The World Swappers by John Brunner Read Free Book Online Page A

Sometimes she was the only person there aside from Jaroslav; sometimes there was a spaceship officer calling on his only friend on Ymir. Most often, though, the group consisted of three or four other young people who had managed to elude parental supervision for a precious hour or two.
    On her third visit, Jaroslav, beaming delightedly, gave her a dress from Earth to put on while she was in the house, and thereafter he kept it waiting for her to change into on her arrival. She would never have dared to try and hide it in her own home.
    After a while she found herself hoping that Jaroslav would be alone when she called. Occasionally he was. But he invariably treated her with courtesy and never presumed on the situation. She could not quite decide whether he wanted to or not at first. Later she learned to notice the slight disappointment in his manner as the evening progressed, if no one else turned up, and she reahzed that to Jaroslav an evening when he had only one visitor was a failure. Like leaven working in rising dough, Jaroslav’s nature was to be yeast in the ferment of ideas now bubbling through the minds of the young men and women of Ymir.
    And what did he get out of it? What was his purpose in this genuinely dangerous activity? Those were questions Enni found herself unable to answer. The danger lay in the possibility of the elders, or someone else in authority, discovering what was happening; then, whether or not Jaroslav himself suffered, his “pupils” would certainly be severely punished, and Enni had come wonderingly to understand that such an event would cause Jaroslav deep and sincere sorrow.
    That, perhaps more than anything else about Jaroslav, reinforced the conclusions Enni had come to earlier. In her opinion, the fact that Jaroslav had learned (presumably among the people of Earth, for he had had no other chance) to care as deeply for the fate of others as for himself was the most astonishing thing about his altogether surprising nature. She told him so, one evening when no one else was with them, and for a long time the speculative look that came and went in his eyes as he listened haunted her memory and filled her mind with puzzlement.
    Much later, she came to understand.

CHAPTER VII

    There was more to Jaroslav Dubin’s house than its mere appearance. The elders, grudgingly, had assigned it to him because they felt he would be less dangerous if he were isolated from the rest of the population, quarantined by the gap separating his one-story house of black stone from the edge of the spaceport and the town itself. That had suited Jaroslav fairly well. Every time the elders came to see their self-appointed trading agent, the envy in their eyes grew, for there was always something new to add to the luxury Jaroslav enjoyed: a picture, a carpet, a piece of furniture, rare offworld delicacies. They had objected feebly to the crates of goods the spacemen brought for their friend on Ymir, but they could not do more.
    Envy was reflected, too, in the eyes of the young people who called unofficially at the house–the youths and girls like Enni Zatok. But that was as it ought to be. That was why Jaroslav went to such pains to make his luxury ostentatious.
    It was seldom, therefore, that he had a visitor who merely accepted his surroundings. When such a visitor came, he never came by the orthodox route; he always came through the wall. The wall was cunningly hollowed out; into the cavity led the power cables from the portable atomic generator he had installed below the main room. You needed a lot of power for operating a transfax platform.
    He sat alone reading when the alarm sounded. The soft buzzing could have heralded anything–the arrival of a scrap of paper with a message on it, the delivery of a new batch of books and magazines, food, clothes. The things he used did not all by any means come by the regular space routes.
    But when he opened the concealed wall panel and looked into the ten-foot cavity, he