involved more than two thousand memberplanets, allowed of departments and bureaus hidden away in the endlessstretches of red tape.
In fact, although Ronny Bronston had spent the better part of his life,thus far, in studying for a place in the organization, and then working inthe Population Statistics Department for some years, he was only nowbeginning to get the over-all picture of the workings of the mushrooming,chaotic United Planets organization.
It was Earth's largest industry by far. In fact, for all practicalpurposes it was her only major industry. Tourism, yes, but even that, in away, was related to the United Planets organization. Millions of visitorswhose ancestors had once emigrated from the mother planet, streamed backin racial nostalgia. Streamed back to see the continents and oceans, theArctic and the Antarctic, the Amazon River and Mount Everest, the Saharaand New York City, the ruins of Rome and Athens, the Vatican, the Louvreand the Hermitage.
But the populace of Earth, in its hundreds of millions were largelycitizens of United Planets and worked in the organization and with itsauxiliaries such as the Space Forces.
Section G? To his surprise, Ronny found that Ross Metaxa's small sectionof the Bureau of Investigation seemed almost as great a secret within theBureau as it was to the man in the street. At one period, Ronny wonderedif it were possible that this was a department which had been lost in thewilderness of boondoggling that goes on in any great bureaucracy. HadSection G been set up a century or so ago and then forgotten by those whohad originally thought there was a need for it? In the same way that it isusually more difficult to get a statute off the lawbooks than it wasoriginally to pass it, in the same manner eliminating an office, with itsemployees can prove more difficult than originally establishing it.
But that wasn't it. In spite of the informality, the unconventionalbrashness of its personnel on all levels, and the seeming chaos in whichits tasks were done, Section G was no make-work project set up to providejuicy jobs for the relatives of high ranking officials. To the contrary,it didn't take long in the Section before anybody with open eyes could seethat Ross Metaxa was privy to the decisions made by the upper echelons ofUP.
Ronny Bronston came to the conclusion that the appointment he'd receivedwas putting him in a higher bracket of the UP hierarchy than he'd at firstimagined.
His indoctrination course was a strain such as he'd never known in schoolyears. Ross Metaxa was evidently of the opinion that a man couldassimilate concentrated information at a rate several times faster thanany professional educator ever dreamed possible. No threats were made, butRonny realized that he could be dropped even more quickly than he'd seemedto have been taken on. There were no classes, to either push or retard therate of study. He worked with a series of tutors, and pushed himself. Thetutors were almost invariably Section G agents, temporarily in GreaterWashington between assignments, or for briefing on this phase or that oftheir work.
Even as he studied, Ronny Bronston kept the eventual assignment, at whichhe was to prove himself, in mind. He made a point of inquiring of eachagent he met, about Tommy Paine.
The name was known to all, but no two reacted in the same manner. Severalof them even brushed the whole matter aside as pure legend. _Nobody_ couldaccomplish all the trouble that Tommy Paine had supposedly stirred up.
To one of these, Ronny said plaintively, "See here, the Old Man believesin him, Sid Jakes believes in him. My final appointment depends onarresting him. How can I ever secure this job, if I'm chasing a myth?"
The other shrugged. "Don't ask me. I've got my own problems. O.K., now,let's run over this question of Napoleonic law. There are at least twohundred planets that base their legal system on it."
But the majority of his fellow employees in Section G had strong enoughopinions on the interplanetary firebrand. Three or four even claimed tohave seen him fleetingly, although no two descriptions jibed. That, ofcourse, could be explained. The man could resort to plastic surgery andother disguise.
Theories there were in plenty, some of them going back long years, andsome of them pure fable.
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"Look," Ronny said in disgust one day after a particularly unbelievablesiege with two agents recently returned from a trouble spot in a planetarysystem that involved three aggressive worlds which revolved about the samesun. "Look, it's impossible for one man to accomplish all this. He'sblamed for half the _coups d'etats_, revolts and upheavals that have takenplace for the past quarter century. It's obvious nonsense. Why, arevolutionist usually spends the greater part of his life toppling agovernment. Then, once it's toppled, he spends the rest of his life tryingto set up a new government--and he's usually unsuccessful."
One of the others was shaking his head negatively. "You don't understandthis Tommy Paine's system, Bronston."
"You sure don't," the other agent, a Nigerian, grinned widely. "I've beenon planets where he'd operated."
Ronny leaned forward. The three of them were having a beer in a part ofthe city once called Baltimore. "You have?" he said. "Tell me about it,eh? The more background I get on this guy, the better."
"Sure. And this'll give you an idea of how he operates, how he can get somuch trouble done. Well, I was on this planet Goshen, understand? It hadkind of a strange history. A bunch of colonists went out there, oh, fouror five centuries ago. Pretty healthy expedition, as such outfits go.Bright young people, lots of equipment, lots of know-how and books. Well,through sheer bad luck everything went wrong from the beginning.Everything. Before they got set up at all they had an explosion thatkilled off all their communications technicians. They lost contact withthe outside. O.K. Within a couple of centuries they'd gotten into a stateof chattel slavery. Pretty well organized, but static. Kind of an AthenianDemocracy on top, a hierarchy, but nineteen people out of twenty wereslaves, and I mean real slaves, like animals. They were at this stage whena scout ship from the UP Space Forces discovered them and, of course, theyjoined up."
"Where does Tommy Paine come in?" Ronny said. He signaled to a waiter formore beer.
"He comes in a few years later. I was the Section G agent on Goshen,understand? No planet was keener about Articles One and Two of the UPCharter. The hierarchy understood well enough that if their people evercame to know about more advanced socio-economic systems it'd be the end ofGoshen's Golden Age. So they allowed practically no intercourse. Nocontact whatsoever between UP personnel and anyone outside the upperclass, understand? All right. That's where Tommy Paine came in. Itcouldn't have taken him more than a couple of months at most."
Ronny Bronston was fascinated. "What'd he do?"
"He introduced the steam engine, and then left."
Ronny was looking at him blankly. "Steam engine?"
"That and the fly shuttle and the spinning jenny," the Nigerian said."That Goshen hierarchy never knew what hit them."
Ronny was still blank. The waiter came up with the steins of beer, andRonny took one and drained half of it without taking his eyes from thestoryteller.
The other agent took it up. "Don't you see? Their system was based onchattel slavery, hand labor. Given machinery and it collapses. Chattelslavery isn't practical in a mechanized society. Too expensive a laborforce, for one thing. Besides, you need an educated man and one with someinitiative--qualities that few slaves possess--to run an industrialsociety."
Ronny finished his beer. "Smart cooky, isn't he?"
"He's smart all right. But I've got a still better example of his foulingup a whole planetary socio-economic system in a matter of weeks. A friendof mine was working on a planet with a highly-developed feudalism. Barons,lords, dukes, counts and no-accounts, all stashed safely away in castlesand fortresses up on the top of hills. The serfs down below did all thework in the fields, provided servants, artisans and foot soldiers for thecontinual fighting that the aristocracy carried on. Very similar to Europeback in the Dark Ages."
"So?" Ronny said. "I'd think that'd be a deal that would take centuries tochange."
; The Section G agent laughed. "Tommy Paine stayed just long enough tointroduce gunpowder. That was the end of those impregnable castles up onthe hills."
"What gets me," Ronny said slowly, "is his motivation."
The other two both grunted agreement to that.
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Toward the end of his indoctrination studies, Ronny appeared one morningat the Octagon Section G offices and before Irene Kasansky. Watching herfingers fly, listening to her voice rapping and snapping, O.K.-ing andrejecting, he came to the conclusion that automation could go just so farin office work and then you were thrown back on the hands of the efficientsecretary. Irene was a