Mack Reynolds - Planetary Agent X

“Han?” Ronny said.

Her voice was quiet. “Where I was born, Ronny. Colonized from China in the very early days. In fact, I spent my childhood in a commune.” She said musingly, “The party bureaucrats thought their system was an impregnable, unchangeable one. Your move.”

Ronny was fascinated. “And what happened?” He was in full retreat now, and with nowhere to go, his pieces pinned up for the slaughter. He moved a pawn to try and open up his queen.

“Why don’t you concede?” she said. “Tommy Paine happened.”

“Paine!”

“Uh-huh. It’s a long story. I’ll tell you about it sometime.” She pressed closer with her own queen.

He stared disgustedly at the board. “Well, that’s what I mean,” he muttered. “I had no idea there were so many varieties of crackpot politico-economic systems among the UP membership.”

“They’re not necessarily crackpot,” she protested mildly. “Just at different stages of development.”

“Not crackpot!” he said. “Here we are heading for a planet named Kropotkin which evidently practices anarchy.”

“Your move,” she said. “What’s wrong with anarchism?”

He glowered at her, in outraged disgust. Was it absolutely impossible for him to say anything without her disagreement?

Tog said mildly, “The anarchistic ethic is one of the highest man has ever developed.” She added, after a moment of pretty consideration, “Unfortunately, it hasn’t been practical to put it into practice. It will be interesting to see how they’ve done on Kropotkin.”

“Anarchist ethic, yet,” Ronny snapped. “I’m no student of the movement, but the way I understand it, there isn’t any.”

Tog smiled sweetly. “The belief upon which they base their teachings is that no man is capable of judging another.”

Ronny cast his eyes ceilingward. “O.K., I give up!”

She began rapidly resetting the pieces. “Another game?” she said brightly.

“Hey! I didn’t mean the game! I was just about to counterattack.”

“Ha!” she said.

The Section G agent on Kropotkin was named Hideka Yamamoto, but he was on a field tour and wouldn’t be back for several days. However, there wasn’t especially any great hurry so far as Ronny Bronston and Tog Lee Chang Chu knew. They got themselves organized in the rather rustic equivalent of a hotel, which was located fairly near UP headquarters, and took up the usual problems of arranging for local exchange, meals, means of transportation and such necessities.

It was a greater problem than usual. In fact, if it hadn’t been for the presence of the UP organization, which had already gone through all this the hard way, some of the difficulties would have been all but insurmountable.

For instance, there was no local exchange. There was no medium of exchange at all. Evidently simple barter was the rule.

In the hotel—if it could be called a hotel—lobby, Ronny Bronston looked at Tog. “Anarchism!” he said. “Oh, great. The highest ethic of all. And what’s the means of transportation on this wonderful planet? The horse. And how are we going to get a couple of horses with no means of exchange?”

She tinkled laughter.

“All right,” he said. “You’re the Man Friday. You find out the details and handle them. I’m going out to take a look around the town—if you can call this a town.”

“It’s the capital of Kropotkin,” Tog said placatingly, though with a mocking background in her tone. “Name of Bakunin. And very pleasant, too, from what little I’ve seen. Not a bit of smog, industrial fumes, street dirt, street noises—”

“How could there be?” he injected disgustedly. “There isn’t any industry, there aren’t any cars, and for all practical purposes, no streets. The houses are a quarter of a mile or so apart.”

She laughed at him again. “City boy,” she said. “Go on out there and enjoy nature a little. It’ll do you good. Anybody who has cooped himself up in that one big city, Earth, all his life ought to enjoy seeing what the great outdoors looks like.”

He looked at her and grinned. She was cute as a pixie, and there were no two ways about that. He wondered for a moment what kind of a wife she’d make. And then shuddered inwardly. Life would be one big contradiction of anything he managed to get out of his trap.

He strolled idly along what was little more than a country path and it came to him that there were probably few worlds in the whole UP where he’d have been prone to do this within the first few hours he’d been on the planet. He would have been afraid, elsewhere, of anything from footpads to police, from unknown vehicles to unknown traffic laws. There was something bewildering about being an Earthling and being set down suddenly in New Delos or on Avalon.

Here, somehow, he already had a feeling of peace.

Evidently, although Bakunin was supposedly a city, its populace tilled their fields and provided themselves with their own food. He could see no signs of stores or warehouses. And the UP building, which was no great edifice itself, was the only thing in town which looked even remotely like a governmental building.

He approached one of the wooden houses. The thing would have been priceless on Earth as an antique to be erected as a museum in some crowded park. For that matter, it would have been priceless for the wood it contained. Evidently the planet Kropotkin still had considerable virgin forest.

An old-timer, smoking a pipe, sat on the cottage’s front steps. He nodded politely.

Ronny stopped. He might as well try to get a little of the feel of the place. He said courteously, “A pleasant evening.”

The old-timer nodded. “As evenings should be after a fruitful day’s toil. Sit down, comrade. You must be from the United Planets. Have you ever seen Earth?”

Ronny accepted the invitation and felt a soothing calm descend upon him almost immediately. An almost disturbingly pleasant calm. He said, “I was born on Earth.”

“Ai?” the old man said. “Tell me. The books say that Kropotkin is an Earth type planet within what they call a few degrees. But is it? Is Kropotkin truly like the mother planet?”

Ronny looked about him. He’d seen some of this world as the shuttle rocket had brought them down from the passing liner. The forests, the lakes, the rivers, and the great sections untouched by man’s hands. Now he saw the areas between homes, the neat fields, the signs of human toil—the toil of hands, not machines.

“No,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m afraid not. This is how Earth must have been once. But no longer.”

The other nodded. “Our total population is but a few million,” he said. Then, “I would like to see the mother planet, but I suppose I never shall.”

Ronny said diplomatically, “I have seen little of Kropotkin thus far but I am not so sure but that I might not be happy to stay here, rather than ever return to Earth.”

The old man knocked the ashes from his pipe by striking it against the heel of a work-gnarled hand. He looked about him thoughtfully and said, “Yes, perhaps you’re right. I am an old man and life has been good. I suppose I should be glad that I’ll unlikely live to see Kropotkin change.”

“Change? You plan changes?”

The old man looked at him and there seemed to be a very faint bitterness, politely suppressed. “I wouldn’t say we planned them, comrade. Certainly not we of the older generation. But the trend toward change is already to be seen by anyone who wishes to look, and our institutions won’t long be able to stand. But, of course, if you’re from United Planets you would know more of this than I.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”