The word “think” got through to me. Slowly my mind cleared. It was quite true what she said. I should think instead of running around like someone out of his wits. Eileen and the black-dressed stranger could be in any one of dozens of rooms or corridors-they could even be on their way out of the Project and the Enclave completely. Besides, what would I have said if I had caught up with them, anyway? Demand that the man identify himself and state his intentions toward my sister? It was probably lucky I had not been able to find them.
Besides, there was something else. I had worked hard to get the contract I had signed three days ago, just out of the University, with the Interstellar News Services. But I had a far way to go yet, to the place of my ambitions. For what I had wanted-so long and so fiercely that it was as if the want was something live with claws and teeth tearing inside me- was freedom. Real freedom, of the kind possessed only by members of planetary governments-and one special group, the working Guild members of the Interstellar News Services. Those workers in the communications field who had signed their oath of nonallegiance and were technically people without a world, in guarantee of the impartiality of the News Services they operated.
For the inhabited worlds of the human race were split-as they had been split for two hundred years now-into two camps, one which held their populations to * ‘tight” contracts and the other who believed in the so-called loose contract. Those on the tight-contract side were the Friendly worlds of Harmony and Association, Newton, Cassida and Venus, and the big new world of Ceta under Tau Ceti. On the loose side were ranged Earth, the Dorsai, the Exotic worlds of Mara and Kultis, New Earth, Freiland, Mars and the small Catholic world of Ste. Marie.
What divided them was a conflict of economic systems-an inheritance of the divided Earth that had originally colonized them. For in our day interplanetary currency was only one thing-and that was the coin of highly trained minds.
The race was now too big for a single planet to train all of its own specialists, particularly when other worlds produced better. Not the best education Earth or any other world could provide could produce a professional soldier to match those turned out by the Dorsai. There were no physicists like the physicists from Newton, no psychologists like those from the Exotics, no conscript hired troops as cheap and careless of casualty losses as those from Harmony and Association-and so on. Consequently, a world trained one kind or type of professional and traded his services by contract to another world for the contract and services of whatever type of other professional the world needed.
And the division between the two camps of worlds was stark. On the “loose” worlds a man’s contract belonged in part to him; and he could not be sold or traded to another world without his own consent- except in a case of extreme importance or emergency. On the “tight” worlds the individual lived at the orders of his authorities-his contract might be sold or traded at a moment’s notice. When this happened, he had only one duty-and that was to go and work where he was ordered.
So, on all the worlds, there were the non-free and the partly free. On the loose worlds, of which as I say Earth was one, people like myself were partly free. But I wanted full freedom, of the sort only available to me as a Guild member. Once accepted into the Guild, this freedom would be mine. For the contract for my services would belong to the News Services, itself, during the rest of my lifetime.
No world after that would be able to judge me or sell my services, against my will, to some other planet to which it owed a deficit of trained personnel. It was true that Earth, unlike Newton, Cassida, Ceta and some of the others, was proud of the fact that it had never needed to trade off its university graduates in blocks for people with the special trainings of the younger worlds. But, like all the planets, Earth held the right to do so if it should ever become necessary-and there were plenty of stories of individual instances.
So, my goal and my hunger for freedom, which the years under the roof of Mathias had nourished in me, could be filled only by acceptance into the News Services. And in spite of my scholastic record, good as it was, that was still a far, hard, chancy goal to reach. I would need to overlook nothing that could help me to it; and it came to me now that refusing to see Mark Torre might well be to throw away a chance at such help.
“You’re right,” I said to Lisa. “I’ll go and see him. Of course. I’ll see him. Where do I go?”
“I’ll take you,” she answered. “Just let me phone ahead.” She went a few steps away from me and spoke quietly into the small phone on her ring finger. Then she came back and led me off.
“What about the others?” I asked, suddenly remembering the rest of our party back in the Index Room.
“I’ve asked someone else to take them over for the rest of the tour,” Lisa answered without looking at me. “This way.”
She led me through a doorway off the hall and into a small light-maze. For a moment this surprised me and then I realized that Mark Tbrre, like anyone in the public eye constantly, would need protection from possibly dangerous crackpots and cranks. We came out of the maze into a small empty room, and stopped.
The room moved-in what direction, I could not say-and then stopped.
“This way,” said Lisa again, leading me to one of the walls of the room. At her touch, a section of it folded back and let us into a room furnished like a study, but equipped with a control desk, behind which sat an elderly man. It was Mark Torre, as I had often seen him pictured in the news.
He was not as old in appearance as his age might have made him appear-he was past eighty at the time-but his face was gray and sick-looking. His clothes sat loosely on his big bones, as if he had weighed more once than he did now. His two really extraordinarily large hands lay limply on the little flat space before the console keys, their gray knuckles swollen and enlarged by what I later learned was an obscure disease of the joints called arthritis.
He did not get up when we came in, but his voice was surprisingly clear and young when he spoke and his eyes glowed at me with something like scarcely contained joy. Still he made us sit and wait, until after a few minutes another door to the room opened and there came in a middle-aged man from one of the Exotic worlds-an Exotic-born, with penetrating hazel-colored eyes in his smooth, unlined face under close-cropped white hair, and dressed in blue robes like those Lisa was wearing.
“Mr. Olyn,” said Mark Torre, “this is Padma, OutBond from Mara to the St. Louis Enclave. He already knows who you are.”
“How do you do?” I said to Padma. He smiled.
“An honor to meet you, 1km Olyn,” he said and sat down. His light, hazel-colored eyes did not seem to stare at me in any way-and yet, at the same time, they made me uneasy. There was no strangeness about him-that was the trouble. His gaze, his voice, even the way he sat, seemed to imply that he knew me already as well as anyone could, and better than I would want anyone to know me, whom I did not know as well in return.
For all that I had argued for years against everything my uncle stood for, at that moment I felt the fact of Mathias’ bitterness against the peoples of the younger worlds lift its head also inside me, and snarl against the implied superiority in Padma, OutBond from Mara to the Enclave at St. Louis, on Earth. I wrenched my gaze away from him and looked back at the more human, Earth-born eyes of Mark Torre.
“Now that Padma’s here,” the old man said, leaning forward eagerly toward me over the keys of his control console, “what was it like? Tell us what you heard!”
I shook my head, because there was no good way of describing it as it really had been. Billions of voices, speaking at once, and all distinct, are impossible.
“I heard voices,” I said. “All talking at the same time-but separate.”
“Many voices?” asked Padma.
I had to look at him again.
“All the voices there are,” I heard myself answering. And I tried to describe it. Padma nodded; but, as I talked I looked back at Torre, and saw him sinking into his seat away from me, as if in confusion or disappointment.