during the reign of Vestolian as you are. But you can't just withdraw from the marketplace of ideas and culture. Come to the Bureau. Prove that you're better than we are! You'll be given every opportunity to do so. Every facility will be open to you, every comfort will be provided. If you want to plot the downfall of the Commonwealth, what better place could there possibly be to do so than the Bureau, where you'll be in instant contact with other races who feel equally wronged?” The Procyons, being insectoids, could not understand why the Bureau had been created in the first place. They bore Man no malice; indeed, they had replaced their decimated population in a handful of years. They simply could not relate to the problem. Why travel to the Bureau to eat and breathe? They could do that right here.
His next stop was Domar, but he didn't even get a chance to get out of his ship. The Domarians, one of the few ESPer races in the galaxy, knew everything he was prepared to say and weren't buying any. After all, what need had a race of telepaths for close physical contact with other races? At Terrazane he felt he had the means with which to finally strike a responsive chord. “The people of Terrazane,” he said, “are known throughout the galaxy for the magnificent edifices they construct in their cities. You, of all races, must understand that a project such as the Bureau has been designed to be used. To let it stand, an unused, sterile monument to futility, would border on the criminal. Surely the Terrazanes will not boycott the Bureau.” But he was wrong again, for the Terrazanes’ racial art was nonfunctional. Huge, minutely embellished edifices covered the planet, but for no purpose other than the appreciation of the populace at large. On Aldebaran XIII the reaction of the natives against what they felt to be a structure built by Man to assuage his conscience was so violent that he needed an armed guard to escort him back to his ship. On Gamma Leporis IV, he met with a race of aquatic beings that had never been exploited by Man, had never been at war with Man, and had no reason whatsoever to feel inimical to Man. Garbed in a protective undersea suit, he used a modified T-pack to address their delegation. “I am at a loss to understand why you have withdrawn your support from the Bureau,” he told them. “We have always had an amicable relationship between our races, and since so very few races are aquatic, the potential to learn about the thousands of other sentient species is severely limited even for those of you who have journeyed to other worlds. But at the Bureau, your opportunities to increase both your knowledge and your alliances would be virtually limitless. Ample living space would be provided you, and all of your needs—medical, social, religious, even sexual —would be provided for. Surely you, who have the most to gain from the Bureau and the least reason to embarrass my race, will reconsider
your position.”
They agreed with everything he said. The Bureau would make the task of contacting other races infinitely easier, and certainly they had nothing against Man, who had freed them, ages ago, from the tyrannical yoke of the Lemm. But, on the other hand, those few other races they had been in contact with felt that a gesture must be made against Man's ironfisted control of the galaxy, and while they personally had only the highest regard for Man, they would not go against the will of the majority, especially in a situation such as this, where they were physiologically prohibited from gaining a full appreciation of the problem. They intended no offense, but under the circumstances... And so it went, on world after world, with race after race. By the time he visited the twentieth alien planet, he found out that he was far from the only emissary of the Commonwealth trying to persuade the aliens to reconsider their stand. He struck paydirt on the twenty-seventh planet, Balok VII, only to have his work undone when the Commonwealth began putting economic sanctions on all alien worlds that had not yet come back into the fold. The Balokites, who had been all set to rejoin the Bureau, dug in their heels and again withdrew their support. The Setts actually went to war with the Navy, and held their own for almost a month before they were totally exterminated. As failure after failure greeted Man's efforts, work nonetheless proceeded on the Bureau. Foundations were laid, walls and facades erected, environmental systems laid in, communication and translation systems set up, food synthesis laboratories installed, medical centers created, decorations and furniture imported.
Within a decade the Bureau was complete, a huge, proud, unbelievably complex monolith of a building, towering many thousands of feet above the rocky surface of Deluros IV, visible for miles in every direction, all of its internal systems functioning smoothly, its exterior a paean to the art of a thousand sentient races.
Thus it stood. And thus, Mallow knew, it would stand for all eternity, an empty, unused monument both to Man's brilliance and his shortcomings, an edifice so mature and farsighted in its conception and execution that neither Man nor his neighbors in the galaxy would ever be ready for it. The night it was completed Mallow got rip-roaring drunk and stayed that way for a week. When he finally sobered up he resigned his position, left the Deluros system, set up shop some forty thousand light-years away, and made a fortune designing inexpensive but highly efficient group housing for the colonists of Delta Scuti II.
21: THE COLLECTORS
...With the Commonwealth entering a period of severe unrest, it was primarily the duty of the planetary governors to hold their native populations in check. They were a remarkable lot, these governors, charged with the responsibility of speaking for the Commonwealth on their respective worlds. One of the greatest of them was Selimund (6888- G.E.), who, in addition to his political abilities, founded the Museum of Antique Weaponry on Deluros VIII...
collection, or collectors and collections in general in
natives despised humanity so devoutly and so openly that he perforce had very little contact with them.
And, too, there was his collection.
Man had always had the urge to collect things, to surround himself with ordered series of possessions. Possibly it was an intellectualization of the primordial territorial instinct, possibly not. Selimund himself called it the “pack-rat urge,” although no member of that long-extinct species had ever carried the fetish quite so far as Man had done. There was something in his nature that reveled not only in pride of ownership, but in the painstaking formulation of lists of objects to be procured, lists of objects already procured, and the numerical, alphabetical, or other orderly arrangement of both possessions and lists. It wasn't exactly avarice, for most collectors spent enormous amounts of time and capital on the accumulation of objects—or, more often, sets and series of objects—that most other people considered either trivial or worthless.
Collecting, over the eons, had become highly specialized, just as had all other forms of endeavor. There was once an era when it was possible for a man to know, in his own lifetime, the sum total of all scientific knowledge. By the time the race had left its birthplace and begun to permeate the galaxy, no man could even know his own highly specialized field with any degree of completeness, and the concept of the true Renaissance Man was lost forever. So, too, did collections become more and more specialized. It was still possible to collect the entire works of a single author or painter, or representative stamps from every period of a planet's history—but to try to collect
And very few men collected with the skill, passion, or success of the current governor of Mirzam X. Selimund, whose closest association with military life was the armed guard around his executive mansion, had for reasons probably not even known to himself decided early in life that there was nothing quite so fascinating as the study—and, hence, the collecting—of alien firearms. The production and possession of all such weapons had been strictly prohibited since the inception of the Commonwealth, but that merely made their acquisition all the more challenging. He had begun with handguns from the Canphor Twins and Lodin XI from the Democracy, and had gradually increased his possessions, moving both forward and backward from that historical point in time. He was acknowledged to be the greatest living authority on the weaponry of the late Democratic period, and more than once he had been called in
