Visions of Liberty

“It’s Zeeb, from his emporium,” Duggan murmured to Tawna. “He’s having some kind of trouble with the locals. Wants us over there to see if you can maybe talk to them. Is that okay with you?”

“Sure.”

“We’re on our way, Zeeb.”

* * *

A miscellany of vehicles was parked outside the building in which Stell had his premises, including a beat-up truck. Inside, they found him remonstrating with a dowdily dressed woman who seemed interested in some toilet preparations that he had amassed a stack of in one of the rooms. Elsewhere, a couple with two small children were examining a shelf of electronics appliances, while a small, bespectacled, bearded man, wearing a tweed jacket with deerstalker-like hat and waving a list of some kind, hopped about, trying to get Stell’s attention. “NolYou’re outta your mind,” Stell told the woman. “How is that supposed to be doing me a favor? It’s not even what I paid.” Then, to the man, “Look, I told you I’m not interested. I don’t even know who any of those people are. How in hell do you figure you’re helpingme?” Another man appeared in a doorway at the rear, smiling and holding an elaborate wrist unit of some kind that had a miniature screen. Stell groaned, then caught sight of Duggan and Tawna and steered them gratefully back into the entrance hallway.

“There’s some kind of victimization conspiracy,” he told them. “With each other, they’re real generous. I know. I watched ’em. But when they come here, they try and rip me off with pennies and buttons. It’s almost like they think Iowe them. And Sherlock Holmes’s brother back there keeps pestering me with every hard-luck story in town. One guy’s house got flattened in a mudslide. Somebody else’s baby needs surgery. I even had a lady in earlier, asking if I wanted to put something into an education fund. What’s going on?”

Tawna nodded. “Of course. These are people who really do need help…”

“But they’re talking about helpingme!” Stell protested.

“Well, yes… that too.” Tawna obviously still couldn’t see anything strange.

“How do they figure that?” Stell demanded.

“Well…” Tawna hesitated in the way of somebody reluctant to spell out what should have been clear. “To enjoy pride and self-esteem, the way everyone wants to,” she said. “The more wealth and material things you acquire, the more you can make things easier for those going through hard times. Once you’re reasonably comfortable yourself, it starts to mean more, right?” She glanced at Duggan. “It’s like what we were saying the other day about eating all day. Beyond a certain point, any more doesn’t make sense.”

Stell’s eyes bulged. “You mean they’ll hassle me like this forever here?”

“Oh, no. Only until you learn to judge for yourself what share to put back in, like everyone else. Since you don’t know how it works yet, they’re probably just trying to help. It might take a little time.”

“Well, suppose I don’t want them telling me. What if I put my own guards on the place and keep ’em away?”

“That would be up to you, of course…. But why would anyone want to?” She looked at Duggan again and caught the resigned expression on his face. “Okay, don’t tell me, Paul. Back home they’re all like that. Yes?”

* * *

General Rhinde’s measures weren’t having the intended effect. In a closed-door meeting of the political and military chiefs aboard theBarnet, it was agreed that the citizens of Ferrydock were undergoing too little violation of their freedoms and rights to provoke whoever was supposed to defend them into coming out and doing so. Accordingly, since there was no set precedent at Tharle to say how far these things should be taken, the governor was instructed to issue a declaration stating that to facilitate improved control and efficiency, the Terran administration now owned everything in the name of everybody and was taking charge of manufacture, distribution, employment, and other services directly.

But the populace seemed happy to let them take it. A mood of festivity spread as virtually the whole of Ferrydock shut up stores and offices and took to the boulevards or sat back in the sun to await decisions and directions. Very soon, surface landers were shuttling frantically between the Barnet and Base 1, bringing extra details of planners and controllers to relieve the harried supervisory offices, now working around the clock. Meanwhile, ostensibly to bolster the security of all by setting up a centrally managed disaster relief agency—in reality, to get faster results through imposed austerity—huge stocks of food, fuel, clothing, materials, and other supplies were impounded and locked up in a large warehouse near the airport requisitioned for the purpose and officially renamed the “Federal Emergency Relief Repository.” (Use of the word “federal” was a bit premature since as of yet there were no political entities other than Ferrydock to federate with it, but the planners were already shaping up grand schemes and visions of the future.) The repository was duly furnished with a ten-foot wire fence, traffic barrier and checkpoint at the gate, and a billet of armed guards.

However, the harassed Terran administrators were like innocents in a Casbah bazaar before the demands of Tharleans taking them at their word that they were now responsible for everything, and in a short space of time just about everything of utility or value had vanished from the stores and the streets. By the terms under which the Repository had been established, the circumstances qualified as a disaster deserving of relief, and the officer in charge dutifully commenced handing back to the town, at enormous cost in overhead and added effort, the goods that had been confiscated at comparable cost in the first place. Eager to help Terran officialdom find satisfaction and self-esteem by the terms of their own morality, the Tharleans didn’t take long to exhaust the stocks completely. Since there was nothing in the regulations that said otherwise, the guards continued, befuddled but doggedly, patrolling outside to protect the contents of the empty warehouse. The only threatening incident they had to deal with, however, was when a small procession of trucks from some outlying farms arrived full of vegetables and other produce that the growers didn’t know what else to do with—only to be turned away again because there were no orders for dealing with anyone trying to bring things/n.

By this time, the political opponents of the mission’s incumbent regime, seeing ammunition here to unseat their rivals, formed a dissident faction to fire off a joint protest to Earth, giving all the facts and details. A directive from Colonial Affairs Administration terminating the Barnet’s mission and recalling the ship

forthwith arrived within forty-eight hours.

* * *

Base 1 was an abandoned shell, unsightly with the litter left by departing military anywhere. Children in makeshift helmets and carrying roughly fashioned imitation rifles marched each other to stations at the main gate guard posts. Duggan stood with his arm around Tawna’s waist among a crowd watching the last shuttle out climb at the top of a pillar of light through scattered, purple-edged clouds. If the figure he’d heard was correct, he was one of forty-six who would have been unaccounted for when the muster lists were checked, and whose compaks hadn’t answered calls or returned a location fix.

“No reservations or second thoughts, Dug?” she asked him. “No last-minute changes about everything, like Zeeb? I hope not. It would be a bit late now.” Stell hadn’t been among them at the end, after all. Driven to distraction under the pressures of trying to give things away, he had turned a complete about-face and stormed back up to the ship, berating anyone who would listen that he couldn’t get back to Earth fast enough.

Duggan shook his head. “Not me.” He gave her a squeeze, savoring the touch of her body through the light dress she was wearing. “My future’s cut out right here. Everything I want.”

“So Zeeb will probably get that promotion you told me about. I hope he’ll be pleased.”

“Oh, I’m sure he’ll fit right back in,” Duggan said. Brose had as good as come out and said that he favored Duggan for the subsection supervisor position and would back him. Duggan had seen it as a pretty transparent ploy to recruit support in the political maelstrom that Brose knew they’d be heading back to, and had no doubt that Brose had told Zeeb the same thing, and for the same reason. It felt like a reprieve from a life sentence to know he was out of all that. “In any case,” Duggan added, “I wouldn’t have gotten the job. The screening application that Brose made me put through was turned down.” Brose had been as stunned as Duggan was pleased when the assessment back from Earth readDoesn’t display the competitiveness and aggressiveness that success in this appointment would require. It meant that Duggan had done something right.

“I’m surprised,” Tawna said, sounding defensive on his behalf. “I’d have thought that even if you decided…” She caught the amused twist of his mouth. “Dug, what happened? What did you do?”

“I filled it in the Tharlean way,” he told her.

“What way’s that?”