on test.
Maddalena had been staring at tonight’s half moon-
small, and reduced in size still further by its distance
from Cyclopsfor some minutes before she spoke again.
“There are an awful lot of things I can’t get clear
about the situation here, Gus. Maybe you’d better edu-
cate me.”
“Hm?” Langenschmidt jerked his head. “Oh! Oh yes.
I’m sorryI’m still working on the false assumption that
you were briefed before you were sent to Cyclops. Since
you weren’t, presumably you know practically nothing
about it. After all, it’s never been a world to hit the
galactic headlines.”
“The last rime I paid it any attention was twenty years
back. There must have been many changes since then.”
“Yes and no.” Langenschmidt had been perching on
the end of the room’s single large table; now he grew
uncomfortable and moved to a contoured chair, drop-
ping his body into it absently and letting it slump.
“Thethe mood of Cyclops, the planetaiy average of
human attitudes, so to speak, is constant over a long
period, as it is anywhere. What was the word I beard
you apply?”
“Predatory?”
“Exactly. Ummmm . . . Where the hell ought I to
start?” Langenschmidt rubbed his face tiredly. “Clear
back at the beginning, I guess. It must start with the fact
that it’s an unsupendsed foundation.”
Maddalena started. “Is is now? That accounts for a
great deal, I imagine.”
“I’m sure it does. Of the two hundred and sixty civil-
ised worlds, over two hundred followed the standard of-
ficial patternexploration, selected colonisation under the
direction of a polymath trained intensively for the de-
velopment of one and only one particular planet, and
eventually opening to immigration. Cyclops is among the
anomalous fifty-odd. It’s a second-stage offshoot from
Dagon. Ring any bells?”
“Of course it does.” Maddalena hesitated, then gave a
little nervous laugh. “Dear Gus! How little you’ve
changed! You still have exactly the same lecturing man-
ner as you did when you first briefed me on ZRP Four-
teentouchy, expecting this conceited Earthgirl to have
ignorance of unplumbable depth.”
“I’m sorry.” Langenschmidt gave a crooked smile. “So
we take the rest as read. They made one of their rare
mistakes on Dagon, and picked for its polymath a man
who couldn’t stand the strain. He clashed with one of his
continental managers, who finally couldn’t endure it any
more and decided he could do better by himself on some
other planet. He, and about four thousand followers, left
Dagon and set out towell, to homestead Cyclops, I
guess.
“It was as tough in the early days as it must have been
on ZRP One, or some other comparatively hospitable
ZRP. Naturally, since he’d attracted his followers on the
basis of liberty- from the authoritarian whims of a bad
polymath, the original leader insisted on at least the
structure of a representative government, and that’s sur-
vived, but only as a formality to the degree required to
qualify Cyclops as a member of galactic civilisation.
Their laws follow the Unified Galactic Code, too. In
theory.
“In fact, starting off with so great a handicap, they let
all this remain a formality and proceeded to develop a
hand-to-mouth pattern they’ve never escaped from. It’s
one of the few civilised planets where ruthlessness brings
power. Quist, who has been the de facto head of govern-
ment for a long time now, has no better qualifications
for the )ob than sheer love of authority. She enjoys giv-
ing orders and having them obeyed that significant one
per cent more than anyone else.
“If you want handy comparisonswell, they have to
be pre-Galactic. First century atomic era. Earthside areas
like Spain, some countries of Latin America, and some of
South Asia. Where you had an economy too impover-
ished to support the governmental structure of a finan-
cially efficient administration, but a sort of crust of great
wealth overlying it. Half the population are at the pov-
erty line, a third are illiterate, a quarter are diseasedbut
perhaps one in twenty have achieved some kind of per-
sonal success by pure doggedness.”
“I didn’t realise you knew Earthside history as well as
that,” Maddalena said after a moment’s silence.