Brisby found himself showing a “Most Secret” dispatch to his most Junior, acting petty officer, to convince said junior that his C.O. was entitled to talk with him. At the time It seemed reasonable; it was not until later that the Colonel wondered.
Thorby read the translated dispatch and nodded. “Anything you want. Skipper. I’m sure Pop would agree.”
“Okay. You know what he was doing?”
“Well . . . yes and no. I saw some of it. I know what sort of things he was interested in having me notice and remember. I used to carry messages for him and it was always very secret But I never knew why.” Thorby frowned. “They said he was a spy.”
“Intelligence agent sounds better.”
Thorby shrugged. “If he was spying, he’d call it that. Pop never minced words.”
“No, he never minced words,” Brisby agreed, wincing as he recalled being scorched right through his uniform by a dressing-down. “Let me explain. Mmm . . . know any Terran history?”
“Uh, not much.”
“It’s a miniature history of the race. Long before space travel, when we hadn’t even filled up Terra, there used to be dirtside frontiers. Every time new territory was found, you always got three phenomena: traders ranging out ahead and taking their chances, outlaws preying on the honest men — and a traffic in slaves. It happens the same way today, when we’re pushing through space instead of across oceans and prairies. Frontier traders are adventurers taking great risks for great profits. Outlaws, whether hill bands or sea pirates or the raiders in space, crop up in any area not under police protection. Both are temporary. But slavery is another matter — the most vicious habit humans fall into and the hardest to break. It starts up in every new land and it’s terribly hard to root out After a culture falls ill of it, it gets rooted in the economic system and laws, in men’s habits and attitudes. You abolish it; you drive it underground — there it lurks, ready to spring up again, in the minds of people who think it is their ‘natural’ right to own other people. You can’t reason with them; you can kill them but you can’t change their minds.”
Brisby sighed. “Baslim, the Guard is just the policeman and the mailman; we haven’t had a major war in two centuries. What we do work at is the impossible job of maintaining order on the frontier, a globe three thousand light-years in circumference — no one can understand how big that is; the mind can’t swallow it.
“Nor can human beings police it. It gets bigger every year. Dirtside police eventually close the gaps. But with us, the longer we try the more there is. So to most of us it’s a job, an honest job, but one that can never be finished.
“But to Colonel Richard Baslim it was a passion. Especially he hated the slave trade, the thought of it could make him sick at his stomach — I’ve seen. He lost his leg and an eye — I suppose you know — while rescuing a shipload of people from a slaving compound.
“That would satisfy most officers — go home and retire. Not old Spit-and-Polish! He taught a few years, then he went to the one corps that might take him, chewed up as he was, and presented a plan.
“The Nine Worlds are the backbone of the slave trade. The Sargony was colonized a long time ago, and they never accepted Hegemony after they broke off as colonies. The Nine Worlds don’t qualify on human rights and don’t want to qualify. So we can’t travel there and they can’t visit our worlds.
“Colonel Baslim decided that the traffic could be rendered uneconomic if we knew how it worked in the Sargony. He reasoned that slavers had to have ships, had to have bases, had to have markets, that it was not just a vice but a business. So he decided to go there and study it.
“This was preposterous — one man against a nine-planet empire . . . but the Exotic Corps deals in preposterous notions. Even they would probably not have made him an agent if he had not had a scheme to get his reports out. An agent couldn’t travel back and forth, nor could he use the mails — there aren’t any between us and them — and he certainly couldn’t set up an n-space communicator; that would be as conspicuous as a brass band.