The bondsmen did not put in an appearance. Rodrone watched for a short while, then smiled wryly, got up and left. He was in no mood for the orgy which the gathering would shortly become.
He withdrew to his private cabin and relaxed in its quiet, soothing atmosphere. Around him were his maps, his books on every conceivable subject—mostly science. A few scientific instruments were littered about, more for decoration than for any purpose they could serve here, and the smell of oiled steel mingled incongruously with the scent from a bunch of exotic pink orchids.
Rodrone was a man caught in an unstable tug of war between the poles of action and thought. Here he could sink into the latter state, brooding and dreaming, seeking to satisfy the cravings of his imagination by erratic dabblings in history and the sciences.
Idly he picked up one of his favorite tomes, a history of prehistoric Earth. It told of the drama of human nations in the confused period before interstellar flight, of Egypt, America, Pan-Asia. Turning the pages, he came to the lavish illustrations of Egyptian religion and gazed for the hundredth time at a picture that would never cease to hold him spellbound: the Barque of Millions of Years, carrying Ra and its crew of the lesser gods on a steady course through the universe.
Rodrone often wondered if the writer of the book, who seemed to have gained his information from haphazard sources, was not wrong in one major fact. Was it not more likely that the civilization of Egypt could have come after that of America, that is after the advent of spaceflight? The preoccupation with solar energy, the bright colors and stiff, stylized depictions of gods and cosmic processes did not belong on a world softened by a rich atmosphere and abundant biological life. They belonged here in alien space, light-years away from human populations, on an airless world whose sharp outlines stood out in a wash of lurid color. This, he felt, was the kind of universe the Egyptian myths understood; it seemed incredible to him that Egypt should have known nothing of other worlds while the Pan-Asian Commune, with its earthbound and totalistic philosophy, should have been the civilization to carry man’s activity into the galaxy before dissolving in its last determined effort to maintain mankind as a single political entity and prevent the explosion of its authority into a never-ending frontier.
There would never be such a thing as unity again… because of the Hub: the dazzling, star-packed swirl visible in every planet’s sky, offering such a plethora of worlds that the very concept of “world” had disappeared from men’s lives. Boundaries had not existed in the five hundred years since men came to the Hub and realized that the age of fences,was over. There were a billion places to go, and under such conditions regular authority became impossible. There were no nations. There were no governments except those partially attempted by the moguls of interstellar trade. It was a half-civilized age of free men, and there seemed no reason why it should not go on forever.
The outlying stellar districts of man’s origin, where stars were thinly spread and separated by tens of light-years, were forgotten as the Hub became man’s habitat. The location of Earth was not to be found on any of Rodrone’s maps.
The ensuing disorganization of human populations was increased by the fact that technology too had exploded and was no longer associated with an organized body of thought. Every man was his own engineer, his own technician, and numerous techniques existed locally which were not known generally. There were scores of different types of spacedrive, for instance. Such scientific contact as did take place was mainly due to men of Rodrone’s caliber—“fuzzy-brains,” to use an ambiguous term that meant execration in some quarters and grudging praise in others. The big Merchant Houses, always ambitious to coagulate political power, hated and feared such men; for while a simple adventurer caused little trouble apart from some rowdyism, and could always be depended upon to transport a cargo or escort it to ward off marauders, thinkers seemed to pose a perpetual threat to their unsteady power, especially if they were the half-hearted kind like Rodrone. To Rodrone, however, the Houses were a parasitic growth little better than the Dravian Vine. His reading of history had strengthened his natural distaste for political institutions of any kind.
In an earlier age he might have been a university professor or an academician. Today he lived by the strength of his arm and the quickness of his wits, and his knowledge in all directions was patchy and bizarre. But tonight he had promised himself a treat. He laid aside the book, pushing the colorful Egyptian gods from his mind, and took down an advanced text on physics heavily larded with mathematics.
But before taking the next step, he paused. There was a little job he wanted to do first. Moving to a servo-panel he made settings, bringing to life the transmitter in another part of the ship. His base on the planet Brüde was currently inside the ten light-year radius within which the space-tensor communicator worked instantaneously, and he had been waiting for a certain piece of news for several weeks now.
After about a minute the picture screen lit up to show an empty room bathed in the golden sunlight of a summer afternoon. Through the window opposite he could see a stretch of the crater floor where he had made his permanent camp for a number of years, covered with lilac grass and dotted with fruit trees. In the far wall of the crater gaped the cavern that he used as a hangar for his motley collection of spaceships.
A teenage face framed with golden curls slid into the screen in answer to his call. “Well?” Rodrone snapped.
The youngster’s hazel eyes flashed as he smiled languorously. “We’ve got what you wanted, Rodrone,” he drawled. “Crule came in with it this morning. Want me to lase you the store?”
Rodrone nodded. The youngster was speaking slang based on computer jargon. His words meant roughly “Shall I give you the griff.”
He disappeared for a few moments, then came back. “The planet is called Sultery, Kriga IV. It’s in a small town there on the edge of a desert. Maintown is the name of it; sounds like a lotta fun. Here are the coordinates.”
He lifted up a small plastic card printed with a string of figures and symbols. Rodrone leaned forward and pressed a button, recording the image.
“It’s in a building in the main street, supposed to be the Desert Trading Company. That’s a front, of course. I think they squeeze some kinda juice out of plants in the desert.”
“Crule didn’t go there himself?”
The other shook his head. “No, he did just what you said. It would have been too far, anyway. He’s outside somewhere. Do you want to speak to him?”
“Don’t bother, there won’t be time.” Instantaneous space-tensor communication always faded out after a few minutes, after which a period of hours or days was needed for the tortured space strains to smooth themselves out again. “We’ll be heading for Sultery. I’ll call again later.”
Cutting the connection, he leaned back, feeling a warm glow of anticipation at the good news. Although he also engaged in legitimate mining operations, his preferred activity was to hold up freight ships in space and force their captains to sell their cargoes at rates highly favorable to himself. If he was in a particularly impatient mood, he took their cargoes for nothing.
The finesse lay in not coming too much to the attention of the Guild of Merchant Houses. They found it difficult to protect their shipments and almost impossible to trace where they went after requisition. But if their losses became too troublesome, they would sometimes mount heavily-armed expeditions of war to hunt down a suspected pirate.