The Universe Maker by A. E. van Vogt Read Free Book Online Page A

buzzard," said Bouvy pleasantly. But he stood up and disappeared into the ship. He emerged presently with another chair.
    During his absence the woman had picked up the chair in which he had been sitting and carried it some twenty-five feet down the river's bank.
    She yelled at Bouvy, "Bring that contraption over here! I want to talk to you privately. Besides, I guess maybe those two love-birds want to be alone." She guffawed.
    Lela said in a strained voice to Cargill, "That's Carmean. She's one of the bosses. She thinks she's being funny when she talks like that."
    Cargill said, "What do you mean, one of the bosses?"
    The girl sounded surprised. "She tells us what to do." She added hastily, "Of course, she can't interfere in our private life."
    Cargill digested that for a moment. During the silence he could hear Carmean's voice at intervals. Only an occasional word reached him. Several times she said, "Tweeners" and "Shadows." Once she said, "It's a cinch."
    There was an urgency in her voice that made him want to hear what she was saying, but presently he realized the impossibility of making sense out of stray words. He relaxed and said, "I thought you folks lived a free life—without anybody to tell you what to do and where to get off."
    "You got to have rules," said Lela. "You got to know where to draw the line. What you can do and what you can't do." She added earnestly, "But we are free. Not like those Tweeners in their cities." The last was spoken scornfully.
    Cargill said, "What happens if you don't do what she says?"
    "You lose the benefits."
    "Benefits?"
    "The preachers won't preach to you," said Lela.
    "Nobody gives you food. The Shadows won't fix your ship." She added casually, "And things like that."
    Cargill decided he wouldn't worry about the preachers. He had once had a conversation with an army chaplain before leaving the U.S. for the Far East. The man had attempted a very colloquial approach, referring to the possibility of "going West." Cargill recalled his own analogy that Stateside "West" ended at the Pacific Ocean, and that if he could still feel his feet wet after crossing that boundary, he would begin to believe that he'd better find out how warm the water could get.
    He considered most of the religious people he knew hypocrites. The implications of believing that one was a soul, or had one, were so numerous that anything short of acting on these implications made belief a mere protective coloring. Cargill knew of no one who showed by his actions that he believed himself to be an infinitely tenuous energy structure united to a material body.
    Lela's reference to not receiving food if they didn't conform puzzled him. He had had the impression that the Planiacs garnered their living from the streams and the seashore and the wilderness. They might not be provided a bountiful living the year round, but the marvellous refrigeration and cooking systems on the floaters made large accumulations possible at the harvest seasons. And that emphasized the one important restriction in what she had said. If the Shadows wouldn't fix the ships, that indeed could be disastrous. One might conclude that the solution was to learn to fix one's own ship. It was interesting that a large number of people would let themselves be so easily controlled. It indicated that it wasn't the material side that mattered, but the belief and attitudes of a group. These people, like so many before them, were the slaves of their own thoughts.
    Cargill said at long last: "Why do the Shadows recognize the authority of Carmean and the other bosses?"
    "Oh, they just want us to behave."
    "But you can capture Tweeners?"
    The girl hesitated. Then, "Nobody seems to worry about a Tweener," she said.
    Cargill nodded. He recalled his attempts to get information from her during the past few days. Apparently she hadn't then thought of these restraining influences on her life. Now, though she seemed unaware of it, she had given him a picture of a rigid