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

was startled to see a man.
    “Said Counce!” he exclaimed, taking half a step back. “What in the galaxy brings you here? Come out and sit down.”
    Counce nodded and walked forward. He was still dressed as he had been for his visit to Bassett, in nothing but a pair of shorts, but Jaroslav kept his home warm and the pile carpets were kind to bare feet.
    Hospitably bustling to fetch his guest a glass of wine and something to eat, Jaroslav hurried about the room while Counce chose a chair and looked musingly about him. There was a depth-illusion mobile on the whole of one wall, showing the local galaxy and the human-occupied worlds. There was a cosmopolitan selection of objets d’art. There were books and magazines that by Ymiran standards were intolerably seditious. That was all right.
    He took the wine, refused any food, and indicated with a nod of his head that Jaroslav should take a chair facing him. When the plump man had done so, he looked him straight in the eye.
    “Jaroslav, what have you been doing lately?” he demanded.
    “Spreading the word. I’ve been working under the most extreme difficulties, as usual. But the work is paying off. I wish there were several agents here on Ymir instead of myself alone.”
    “So do we all,” Counce agreed. “Only until we think of an excuse as brilliant as the one which forced the elders to tolerate you, we can’t establish more people here. It’s a peculiar trait of human psychology that one misfit will be tolerated as a crank when two or more automatically assume the status of a subversive movement. Originally, the plan was for you to act as a focus of infection. You don’t seem to have made yourself very contagious.”
    Jaroslav blinked. “I think I’ve done tolerably well under the circumstances,” he objected. “In the five years I’ve been here, I’ve managed to get thousands of books and magazines into surreptitious circulation. I have regular visitors among the young people–some of them are even bold enough to smile at me on the street now.”
    “We’re facing a desperate situation. We have to take risks. Why, for instance, have you not recommended anyone as a recruit yet?”
    “Mainly because the only people I’ve made any serious impression on have been boys and girls in their early teens. Ymiran conditioning is hellishly successful; by the time the children reach adult status at eighteen, they’re solid from the neck up.”
    “I’ve never worked on Ymir,” said Counce thoughtfully. “But I have worked on more than twenty different worlds. I think you’re still partly a victim of your own early conditioning yourself, despite what we did to counteract it. There are ten million people on the planet. In five years it ought to be possible to find more than one person with sufficient hereditary empathy to free him or her from his background. You were a white-haired boy at one time, remember? When the elders selected you to join the staff of their embassy on Earth, you were regarded as totally uncorruptible. You fell inside the year. Agreed, you were exposed to the truth at first hand. But though you’re working with diluted information, you’ve had a much longer time and many more people to work on. I want a potential recruit, Jaroslav–and I want him now .”
    Jaroslav’s eyes searched his visitor’s face. “You have bad news, Saïd,” he suggested.
    “I have.” Counce put his glass down and got to his feet. “The Others have been to Regis. They were there before we arrived–possibly only scouting the planet, possibly with the intention of planting a colony. We don’t know for sure. But we’ve got to hurry.”
    He put his thumb on a certain star in the pattern on the wall-map. “That’s Regis, Jaroslav. And here”–he made a pair of compasses with his forefinger and thumb, and swung the finger through a third of a circle–“is Ymir. Ymir is the sort of world the Others hunt for. Oxygen-high, frigid, almost lifeless, it’s