Ferrydock where you're from originally?" he asked instead.

They chatted for a while. She had grown up in a farming area on the far side of the mountains standing distantly in the purplish haze to the northeast, and moved here to be with friends. She was curious about Earth and would maybe have kept them both there for the rest of the day with her questions, but her knowledge of its affairs was dated, reflecting the politics and geography of the period around a century ago, before the colony world of Tharle had become isolated.

"We need to talk some more," Duggan said when he spotted the scout car from Base 1 coming to collect him. "Somewhere different from this—where it's quieter, more private."

"I'd like that," Tawna said.

"How can I get in touch with you?"

She gave him the call codes for her personal phone, which turned out to consist of the blue-jeweled ear rings with silver mountings and matching pendant that she was wearing. Duggan would never have guessed. He gave her one of his official departmental calling cards with contact details. Communications engineers aboard the Barnet had already programmed the ship's system to interface with the planetary net. Tawna waved brightly after them as people parted to let him and his two escorts through to the waiting car.

Duggan stared out at the town's busy sidewalks and pedestrian precincts as they began the short drive back. The last problem anyone had anticipated the mission would come up against in reestablishing contact with the colony's government when it got to Tharle was finding a government. He looked down at the compak that he was still holding in his hand, where he'd stored Tawna's call codes. Electronics so advanced that he hadn't even recognized it; technology to put satellites aloft; sophisticated air travel available when the need arose. And yet, at the same time, the deep-space-going capability that the founders brought had gone into decline; people spent much more time getting around than they needed to, sailing in ships or plain walking; and the supposedly fundamental laws of market trading somehow worked backwards.

Nothing made sense.

Nobody knew who the "Barnet" was or had been, whom the ship was named after. Typically, it would have been some long-forgotten bureaucrat from an extinct department. Duggan sometimes wondered if it might have been the one responsible for the blunder that had resulted in Tharle's disappearing from the records for almost a hundred years. Two rival sections of the Colonial Affairs Administration had each recorded that the other was responsible for handling Tharle, out at Xylon-B, and a hundred years was how long it had taken for the realization to dawn that nobody was. Contact was established, and the Barnet and its mission hastily despatched to reintroduce formal diplomatic relations. In the furious exchanges of messages and memoranda, accusations and denials, evasions of blame and attempts to direct it elsewhere that followed discovery of the fiasco, it apparently escaped everyone as significant that in all that time nobody on Tharle had chosen to draw Earth's attention to its omission.

Back aboard the orbiting Barnet, Pearson Brose, head of the mission's Office of Exorelations and Earth's designated ambassador-to-be if a government could be found that wanted one, was getting impatient for results. "Of course they have to exist," he fumed at the review meeting of his staff, including Duggan, gathered in the conference room of his unit's offices in the Planetary Department section of the Administrations deck. He had a florid face with long, wispy white hair that flailed like a stormy sea when he jerked his head about—which he did a lot at times like this. "They're probably paranoid and gone underground for reasons best know to themselves. Why? What reason have we given them to do that? Have we made threats? Are their cities quavering under weapons that we have deployed? I see no weapons. We've shown nothing but reasonableness and a desire to advance our common interests. So what have I missed? Where am I going wrong? Somebody tell me."

Everybody knew that Brose hadn't gone wrong anywhere. The melodramatic flourishes were his way of reminding the world of how much his responsibilities required him to endure and suffer. Zeebron Stell, with his hefty build, swarthy skin, short-cropped black hair and shaggy mustache, almost an inverse of Brose, brought them back on track. He was supposed to be Duggan's colleague and virtual opposite number, but they seemed to end up at odds over everything. "Well, I did get to talk with that scientific group up north. They're into a new line on catalyzed nuclear processes that will need a high-energy installation and big bucks."

Brose forgot his lamentations and became interested. "Ah yes, the research institute. So where does the funding come from. Did we find out?" He always said "we" if the prospective news was good. It was taken for granted that such a source would be some branch or other of government, the uncovering of which would hopefully lead to the rest.

"Not really," Stell answered. "That is, nothing that you'd be interested in. The bread comes from all kinds of places: a bunch of corporations, as you'd expect; an amazing number of individuals; even a school science club. But none of it was like what we were looking for." Brose looked at him sourly, as if asking why he had bothered bringing it up if that were the case. Stell went on, "But the way they were going about it says to me that they don't deal with anyone in the government anyway."

"How do you mean?" Brose asked.

Stell showed his hands and turned from side to side in an appeal to the others that he wasn't making this up. "When we asked them about procedures, they started telling us that their biggest problem is arguing grants down to less than the sources want to give them—as if that was obviously what anyone would do. They thought that accepting too much would make them look incompetent. Who ever heard of a government funding agency that would have problems dealing with people like that?" A baffled silence engulfed the room. Then Milford Grimes from Research Resources pronounced what was going through all their minds.

"That's insane."

Amelia Jonkin, another of the Exorelations staff, looked from one to another as if inviting any better ideas before voicing the only one she could come up with. "Maybe they're a second-rate outfit. It could be an indication of lack of self-esteem there, or that they have an inferior image of themselves." She didn't sound as if she really believed it.

"The stuff they were doing looked right-on to me," Stell said. "And Dransel Howess who was with us thought so too. Nuc-cat is his line, and he was big-time impressed."

Duggan shifted in his seat. He had been quiet for a long time. "I saw the same thing when I was down in Ferrydock," he told the room. "They've got a marketplace there in the town, and people haggle. Except they try to sell lower and buy higher. I tried getting some of them to explain it, but nobody could. They couldn't understand what was so strange that needed explaining."

"It just shows that they're all simpletons," somebody from the Planning Group said. "We can't let people like that get the better of us, surely." The tone was facetious.

"Perhaps we should look for the big houses," Amelia mused. "The real rulers in any society always live in the biggest houses."

And that seemed to exhaust the suggestions. Brose looked around for further comment. After a second or two of more silence, it came from the commander of the mission's military contingent, General Rhinde, who was sitting in and so far had maintained silence with visibly rising impatience.

"This nonsense has gone on long enough. You're not going to get anywhere creeping around like tourists frightened of giving offence, and asking polite questions." He glowered around, challenging anyone to disagree. Nobody dared. "The people you're talking about will be all office clerks, anyway, even if you find them. The true government of a country, planet, whatever, is whoever defends it. The way you find them is make them come to you. Just march in, say you're taking over, and wait to see who appears. If nobody does, then you know who the government is anyway. It's you."

Nobody was prepared to argue. But at the same time, it was clear to everyone except Rhinde that nothing that drastic was a candidate for the time being. Ever the able and resourceful organization man, Brose tabled the proposal for further consideration and appointed someone to form a subcommittee to look into it.

After the meeting adjourned, Duggan approached Brose privately in his office at the Executive Suites end of the Planetary Department. "I'd like approval to roam around freely down there, without escorts," he said. "There isn't any threat, and the presence of weapons inhibits the Tharleans. It's a barrier to further progress in getting through to them."

"You really think it's likely to make much difference?" Brose queried. His conviction seemed distinctly far short of total. "I mean, what progress at all is there to take further? Have you, for instance, met anyone who looks even remotely capable of being gotten through to?"

"I think so, maybe. Yes."

"Hm." Brose sniffed. "And what if we have to scrape you up out of an alley one morning, and it gets back that I waived regulations. How would I be supposed to explain it?"

"Well, we'd better come up with something before Rhinde gets his way and ends up starting a war," Duggan said. "Would you rather have to explain that?"

Duggan got his request approved—on signing a disclaimer that it was at his own instigation, and against the advice of his superior. "I'm doing it to give you a chance to rack up some points for promotion to subsection supervisor when we get back," Brose murmured confidentially as he signed the paper. "I think you'd be more suited to it, Paul." Duggan had little doubt that Brose was saying similar things to Stell too, who was also a candidate for the slot. Fostering a healthy competitive spirit between rivals was encouraged as part of the Department's management style. It was considered the astute way to develop human resources. They were what at one time had been called "people."

"I'll be coming back down tomorrow," Duggan told Tawna when he called her a half hour later. "No guards to get in the way this time, so we can have that talk. Tell me a good place to meet."

The bronzed, orangey-haired face on the screen looked genuinely pleased. "That's wonderful! Then you can tell me all about Earth." She must have caught a hint of a reaction in his face. "And talk about other things too, naturally. What did you want to do down here?"

Duggan frowned, realizing that he had been unprepared. He thought rapidly. "I want to find out who lives in the biggest houses," he told her.

They met and had breakfast in a cafe by the river, on a terrace at the rear, overlooking the water. It was a fair, sunny day, and there were a lot of small boats about—some sporty and powered, others curvy and delicate with strange-shaped sails, reminiscent in ways of Arab dhows. It was the same incongruous blend of ancient and new existing happily side-by-side that Duggan had been noticing everywhere. A large blimp passed overhead, heading south, maybe following the coast. Tawna explained that on days when the weather permitted, those who could afford it often preferred them to regular jets. By this time, Duggan was surprised to hear that for once the price of something should actually reflect how it was valued. It turned out that what Tawna meant was those who could afford the time.

As he listened, Duggan found himself being captivated by her openness. She played none of the mind games that he was accustomed to in this kind of situation, no jockeying for one-up points to decide who had a controlling advantage. And in a way that he realized was a new concept to him, her absence of deviousness absolved him from any need to reciprocate. He could actually be himself and say what he thought, without having to calculate implications and consequences. It felt liberating and refreshing. Yes, there had been a man that she'd lived with for a while when she moved to Ferrydock. His name had been Lukki. But in the end it hadn't worked out. No, there was no one in particular at present.

The people they were going to meet were called Jazeb and Maybel Wintey, and kept what Tawna described as a "huge" house in a foothill region of the mountains northeast of Ferrydock. She didn't know them personally but had known of them for a long time, and contacted them through an agent in town who provided their domestic staff. Hardly surprisingly, a mention that somebody from the Earth ship wanted to meet them was all it had taken. In her non-questioning, accepting way, Tawna hadn't asked Duggan why he wanted to know who lived in the big houses. When Duggan inquired casually what Wintey did, Tawna replied in an uncharacteristically vague kind of way, that he "collected things." It didn't sound much like what Duggan had been hoping for. But he could hardly change his mind now.

Back outside the front of the cafe, Tawna stopped to run her eye over the assortment of vehicles in the parking area. Tharlean ground autos were generally simpler and less ostentatious than Terran designs, though with the same proclivity for curviness that was evident in the architecture and the boats; a couple looked almost like Aladdin slippers on wheels. She led the way across to a pale blue, middle-of-the-range model, unpretentious but comfortably roomy for two. As they got in, Duggan commented that he'd thought she wasn't sure which car was hers. It wasn't hers, he discovered, but belonged to a common pool that anyone could use, rather like a public comlink booth back home. She started it by inserting a plastic tag that seemed to combine the functions of pay card and driver's license. People who needed to owned their own, but most didn't bother, Tawna said—adding that it was the kind of thing Jazeb Wintey would do. She seemed to find it humorous. Duggan wasn't sure why.

They drove out of the town to an airport that Duggan knew of from the Barnet's reconnaissance views, where large commercial planes came and went from all over, and parked outside a building serving an area to one side used by smaller craft. Tawna just took her card from the slot in the car's dash panel and walked away. Inside the building, they rented a personal six-seat flymobile that she had reserved, and soon, with the vehicle practically flying itself, were skimming low along the river valley, toward the mountains outlined in the distant purplish haze.

Tawna hadn't been exaggerating when she described the Wintey house as "huge." It would have qualified as a mansion by Terran standards, with a healthy profusion of Tharlean towers and turrets, and stood amid an estate of outbuildings and grounds enclosed by high walls and wire fences. The flymo landed on a gravel courtyard in front of the house and was met by a retinue of household staff who conducted Duggan and Tawna to the portico-framed entrance. Duggan noticed as they crossed the court that the main gate and the fence were protected by armed guards.

His first impression as they threaded their way through the hall inside between barricades of furniture was of being in a cross between a museum and a home goods warehouse. Enormous, glass-fronted cabinets standing from floor to ceiling, jammed with porcelains, chinaware, glassware, and figurines, lined the walls, while the ceiling was all but invisible behind rows of hanging buckets, pots, pans, basins, metalware, and jugs. The room beyond had tiers of shelves carrying all manner of ornaments, decorated boxes, and bric-a-brac, and furnishings wedged, sometimes inaccessibly, between pedestals laden with pottery and vases, ponderous columns and other carvings, and padlocked cubicles of indeterminate nature. Jazeb Wintey received them in an inner redoubt at the center of more wooden and upholstered fortifications overlooked by walls tiled with pictures and prints. He was small and gnomish, with a ruddy bald head, cantankerous expression, and a fringe of whiskers girding his chin like a sunflower. His dress of frock coat and gaitered britches was impossibly stuffy and formal for a Tharlean, and would have been eccentrically antiquated even on Earth. He shook Tawna's hand stiffly and rapidly as if it were a pump handle and repeated the process with Duggan, the sternness of his features remaining unchanged.

"From Earth! About time! It took you long enough! Maybe we'll see some sense and sanity restored to this place then, before much longer."

So much for social pleasantries. If plunging straight in was the way here, Duggan would follow suit. "Why? What's wrong with things here?" he asked.

Wintey looked at him as if he might have just woken up after a thousand-year sleep. "Pah! No ethics, no standards. Things like that all got lost after the colonists stopped building space-goers. Everything's degenerated. Why do you think we have to live walled up in a fortress like this? Envy and malice all around. It's because I'm the only one around here who's got a notion of business." He cast an arm about to indicate the surroundings. For the first time, a hint of a satisfied smile crossed the berrylike countenance. "See what I mean?" He tapped his temple meaningfully. "Takes acumen to accumulate that kind of worth, young fella. Brains and acumen. People here wouldn't even know what that means."

As Wintey stumped his way ahead of them, between display cases filled with silverware, gold plate, and jewelry, Tawna caught Duggan's eye and sent him an apologetic shrug that seemed to say, well, it was what he'd wanted.

"They don't like us, you know," Wintey went on, as if Tawna were not present. "Try to conspire to drag me down. Outside, among themselves, they do each other favors. But no staff willing to work for reasonable pay ever get sent here. They send me all the beggars and ne'er-do-wells. . . . Thieves, too, if they had half the chance, I'd be bound. Can't even find reliable guards."

They met Maybel Wintey in a sitting area off the dining room draped with silks, cushions, and rugs like movie depictions of a sultan's bridal chamber. One corner constituted a bar, stocked high with racks and shelves of bottles that no longer came as a surprise. Jazeb introduced his wife perfunctorily. She was withered and austere, but glittering with jewels from fingers and chest to a filigreed tiara, worn with a pale green gown suggesting, with a mild touch of absurdity, the robe of a classical goddess.

"What do they want?" she asked frostily, when Jazeb let up on his harangue long enough for a steward to take orders for drinks. "Everyone who comes here wants something."

"Mr. Duggan is from Earth," Jazeb reminded her. "Perhaps we'll see things being put back in order now."

"Well, that's something. At least we won't have to be buying people off to get some peace."

Lunch was a lavish affair, naturally, over which Jazeb continued in much the same vein. Finding peers to develop a satisfying social life with wasn't easy. Tharleans who had something to show for themselves, the ones you'd think would qualify, inevitably proved to be fools when it came to trade, and annoyed him—but he wasn't going to turn them down if they insisted on being gypped. The ones who knew how to bargain were from the bottom of the pile, and fraternizing with them would be out of the question too, of course—which was a shame because if they'd only learn to do something with what they had, Jazeb admitted, he could have had some time for them. It was all beyond him. He only hoped that the administration Earth was presumably going to set up would get things straightened out soon.

Afterward, they toured an entertainments room that reminded Duggan of the command deck aboard the Barnet, a gymnasium that could have kept a regiment of space assault troops in good shape, a games room, and a workshop equipped with every form of gadget, widget, and power tool imaginable, none of which showed much sign of having been used. And sure enough, as Tawna had guessed jokingly, there was a shed at the rear housing a collection of polished and gleaming ground autos, along with several flyers. Throughout it all, the domestic staff remained easygoing and cheerful, despite Jazeb and Maybel's constant grumbles and criticisms. Duggan found himself harboring the uneasy suspicion of watching inmates of an asylum being humored. When he and Tawna finally left, the thought of getting back among the people of Ferrydock seemed like a breath of sanity and fresh air.

"I warned you it would be a bit strange, but it was what you asked for," Tawna said as they flew back above the valley's deepening shadows. She waited a few seconds, then looked across the cabin when Duggan didn't answer. "What's up?"

Duggan returned from his realm of distant brooding. "Those two back there. It was just going through my mind . . . Back where I come from, that would be close to most people's ideal. That's how they want to be."

Tawna paused long enough to be polite. "Yes," she said hesitantly. "I thought it might be something like that."

Duggan could have added that now, perhaps, he thought he knew why the Tharleans had looked askance at the guards who had accompanied him around Ferrydock. He decided he didn't want to go into it.

Zeebron Stell had come down from the mother ship when Duggan got back to Base 1 late that evening. They had coffee in the mess room at the back of the gate guard hut, and then Stell suggested a walk in the night air around the perimeter fence. He waited until they were out of earshot of anybody, then switched from casual chat to a lowered, conspiratorial tone.

"Dug, these people are clueless here. They're set up to be taken. Ask 'em for anything you want; they hand over. Tell 'em what you want done; they do it. If you were ever looking for the place to make out like you never imagined, man, this has to be it.

Duggan paused to look out through the wire at the colored lights over Ferrydock's center. The blimp—or another—was making the return trip, lit up like a Christmas tree gliding silently through the night. "I'm not sure I know what you mean," he said.

Stell edged a pace closer. "Think about it. . . ." he breathed. "Wealth and power: that's what it's all about, eh? What else do we bust our asses year in, year out for, thinking we're gonna get a bigger share of—and put up with jerks like Brose? Well, here you're not talking about waiting years and then maybe watching some operator steal it all from under you anyway. It's already made, right now. All you gotta do is have the balls to take it."

"Take what? How?" Duggan asked guardedly.

"All of it."

"Zeeb, what, exactly, are you proposing?"

"This is were we stay and get rich; get a chance to be somebodies."

"You mean jump ship? Stay behind when the mission leaves. Is that it?"

"Why not, Dug? I'm starting to believe what we've been seeing here—or not seeing. There's nobody to stop you." Stell gestured to indicate both of them. "You and me—" The amused look on Duggan's face checked him. "Hey, all that was another time and place, okay? We can leave it behind. There's a planet full of enough of everything to keep both of us happy."

"Well, that's an abrupt change of tune for you, Zeeb," Duggan said. "I thought you were going for the sub-supervisor slot when we get back. Brose seems to think so. He'll be disappointed. Who will he have to play carrot and stick games with now and boost himself up the ladder?"

Stell snorted. "Oh, don't tell me you're not as tired of all that crap as I am. . . . Look, I'll let you in on a secret. I've rented a place in town to use as a kind of startup base, and already in one afternoon I've got enough stuff in there to fit out a penthouse. I'm telling you it's a steal, man. But you need someone of your own kind too, know what I mean? We could live like a couple of kings. What do you say, huh?"

"I'm not sure. Have you really figured it through as to how things are here?"

"What's there to figure, Dug? I'm telling you, you don't hit on a deal like this more than once in a lifetime." Stell's eyes were insistent in the light from the town, his expression intense. He clearly wasn't prepared to accept no as an answer.

"Okay, I'll think about it," Duggan promised.

Several days passed by, during which more expeditions returned unsuccessful from different parts of Tharle. A flurry of impatient demands for reports on progress, and replies that the situation was more complicated than expected sizzled back and forth between the Barnet's higher echelons and the supervisory directorate on Earth. Duggan filed a report on his visit to the Winteys, which was absorbed into Pearson Brose's growing collection without significant reaction or comment. Duggan took this to mean that those who knew best were too preoccupied with affairs more befitting of their rank and calling to be distracted by lower-echelon menials and their trivia. Being a conscientious department man, he did his best to help by staying out of their way and making the most of the opportunity that Brose's dispensation had opened up for him to follow up informally on possible local leads. Since Tawna had already shown herself to be a willing and capable guide, this coincidentally meant their spending more time with each other.

Through the early part of the evening, Duggan had watched a rehearsal for one of Tawna's shows. The Tharleans handled their personal affairs in the same way as their financial ones, he noticed: when asked for help, they gave more; when offered a favor, they settled for less. Afterward, he and Tawna joined a group from the cast and supporting staff for a dinner of salad and a taco-like dish of bread, meats, and spicy fillings at a cellar bar along the street. Then the company gradually broke up in ones and twos. After staying to finish a bottle of one of the locality's wines—vaguely Rhônish, but with the ubiquitous Tharlean purple touch—Duggan and Tawna found themselves leaning on a parapet of the downtown riverbank among the nighttime strollers, staring out across the water toward the distant lights of the Strandside bridge. "I can't imagine it," Tawna said. "You mean they just try to keep on accumulating more and more, like the Winteys?" She searched for an analogy. "That would be like eating all day. Obviously, you need to have enough to keep you going. But once that's satisfied, other things in life become more important. You make it sound as if how much people own is the only measure of what they're worth. . . . Why, that would be as ridiculous as everybody being judged solely by weight and competing to be the heaviest!"

Financial obesity, Duggan thought to himself. Not a bad way to put it. It was hardly the first time in history for such an observation to be made; but the trouble with giving handouts to the ones inevitably left behind in the race had always been that it produced more and more free riders who eventually brought down the system. Somehow the Tharleans seemed to have solved the problem of restraining excess without perpetrating injustices or undermining initiative. How, then, did it work with power?

"So who makes judgments and decisions?" he asked. "You have to have disputes, the same as anyone else. Who has the final say when nobody involved can agree?"

"It's true. Somebody has to do it." Tawna made it sound like cleaning the sewers or defusing bombs. "They have a kind of lottery, and the losers get appointed. It's only for a year—and people are sympathetic, so they try to be supportive."

"You mean it's a lousy job. Nobody wants it?"

"Well, of course. Why would anyone . . ." Tawna stopped as she registered the astonishment in Duggan's voice. "You mean that on Earth . . ."

He nodded. "Having power over people is considered a big thing. They fight each other for it. Okay, now go ahead and tell me: you thought maybe it would be something like that."

Then he realized that she was giving him a long, contemplative look that held little real interest in such things just at the moment. He forgot about the subject and held her eye quizzically. "You're different from Lukki," she said. "He was like a child, never questioning anything. You do. You see things, and you think about them. It makes you . . . interesting." She slid closer along the rail of the parapet. Her fingertip traced over his arm. Duggan turned toward her. Her hair and skin shone softly golden in the light from the embankment lamps . . .

Beep . . . Beep . . . Beep . . . Beep . . .  

Duggan cursed under his breath and tugged the compak from his shirt pocket. The caller was Brose's assistant aloft in the Barnet. All ship's personnel were recalled to base immediately. General Rhinde had finally gotten his way and announced plans to take over Ferrydock as a military demonstration. The occupation force had begun mobilizing aboard the Barnet and would descend from orbit at dawn.

Four flights of assault shuttles made synchronized landings at key points and deployed with alacrity to seize and secure the prime means of access and communications. Two task forces sealed the main highway and rail links north and south, another commandeered the airport, while the last took the Strandside bridge and sent a column into Ferrydock to occupy the broadcasting stations and news bureaus. Meanwhile, special details sped through the town to install military administrators and technicians in the offices responsible for transportation, power generation and distribution, and communications. By midday the operation was completed as per the timetable. At noon precisely, General Rhinde went on the air to inform the inhabitants of Ferrydock that their town was now under Terran military jurisdiction and subject to the laws of its governing council. Communications and public services were under control of a colonial administration reporting to an appointed governor, and regulations concerning the conduct of business and finance would be announced shortly.

The townspeople seemed to think it was a great idea. An enthusiastic crowd in the central square greeted the news, relayed through their personal phones or from loudspeakers set up for the occasion, and by early afternoon representatives from the sanitation, harbor facilities, and water supply services were appearing at the governor's downtown headquarters offering their organizations for takeover too. Meanwhile, the management at places the Terrans had declared themselves to be in control of were resigning or taking a holiday to disappear to the beaches at Strandside, visit with grandchildren, or spend time on their hobbies. By next morning, the town was in chaos. Half the communications were down, the airport was barely functioning, and services languished as employees took breaks to line up enthusiastically in hundreds to be issued newly introduced permits and licenses. In the end, Rhinde's officers were forced to send out squads to track down essential professionals and bring them back at gunpoint to carry out tasks which until yesterday they had performed readily and willingly. That was when Duggan began getting his first strong intuition that this wasn't going to work out in the way that had been envisaged.

When all-out war failed to materialize, the restrictions confining non-occupation personnel to base were eased. Duggan was standing on a street corner with Tawna, watching two troopers shouldering assault rifles and clad in riot gear, posted to protect the Municipal Services Building from a gaggle of curious onlookers, when Zeebron Stell called from the office suite he'd rented as a trading base. He sounded agitated.

"Dug, where are you?"

"A few blocks away from you on Johannes Street. You know, Zeeb, I think Gilbert and Sullivan could have done a lot with this."

"Is Tawna with you?"

"Yes, she is. What's up?"

"I've got problems. People here don't seem to understand that I'm running a business, not a thrift store. Can you get over? Maybe she'd be able to do a better job of getting the message across."

"It's Zeeb, from his emporium," Duggan murmured to Tawna. "He's having some kind of trouble with the locals. Wants us over there to see if you can maybe talk to them. Is that okay with you?"

"Sure."

"We're on our way, Zeeb."

A miscellany of vehicles was parked outside the building in which Stell had his premises, including a beat-up truck. Inside, they found him remonstrating with a dowdily dressed woman who seemed interested in some toilet preparations that he had amassed a stack of in one of the rooms. Elsewhere, a couple with two small children were examining a shelf of electronics appliances, while a small, bespectacled, bearded man, wearing a tweed jacket with deerstalker-like hat and waving a list of some kind, hopped about, trying to get Stell's attention. "No! You're outta your mind," Stell told the woman. "How is that supposed to be doing me a favor? It's not even what I paid." Then, to the man, "Look, I told you I'm not interested. I don't even know who any of those people are. How in hell do you figure you're helping me?" Another man appeared in a doorway at the rear, smiling and holding an elaborate wrist unit of some kind that had a miniature screen. Stell groaned, then caught sight of Duggan and Tawna and steered them gratefully back into the entrance hallway.

"There's some kind of victimization conspiracy," he told them. "With each other, they're real generous. I know. I watched 'em. But when they come here, they try and rip me off with pennies and buttons. It's almost like they think I owe them. And Sherlock Holmes's brother back there keeps pestering me with every hard-luck story in town. One guy's house got flattened in a mudslide. Somebody else's baby needs surgery. I even had a lady in earlier, asking if I wanted to put something into an education fund. What's going on?"

Tawna nodded. "Of course. These are people who really do need help . . ."

"But they're talking about helping me!" Stell protested.

"Well, yes . . . that too." Tawna obviously still couldn't see anything strange.

"How do they figure that?" Stell demanded.

"Well . . ." Tawna hesitated in the way of somebody reluctant to spell out what should have been clear. "To enjoy pride and self-esteem, the way everyone wants to," she said. "The more wealth and material things you acquire, the more you can make things easier for those going through hard times. Once you're reasonably comfortable yourself, it starts to mean more, right?" She glanced at Duggan. "It's like what we were saying the other day about eating all day. Beyond a certain point, any more doesn't make sense."

Stell's eyes bulged. "You mean they'll hassle me like this forever here?"

"Oh, no. Only until you learn to judge for yourself what share to put back in, like everyone else. Since you don't know how it works yet, they're probably just trying to help. It might take a little time."

"Well, suppose I don't want them telling me. What if I put my own guards on the place and keep 'em away?"

"That would be up to you, of course. . . . But why would anyone want to?" She looked at Duggan again and caught the resigned expression on his face. "Okay, don't tell me, Paul. Back home they're all like that. Yes?"

General Rhinde's measures weren't having the intended effect. In a closed-door meeting of the political and military chiefs aboard the Barnet, it was agreed that the citizens of Ferrydock were undergoing too little violation of their freedoms and rights to provoke whoever was supposed to defend them into coming out and doing so. Accordingly, since there was no set precedent at Tharle to say how far these things should be taken, the governor was instructed to issue a declaration stating that to facilitate improved control and efficiency, the Terran administration now owned everything in the name of everybody and was taking charge of manufacture, distribution, employment, and other services directly.

But the populace seemed happy to let them take it. A mood of festivity spread as virtually the whole of Ferrydock shut up stores and offices and took to the boulevards or sat back in the sun to await decisions and directions. Very soon, surface landers were shuttling frantically between the Barnet and Base 1, bringing extra details of planners and controllers to relieve the harried supervisory offices, now working around the clock. Meanwhile, ostensibly to bolster the security of all by setting up a centrally managed disaster relief agency—in reality, to get faster results through imposed austerity—huge stocks of food, fuel, clothing, materials, and other supplies were impounded and locked up in a large warehouse near the airport requisitioned for the purpose and officially renamed the "Federal Emergency Relief Repository." (Use of the word "federal" was a bit premature since as of yet there were no political entities other than Ferrydock to federate with it, but the planners were already shaping up grand schemes and visions of the future.) The repository was duly furnished with a ten-foot wire fence, traffic barrier and checkpoint at the gate, and a billet of armed guards.

However, the harassed Terran administrators were like innocents in a Casbah bazaar before the demands of Tharleans taking them at their word that they were now responsible for everything, and in a short space of time just about everything of utility or value had vanished from the stores and the streets. By the terms under which the Repository had been established, the circumstances qualified as a disaster deserving of relief, and the officer in charge dutifully commenced handing back to the town, at enormous cost in overhead and added effort, the goods that had been confiscated at comparable cost in the first place. Eager to help Terran officialdom find satisfaction and self-esteem by the terms of their own morality, the Tharleans didn't take long to exhaust the stocks completely. Since there was nothing in the regulations that said otherwise, the guards continued, befuddled but doggedly, patrolling outside to protect the contents of the empty warehouse. The only threatening incident they had to deal with, however, was when a small procession of trucks from some outlying farms arrived full of vegetables and other produce that the growers didn't know what else to do with—only to be turned away again because there were no orders for dealing with anyone trying to bring things in.

By this time, the political opponents of the mission's incumbent regime, seeing ammunition here to unseat their rivals, formed a dissident faction to fire off a joint protest to Earth, giving all the facts and details. A directive from Colonial Affairs Administration terminating the Barnet's mission and recalling the ship forthwith arrived within forty-eight hours.

* * *Γ Γ Γ

Base 1 was an abandoned shell, unsightly with the litter left by departing military anywhere. Children in makeshift helmets and carrying roughly fashioned imitation rifles marched each other to stations at the main gate guard posts. Duggan stood with his arm around Tawna's waist among a crowd watching the last shuttle out climb at the top of a pillar of light through scattered, purple-edged clouds. If the figure he'd heard was correct, he was one of forty-six who would have been unaccounted for when the muster lists were checked, and whose compaks hadn't answered calls or returned a location fix.

"No reservations or second thoughts, Dug?" she asked him. "No last-minute changes about everything, like Zeeb? I hope not. It would be a bit late now." Stell hadn't been among them at the end, after all. Driven to distraction under the pressures of trying to give things away, he had turned a complete about-face and stormed back up to the ship, berating anyone who would listen that he couldn't get back to Earth fast enough.

Duggan shook his head. "Not me." He gave her a squeeze, savoring the touch of her body through the light dress she was wearing. "My future's cut out right here. Everything I want."

"So Zeeb will probably get that promotion you told me about. I hope he'll be pleased."

"Oh, I'm sure he'll fit right back in," Duggan said. Brose had as good as come out and said that he favored Duggan for the subsection supervisor position and would back him. Duggan had seen it as a pretty transparent ploy to recruit support in the political maelstrom that Brose knew they'd be heading back to, and had no doubt that Brose had told Zeeb the same thing, and for the same reason. It felt like a reprieve from a life sentence to know he was out of all that. "In any case," Duggan added, "I wouldn't have gotten the job. The screening application that Brose made me put through was turned down." Brose had been as stunned as Duggan was pleased when the assessment back from Earth read: Doesn't display the competitiveness and aggressiveness that success in this appointment would require. It meant that Duggan had done something right.

"I'm surprised," Tawna said, sounding defensive on his behalf. "I'd have thought that even if you decided . . ." She caught the amused twist of his mouth. "Dug, what happened? What did you do?"

"I filled it in the Tharlean way," he told her.

"What way's that?"

"I have to tell you?" Duggan frowned in mock reproach. "I said I didn't need as much pay as they were offering, and I told them I could do more than they were stipulating. I guess they couldn't hack it." He shrugged. "But Zeeb will do okay. He, Brose, and the System are made for each other."

Tawna pulled close and nuzzled the side of her face against his shoulder. "And you'll do just fine here too," she promised.

For that was the simple principle that underlay the entire Tharlean worldview and way of life: Give a little more; take a little less. At least, with those who reciprocated. Anyone who didn't play by the rules wasn't treated by the rules. That was how they curbed excess. But how did a Tharlean know when enough was enough? By being a part of the culture they had evolved and absorbing its ways and its values from the time they first learned to look at the world, walk around in it, listen and talk.

Every one of them.

That was why nobody from Earth had had any success finding lawmakers—at least, if what they were looking for was a few making rules to be forcibly imposed on the many. The government had been there all along, everywhere, staring them in the face. For on Tharle, all made the law, and all enforced it. Every one of them, therefore, was government.

Now Duggan would learn to become a member of a planetary government too. And that sounded a much better promotion to him than anything the Colonial Affairs Administration was likely to come up with, even if he were to carry on fighting and clawing his way up the ladder for the next hundred years.

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Framed