John Brunner - The World Swappers

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The World Swappers

By John Brunner

Scanned, proofed and formatted by BW-SciFi

Release Date: January, 11th , 2003

Version 1.0

THE WORLD SWAPPERS

any means, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without

permission in writing from the publisher.

All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons,

living or dead, is purely coincidental.

An ACE Book

Printed in U.S.A.

CHAPTER I

Counce launched the end of his cigarette into the air with a gentle

flick of his fingers. It soared out over the side of the boat and

extinguished itself with the faintest of hisses in the green water of

mid-Pacific. Otherwise he did not move.

He was half-sitting, half-lying, with his back against the hard,

sun-warmed cover of the propulsor. One excessively long leg was

stretched out along the fender which rimmed the gunwale, barely sinking

into the resilient plastic; the other dangled over the reactor well.

A gull which had been circling down to look him over, and which had

almost decided he was not worth paying attention to, saw the white

object arc overboard, swooped, and neatly lifted the disintegrating butt

out of the sea. At once it dropped the sour-tasting thing again with a

mewing cry of dismay, gave Counce a hurt look, and flapped off with

injured dignity. Counce followed its movements idly for a few yards.

Then his face suddenly lost all traces of awareness, as if he had cut

himself off from the present. For a while he remained quite still, seeming

to listen, before his right hand shot out and twitched the helm and

accelerator levers together. The boat described a quarter turn and came

to rest again, rocking slightly in its own ripples, the steam from the

propulsor hanging around the stern like a patch of localized fog. The blind

panes of Counce's dark glasses turned towards the blue horizon, facing

the one point where no one else would have expected to see anything.

No one else, that is, except someone who had come to this precise place

for this precise reason.

Behind him now, though very far away, the tentacles of the

purification and extraction plants spread yearly further southward; to his

right, somewhat nearer, were the kelp farms of Pacific Nutrition; to his

left and nearer again, though still below the skyline, was the smart and

somewhat snobbish residential district of Sealand. In the direction in

which Counce faced, there was nothing for a thousand miles bar a few

scattered islands.

Then there was a gleam as if Venus had become visible in the middle

of the day and too far from the plane of the ecliptic. It was very faint,

and the sun competed with it, but the dark glasses helped, and the

distance was closing rapidly - at about twelve hundred miles an hour, he

judged.

The gleam took on form by degrees. The hull showed first, as a

darker blob; then the wings, their leading edges glowing sullen red; and

last of all the thin lines of the hydrofins. Counce nodded approval as the

spaceship slanted down toward the water. The pilot knew his job - he,

Counce, could hardly have chosen the angle of approach better himself.

The first hydrofin bit the water, and the rate of increase of the ship's

apparent size dropped abruptly. It was still more than twenty miles away,

but a vessel capable of carrying a crew of a dozen on hundred-parsec

hops could not very well be inconspicuously small.

The spray from the second layer of hydrofins turned to steam as they

touched and briefly left the water again; with a cry of tortured metal the

hot wings were suddenly struck and chilled. The ship skimmed over the

ocean, settling slowly to its normal riding attitude as it bore down on

Counce's boat. It threw out first a sea anchor, then, when its detectors

had checked the bottom profile, a tractor beam focused on the crest of

the nearest submarine peak. It came to a halt less than a half mile away.

And disappeared.

Counce sighed, taking off his dark glasses and putting them away in

the pouch of his trunks. The deck of the boat was heating up under him,

which meant that someone aboard the spaceship had put two and two

together in an unusually inspired manner. Had Bassett somehow been

warned about him? Counce thought it unlikely, but he would have to

make allowances for the possibility.

He gathered himself in a single movement and tossed himself

languidly after the cigarette just as the sonic found the critical resonance

of the metal hull and the boat shivered into steaming fragments.

Immediately the heavy weight of the shielded propulsor dropped towards

the floor of the ocean, its automatic capsize guards going up with a

succession of sharp clicking noises. In this much water, it would hardly

be worth salvaging.

Feeling the brief wave of warmth from the shattered boat wash about

his body, Counce trod water and stared at the place where the spaceship

had been. Even with the guards up, the propulsor would have shed

enough radioactivity in the immediate vicinity to fog the detectors for a

while, so he was at liberty to go about the task of superoxygenating his

bloodstream with deep breaths before he needed to duck. They would,

he supposed, have shielded the underside of the ship as well as the

superstructure in case one of the local fishguards in his submersible

spotted it and remembered. However, from underneath was the logical

mode of approach - he couldn't fly.

Dodging a shoal of frightened fish bearing the Dateline Fisheries

brand on their dorsal fins, Counce began to swim towards the point at

which the ship had vanished. He reached the edge of the barrier sooner

than he had expected, and trod water again as he felt the tingling of the

blanking frequencies greet his outstretched fingertips. They'd set it for

maximum output, then - they weren't taking any chances. Except,

naturally, the ones they didn't know about.

He made a swift calculation. He had been under for six minutes three

seconds already, and the additional six minutes or so which it would take

him to negotiate the barrier would bring him perilously close to his safety

margin. He would have surfaced if he could, but the problem of

navigating through these screens partly in a liquid and partly in gas added

unnecessary complications to the job. From below was not just the logical

way - it was the only way.

He swung his mental compass, closed his eyes, and deliberately

committed himself to his own personal inertial guidance system. He

forced himself to disregard all sensory impressions except the changing

pressure of water on his skin and the position of the fluid in his

semicircular canals, telling him which way was up. Gravity was the one

thing he could expect to remain constant within the barrier; the ship was

on Earth, and Counce knew perfectly well that for the time being it was

meant to remain here, so that at least they would not be monkeying with

the value of g. But if he deviated from the straight path he was going to

be in trouble.

Exactly six minutes later he surfaced and opened his eyes to the

greenish light which was all that soaked past the barrier - the light from

below the surface, not from above. He found two men looking at him.

That implied that Bassett did not have implicit faith in his excellent

defenses, and that in turn suggested he had heard about Counce after all.

Counce trod water, waiting to die.

The men who stood on the wing of the spaceship regarded him

curiously while he replenished his lungs. The one on the left had a gun

leveled at Counce's chest - not at the point where his chest appeared to

be; this man knew all about refraction. The other one, Counce presumed,

would be Bassett. Interesting.

Finally, the one he took to be Bassett gestured to his companion, and

the latter lowered his gun. Counce felt a surge of relief. It was pretty

much an axiom that little is to be feared from a man who comes naked

and unarmed, but Bassett had got where he was by disregarding axioms

like that.

"All right, you," said the man with the gun. "Come aboard." He kicked

the catch of the disembarkation ladder, and hiduminium legs plopped into

the water a few yards from Counce. Acting rather more fatigued than he

in fact was, he swam to the ladder and hauled himself up, dripping. He

looked about him at the ship and found it much as he had expected; the

distinctive shape of the bulge aft of the control blister implied a

Metchnikov drive, which shouldn't strictly speaking have been fitted to a

private vessel, but Bassett had the key to many unlikely storerooms.

"Get this guy a towel, Lecoq!" shouted the man with the gun, and in a

moment someone tossed one through the open door of the airlock.

Counce's hand was waiting for it when it arrived; the significance of this

fact was lost on the two men watching. He rubbed himself quickly down,

but he was still leaving wet footprints when they judged the job had taken

long enough and urged him inside.

The curious eyes of the man at the detector panel followed him as he

went down a narrow passage and into a room located amidships. Two of

the original cabins must have been knocked into one to make this sizable

compartment, Counce judged, and immediately wondered if the crew

knew what the removal of a bulkhead did to the stress system of a ship

entering hyperspace. Apparently they did; a second glance revealed little

gray nodules welded along the line of the missing partition - the visible

ends of a dozen compensators.

"Sit down," said Bassett from behind him, and the door closed.

Counce obeyed, and his unwilling host came around in front of him

and sat down on the other side of a transparent table in the depths of

which was sunk a game of three-dimensional chess. The pieces were set

for a mate for white in nine.

He looked directly at the other, seeing a tall, thin sandy-haired man,

his face lean; with deep-set gray eyes, his hands strong and

short-fingered. With the kind of geriatric treatment such a man could

afford, Bassett could have been anywhere between forty and a hundred;

Counce knew he was in fact near the lower, not the upper end of the

scale.

Sitting back relaxedly, he capitalized on Bassett's discomfort by

allowing him to take the initiative. The silence stretched elastically as

Bassett looked the intruder up and down and confirmed that he did not

look unlike an ordinary man.

At length he said, "Well, what do you want?"

Counce found the choice of question illuminating. Bassett might have

been expected to say, "Who are you?" But Counce did not react

perceptibly; he merely answered,

"I think it would perhaps be better if I told you first that I already

know what you want."

Bassett's face betrayed a slight puzzlement. "All right," he agreed.

"Tell me what I want."

"You want to rule the galaxy," said Counce.

CHAPTER II

The galaxy

As good a name for it as any, for people who had barely gotten used

to thinking of their back yard as a part of Earth before they had to adjust

to the idea of Earth as one planet of a solar system, and then to the

system being just one corner of the universe. Vocabulary had lagged

behind facts ever since the first tide of real achievement had swamped

mankind.

The galaxy, then, though strictly only a very small part of it.

Specifically, the thirty-one planets within a radius of two hundred parsecs

or so which had been populated by man: thinly, true - ten million here, a

hundred million on some of the older worlds - but populated.

The galaxy, human version: a relatively narrow segment of the

cartwheel of stars centered on Sagittarius, but wide enough. Wide

enough to have accepted people by the cityful when the drivers were

first developed, to have offered escape to people who were frightened,

unsettled, hungry, idealistic - who needed to get the hell out. That had

acted as a safety valve.

Now the boiler was beginning to strain again.

This, then, was Earth in the twenty-sixth century: fat, sleek, well-fed,

though forced to adopt devious means to achieve that end; feeling the

faintest, ghostliest hint of discomfort, wondering at last whether it had not

only never had it so good, but whether it was ever going to have it so

good again.

Three and four centuries before, men of Earth had gone by the

hundreds of thousands to seek their new worlds. They had found them,

and ceased to be men of Earth. Naturally. That was why Bassett was

here. That was why Counce had been waiting for him.

Bassett was taken aback, and, to cover himself while he thought over

Counce's challenging remark, he opened a box which rested on the

transparent tabletop. It was a memento of the visit he had just made;

even if he had not known where Bassett had been, Counce could have

guessed that the box was made on Boreas. For one thing, it was

ornamented with silver, and only a poor colonial world could afford to

waste high-conductivity metals on knick-knacks. The box held slim

brown cigarillos; he accepted one.

"Thanks," he said wryly. "My cigarettes were soaked when you sank

my boat so expertly."

Bassett ignored the remark, closed the box after taking a cigarillo for

himself; and passed an igniter across the table. "You're possessed of

unusual physical abilities," he mused. "I'd have assumed you also had

peculiar powers of intelligence if you hadn't made such an

empty-sounding remark. Suppose I ask what you intended it to mean?"

"Let me say also that I know why you have just visited Boreas,"

Counce answered obliquely, and Bassett frowned.

"My company does a large off-world trade in luxury trinkets," he

prevaricated. "I've been to a number of the worlds where we have

contacts - "

"But never previously to renew a contract which has been losing you

profit steadily for more than a year," Counce interrupted. "Suppose we

stop fencing. Let's look at it this way. In the normal course of events,

you, being a very able man, could expect to be on top of the heap here on

Earth in another forty years' time. You'd still be young enough to enjoy

several years of power. But you're impatient, so it's doubtful whether the

prospect would have satisfied you anyway. However, the question

scarcely arises any more, because you learned some time back that forty

or fifty years from now Earth will most likely be passing through a

severe crisis. On the most generous permissible estimates, the population

curve is going to cut the standard of living curve and chop it off. People

are going to be dissatisfied, unsettled; they'll look for places to go, and

there won't be any unless someone provides them.

"Out there are thirty-one habitable and sparsely populated worlds.

Practically without exception, they hate the guts of Earth, because their

founding fathers expected Earth to get bogged down in its own

population density and sink towards poverty, while they, the colonials,

rose to unheard-of heights. Take Ymir, for example. The pioneers went

out there in a rush of righteous indignation, parked themselves on the first

lump of mud with breathable air that they chanced upon, neglecting the

fact that it was in the middle of a glacial period, and kept themselves

warm by fanning this indignation of theirs to maximum temperature.

"But that was three hundred years ago, and the flames are dying

down. The Ymirans can't admit to themselves that their ancestors were

fools to pass up their chance of a share in the peace and comfort of

twenty-sixth century Earth; yet below the surface they envy us so much

they're sick. They doubtless have plenty of natural resources - only most

of them are under two hundred feet of solid ice.

"There are misfits and malcontents here on Earth even now. When

the squeeze comes in another few decades, some people are going to

look around for an escape. And it will make no difference that

nowadays, with the Metchnikov drive, you could put the whole population

of Rio or Greater Tokyo aloft in a single ship. You'd run up against the

square-cube law: within the radius of explored space there are no

habitable virgin worlds for people to go to.

"The obvious answer is to re-open the colonial worlds already planted

to a fresh wave of Earthborn. And that's what you propose to do; you're

intending to buy the good will of the colonial planets with technical and

other assistance, so that when the time comes you'll be the man who can

offer the way of escape people are looking for.

"But there will be conflict. Your computers predict that, and they're

right. The newcomers will struggle with the colonists; because the

newcomers will have the pioneering urge, and the colonists are

disillusioned, the newcomers will win - and they'll owe their greatest

loyalty to you."

Counce finished his long speech in the same level tone he had used

throughout, and looked at Bassett, wondering what his reaction would be.

It took a long time coming, but it was a tacit admission. That was another

reason why Bassett was on his way to the top: he wasted no time on

things like useless denials.

He said, "In outline, that's correct. I don't pretend to guess how you

know, but if that's your motive for saying I want to rule the galaxy, you're

wrong, of course. You can't rule the galaxy."

"That's so true it's a platitude," agreed Counce.

"However, we needn't quibble about what 'ruling' actually consists of."

Bassett nodded. "But I still want to know why you came."

"I came to tell you that your mission to Boreas was a complete waste

of time. In view of the fact that Boreas is one of the few outworlds that

is kindly disposed towards Earth, you jumped to the obvious - but wrong -

conclusion that it was the best place to start buying your good will for the

future. Your computers will tell you that, but if I hadn't come to see you,

you'd have assumed insufficient data was the trouble, and maybe you'd

have spent another ten months or a year hammering away at the problem

before giving up. You might even have been discouraged enough to go

back to a problem which is genuinely insoluble- how to avert Earth's

coming crisis."

"Now look here," said Bassett, "we ourselves haven't had a chance to

evaluate our findings yet. You, and whoever else is behind you, can't

conceivably have had an advance report. To start with, this is one of the

fastest civil ships in space, and I doubt whether anyone in your group,

whoever they may be, has access to a Metchnikov drive."

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TheWorldSwappersByJohnBrunnerScanned,proofedandformattedbyBW-SciFiReleaseDate:January,11th,2003Version1.0THEWORLDSWAPPERSCopyright©,1959byAceBooks,Inc.Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthisbookmaybereproducedinanyformorbyanymeans,exceptfortheinclusionofbriefquotationsinareview,withoutpermissioninwritingfrom...

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John Brunner - The World Swappers

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