Boolbak laughed. “Fool! We want you here. Do you think for a moment we’d allow you blundering pompous snoopers around if we didn’t have a use for you?
“Let me tell you a story,” the old man went on. “Hundreds of years ago, before what you blissfully call the Kyben Explosion into space, both Crackpots and Stuffed-Shirts lived here, though they weren’t divided that way, back then. The Stuffed-Shirts were the administrators, the implements of keeping everything neatly filed, and everyone in line. That type seems to gravitate toward positions of influence and power.
“The Crackpots were the nonconformists. They were the ones who kept coming up with the new ideas. They were the ones who painted the great works of art. They were the ones who composed the most memorable music. They were the ones who overflowed the lunatic asylums. They thought up the great ideas, true, but they were a thorn in the side of the Stuffs, because they couldn’t be predicted. They kept running off in all directions at once. They were a systematic problem. So the Stuffs tried to regiment them, keep them in line, gave them tedious little chores to do, compartmentalized them in thought, in habits, in attitudes. The noncons snapped. There is no record of it, but there was almost a war on this planet that would have wiped out every Kyben—of both breeds—to the last man.”
He rubbed a hand across his eyes, as if to wipe away unpleasant images.
Themus and Darfla listened, intently, their eyes fastened to those of the old man in his ridiculous costume. Themus knew Darfla must have heard the story before, but still she strained to catch every sound Boolbak made.
“Luckily, the cooler heads won. An alternate solution was presented, and carried out. You’ve always thought the Kyben left their misfits, the Crackpots, behind. That we were left here because we weren’t good enough, that we would disgrace our hard-headed pioneers before the other races, isn’t that the story you’ve always heard? That we are the black sheep of the Kyben?”
He laughed, shaking his head.
“Fools! We threw you out! We didn’t want you tripping all over our heels, annoying us. We weren’t left behind—you were thrown away!”
Themus’s breath caught in his throat. It was true. He knew it was true. He had no doubts. It was so. In the short space of a few seconds the whole structure of his life had been inverted. He was no longer a member of the elite corps of the elite race of the universe; he was a clod, an unwanted superfluity, a tin soldier, a carbon copy.
He started to say something, but Boolbak cut him off. “We have nothing against ruling the Galaxy. We like the idea, in fact. Makes things nice when we want something unusual and it takes influence to get it quickly. But why should we bother doing the work when we can pull a string or two and one of you armor-plated puppets will perform the menial tasks.
“Certainly we allow you to rule the Galaxy. It keeps you out of trouble, and out of our hair. You rule the Galaxy, but we rule you!”
Thunder rolled endlessly through the Watcher’s head. He was being bombarded with lightning, and he was certain any moment he would rip apart. It was too much, all too suddenly.
Boolbak was still talking: “We keep the Watcher Corps on other worlds both for spying purposes and as a cover-up. So we can have a Watcher Corps here on Kyba without attracting any attention to ourselves. A few hundred of you aren’t that much bother, and it’s ridiculously easy to avoid you when we wish to. Better than a whole planet of you insufferable bores.”
He stopped again, and pointed a pudgy finger at Themus’s chest armor.
“We established the Watcher Corps as a liaison between us, when we had innovations, new methods, concepts ready for use, and you, with your graspy little hands always ready to accept what the ‘lunatics back home’ had come up with.
“Usually the ideas were put into practice and you never knew they originated here.
“We made sure the Watchers’ basic motto was to watch, watch, watch, whatever we did, to save ourselves the trouble of getting the information back where it would do the most good, undistorted—and believe me, if we didn’t want you to see something, it wasn’t hard to hide it from you; you’re really quite simple and stupid animals—so when we had a new invention or concept, all we had to do was walk into a public square and demonstrate it for you. Pegulla, see—pegulla, do.”
Themus mused aloud, interrupting the old man, “But what does, well, stacking juba-fruits in the square demonstrate?”
“We wouldn’t expect your simple-celled minds to grasp something like that immediately,” answered Boolbak. “But I happen to know Shella, who did that, and I know what he was demonstrating. He was illustrating a new system of library filing, twice as efficient as the old one.
“He knew it would be dictated, sent back to Kyben-Central and finally understood for what it was. We give you enough clues. If something seems strange, think about it a while, and a logical use and explanation will appear. Unfortunately, that is the one faculty the Star-Flung Kyben are incapable of using. Their minds are patterned, their thoughts set in tracks.” The laugh was a barb this time.
“But why are you all so—so—mad?” Themus asked, a quavering note in his voice.
“Beginning to crack, boy? I’ll tell you why we’re mad, as you put it. We’re not mad, we’re just doing what we want, when we want, the way we want. You rigid-thinkers can’t recognize the healthy sanity of that. You think everyone has to wear a standardized set of clothes, go to his dentist a specified number of times, worship in delineated forms, marry a specified type of mate. In other words, live his life in a mold.
“The only way to stimulate true creativeness is to allow it to grow unchained with restrictions. We’re not mad at all. We may put on a bit, just to cover from you boobs, but we’re saner than you. Can you change the molecular structure of a piece of steel, just by touching it at a juncture of atom-chains?”
“Is that—that—how you did it?” Themus asked.
“Yes. How far could I have gotten on a thing of this kind if I’d grown up in a culture like the one you’ve always known?
“For every mad thing you see on this world, there is a logical, sane answer.”
Themus felt his knees shaking. This was all too much to be taken at one sitting. The very fiber of his universe was being unwound.
He looked at Darfla for the first time in what seemed an eternity, and found it impossible to tell what she was thinking.
“But why haven’t you shown this steel-pinching to the Watchers, if you want them to know all the new concepts?” the incredulous Themus questioned.
Boolbak’s face suddenly went slack. The eyes became glassy and twinkly again. His face became flushed. He clapped his hands together childishly. “Oh, no! I don’t want that!”
“But why?” demanded Themus.
Again the old man’s face changed. This time abject terror shone out. He began to sweat. “They’re gonna chase me, and bend a bar of iron around my head.”
He leaped up and ran in a flurry back to the coal pile, where he burrowed into the black dust and peered out, trembling.
“But that’s crazy! No one wants to bend a bar of iron around your head. Only a maniac would keep a secret like that because of a crazy reason like that!”
“Exactly,” came Darfla’s voice from behind him, sadly. “That’s just it. Uncle is crazy.”
They had wanted to see Themus after his talk with Uncle Boolbak, and though Darfla had taken pains to cover their tracks, a group of Crackpots were waiting outside the house when they emerged.
Themus was white and shaking, and made no movement of resistance as they were hustled into a low-slung bubble-roadster and whisked back to the Cave.