The Ladder in the Sky by John Brunner Read Free Book Online

caused some small disturbance. Nearly ten thousand people were killed and quite a lot of damage was done. We had to divert space traffic to other continents for a period of about a month. Forlorn hope, of course. He was killed by one of his own followers and the movement fell to pieces. There wasn’t any real support for it—just a vague mystical aura that stuck to the prince’s name. Why should there be? Nobody in his right mind wanted to go back to the days of autocratic monarchy, even here on Berak.”
    “And these are the followers of this prince?” the lieutenant hazarded. His voice showed some slight interest at last. It was quite like something out of a historical romance, after all. Hereditary titles—why, even on a backward world like this you’d never have expected it. And the mystical influence of royalty.
    “Some of them,” Zethel said, shrugging. “The healthy ones. The rest are out of the Dyasthala—that’s our thieves’ quarter.”
    King of the Beggars, yet. That was an ancient phrase which had once stuck in the lieutenant’s mind. His interest brightened still further. He said, “I guess the mystic aura you mentioned would be strong among people like that.”
    “No, you’d be wrong,” Zethel corrected him. “That’s what was so curious. It had always been believed that people in the Dyasthala didn’t give a damn about who was at the top of the heap, because they were invariably at the bottom. Nonetheless there was a rumor, far too strong to be ignored, that the prince’s escape from the place he was held captive—which is a story in itself, I may say; it’s acquired overtones of pure legend in a shorter time than you’d think possible—but as I was saying, there were these rumors that his escape had been masterminded by someone from the Dyasthala. Not unreasonable, I suppose. A really skilled professional thief might well be able to steal away a man for once, instead of goods.
    “So to teach them a lesson we had the Dyasthala cleared. It was an appalling slum, anyway, and a sink of disease and moral corruption of all kinds. Quite a number of people we managed to hang criminal charges on—theft, mainly, or receiving stolen goods, or debauching children under the age of discretion. Those we put to use ourselves. The rest are out there, mainly. Now that we’ve cleared the area they used to live in, they haven’t anywhere to go, and we’re anxious to stop them from sleeping in the streets.”
    “And did you catch this mysterious personage who—what did you call it?—masterminded the prince’s escape?”
    “Him? Oh, I doubt whether he really existed,” Zethel said. “We had the same more-or-less garbled story from several of the prince’s sympathizers, though. Rather puzzling. He’s said to have sold himself to an evil being in return for the power to walk on air up to the window of the prince’s prison and bring him down again. Then the demon, or devil, or whatever claimed him by throwing him into the lake below. It’s colorful, at any rate, isn’t it?”
    The lieutenant nodded. He was just going to put another question—after all, this would make a story to tell on the trip to Vashti, and when he’d polished the native crudities off it, perhaps even at home during his next furlough—when an orderly came out of the nearest of the examination huts.
    “Sergeant presents his compliments, sir,” the man said. “Wants a decision from you on a borderline case.”
    The lieutenant sighed and excused himself. Zethel gaveamechanical smile and moved away.

    A tall, lean young man, quite good-looking except for his wolfish expression and lackluster eyes, was standing passive in front of the last table in the examination hut, the one at which the results of all the tests were collated into a whole and the subject accepted or rejected. The lieutenant glanced at him before turning to the sergeant behind the table with his stacks of documents and computing equipment before