“We settle down in those?” It was Ticos’ first experience inside an incubator.
“You do,” Nile said. “They’re clean and comfortable if you don’t mind being dusted with pollen a bit. The whole incubator has built-in small-vermin repellents. We could camp here indefinitely.”
“It doesn’t object to being tramped around in?”
“If it’s aware of being tramped around in, it presumably thinks there’s a kester present. Go ahead!”
He grunted, gripped one of the cables, stepped off the bough to another cable and swayed over to the nearest pod. Nile came behind, waited while he scrambled up the pod, twisted about, let himself down inside and found footing. “Roomy enough,” he acknowledged, looking over the edge at her. He wiped sweat from his face, sighed. “Here, let me give you back your belt.”
“Thanks.” Nile fastened the climb-belt about her. “Where’s yours, by the way?”
“Hid it out in my quarters when I saw the raiding party come up. Thought I might have use for it later. But I never got an opportunity to pick it up again. It’s probably still there.”
“How do you feel now?”
Ticos shrugged. “I’ve stopped twitching. Otherwise physically exhausted, mentally alert. Uncomfortably alert, as a matter of fact. I gather you’ve had experience with nerve guns?”
“Our kinds,” said Nile. “The Parahuan item seem to produce the same general pattern of effects.”
“Including mental hyperstimulation?”
“Frequently. If it’s a light charge, a grazing shot—which is what you caught. The stimulation should shift to drowsiness suddenly. When it does, don’t fight it. Just settle down in the pod, curl up and go to sleep. That’s the best medicine for you at present.”
“Not at present!” Ticos said decidedly. “Now that we’ve hit a lull in the action, you can start answering some questions. That ship you may have contacted—”
“A sledman racer. It was waiting for a message from me.”
“Why? How did it happen to be there?”
Nile told him as concisely as possible. When she finished, he said, “So nobody out there has really begun to suspect what’s going on. . . . ”
“With the possible exception of Tuvelas,” Nile said dryly.
“Yes, the Tuvelas. Gave you quite an act to handle there, didn’t I?”
“You did. But it kept me from being clobbered in the air. The Parahuans have been creating the recent communication disturbances?”
“They’ve been adding to the natural ones. Part of the Great Plan. They’re familiar with the comm systems in use here. They worked out the same general systems on their own water worlds centuries ago. So they know how to go about disrupting them.”
“What’s the purpose?”
“Testing their interference capability. Conditioning the humans to the disturbances. Just before they strike, they intend to blank out the planet. No outgoing messages. Knock off spaceships attempting to leave or coming in. Before anyone outside the system gets too concerned about the silence, they intend to be in control.”
Nile looked at him, chilled. “That might work, mightn’t it?”
“Up to that point it might. I’m no trained strategist, but I believe the local defenses aren’t too impressive.”
“They aren’t designed to deal with major invasions.”
“Then if the Voice of Action can maintain the previous organization—coordinate the attack, execute it in planned detail—I should think they could take Nandy-Cline. Even hold it a while. The situation might still be very much touch and go in that respect. Of course the probability is that they killed too many dissenting Palachs tonight to leave their military apparatus in good working condition. And in the long run the Great Plan is idiotic. Porad Anz and its allies don’t have a reasonable chance against the Hub.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“I am. Take their own calculations. They’ve studied us. They’ve obtained all the information they could, in every way they could, and they’ve analyzed it in exhaustive detail. So they wound up with the Tuvela Theory. A secretly maintained strain of superstrategists. . . . ”
“I don’t see how they ever got to the theory,” Nile said. “There isn’t really a shred of evidence for it.”
“From the Palachs’ point of view there’s plenty of evidence. It was a logical conclusion when you consider that with very few exceptions they’re inherently incapable of accepting the real explanation: that on the level of galactic competition their species is now inferior to ours. They’ve frozen their structure of civilization into what they consider a pattern of perfection. When they meet conditions with which the pattern doesn’t cope, they can’t change it. To attempt to change perfection would be unthinkable. They met such conditions in their first attempt to conquer Hub worlds. They failed then. They’d meet the same conditions now. So they’d fail again.”
“They’ve acquired allies,” Nile said.
“Very wobbly ones. Porad Anz could never get established well enough to draw them into the action. And they’re showing sense. Various alien civilizations tried to grab off chunks of the Hub while the humans were busy battling one another during the War Centuries. All accounts indicate the intruders got horribly mangled. How do you account for it?”
Nile shrugged. “Easily enough. They got in the way of a family fight, and the family had been conditioned to instant wholesale slaughter for generations. It isn’t surprising they didn’t do well. But frankly I’ve begun to wonder how prepared we’d be generally to handle that kind of situation now. The nearest thing to a war the Hub’s known for a long time is when some subgovernment decides it’s big enough for autonomy and tries to take on the Federation. And they’re always squelched so quickly you can hardly call it a fight.”
“So they are,” Ticos agreed. “What do you think of the Federation’s Overgovernment?”
She hesitated. One of the least desirable aftereffects of a nerve gun charge that failed to kill could be gradually developing mental incoherence. If it wasn’t given prompt attention, it could result in permanent derangement. She suspected Ticos might be now on the verge of rambling. If so, she’d better keep him talking about realities of one kind or another until he was worked safely past that point. She said, “That’s a rather general question, isn’t it? I’d say I simply don’t think about the Overgovernment much.”
“Why not?”
“Well, why should I? It doesn’t bother me and it seems able to do its job—as witness those squelched rebellious subgovernments.”
“It maintains the structure of the Federation,” Ticos said, “because we learned finally that such a structure was absolutely necessary. Tampering with it isn’t tolerated. Even the suggestion of civil war above the planetary level isn’t tolerated. The Overgovernment admittedly does that kind of thing well. But otherwise you do hear a great many complaints. A recurrent one is that it doesn’t do nearly enough to control the criminal elements of the population.”
Nile shook her head. “I don’t agree! I’ve worked with the Federation’s anticrime agencies here. They’re efficient enough. Of course they can’t handle everything. But I don’t think the Overgovernment could accomplish much more along those lines without developing an oppressive bureaucratic structure—which I certainly wouldn’t want!”
“You feel crime control should be left up to the local citizenry?”
“Of course it should, when it’s a local problem. Criminals aren’t basically different from other problems we have around. We can deal with them. We do it regularly.”
Ticos grunted. “Now that,” he remarked, “is an attitude almost no Palach would be able to understand! And it seems typical of our present civilization.” He paused. “You’ll recall I used to wonder why the Federation takes so little obvious interest in longevity programs, eugenics projects and the like.”
She gave him a quick glance. Not rambling, after all? “You see a connection?”
“A definite one. When it comes to criminals, the Overgovernment doesn’t actually encourage them. But it maintains a situation in which the private citizen is invited to handle the problems they create. The evident result is that criminality remains a constant threat but is kept within tolerable limits. Which is merely a small part of the overall picture. Our society fosters aggressive competitiveness on almost all levels of activity; and the Overgovernment rarely seems too concerned about the absolute legality of methods used in competition. The limits imposed usually are imposed by agreements among citizen organizations, which also enforce them.”
“You feel all this is a kind of substitute for warfare?”
“It’s really more than a substitute,” Ticos said. “A society under serious war stresses tends to grow rigidly controlled and the scope of the average individual is correspondingly reduced. In the kind of balanced anarchy in which we live now, the individual’s scope is almost as wide as he wants to make it or his peers will tolerate. For the large class of non-aggressive citizens who’d prefer simply to be allowed to go about their business and keep out of trouble, that’s a non-optimum situation. They’re presented with many unpleasant problems they don’t want, are endangered and occasionally harassed or destroyed by human predators. But in the long run the problems never really seem to get out of hand. Because we also have highly aggressive antipredators. Typically, they don’t prey on the harmless citizen. But their hackles go up when they meet their mirror image, the predator—from whom they can be distinguished mainly by their goals. When there are no official restraints on them, they appear to be as a class more than a match for the predators. As you say, you handle your criminals here on Nandy-Cline. Wherever the citizenry is making a real effort, they seem to be similarly handled. On the whole our civilization flourishes.” He added, “There are shadings and variations to all this, of course. The harmless citizen, the predator and the antipredator are ideal concepts. But the pattern exists and is being maintained.”