The World Swappers

by John Brunner

  The news spread to everyone on Regis within moments of Counce’s arrival; everyone consequently took a few minutes off from work to crowd around and congratulate him. It was a considerable achievement to have made Bassett yield. But looking around the group, Counce noticed one person missing.

  “Where’s Anty?” he demanded, and there was a sudden silence.

  “He’s in pretty bad shape,” said Katya after a pause. “We just don’t seem able to get through to him. Last I saw he was outside the base sitting on a rock and looking at the desert.”

  “He got tired of that and went up to the polar base to look at some ice,” Lotus Scharf contradicted with unusual cynicism.

  “Excuse me, then,” said Counce, and forced his way over to the transfax.

  Just as Lotus had said, Anty was looking at some ice. There was hardly anything else to be seen at this polar base except the tent where Friend, the alien, was quartered. Anty was walking moodily up and down the edge of the excavation from which they had dug the proof of the Others’ first visit, occasionally kicking a lump of frozen mud into the pit. He seemed to have adjusted perfectly to his new, slightly different body, and his movements were natural and free. But his hunched attitude oozed depression.

  It was always a shock to Counce to see a friend changed, even when–as in Anty’s case–he had helped with the work of altering the record to change the bodily appearance. It was delicate work, but they had never yet made an error; and if they did, there were always other, older records to base their new design on. Counce recalled himself sternly to his immediate purpose.

  “Anty!” he said. The young man did not cease his aimless pacing; barely even showed that he had heard.

  Counce walked over to him and fell in alongside. “I have a job for you, Anty,” he said. “Rather an important one.”

  Anty gave him a sidelong sneer. The new face he had acquired was darker than his old one; long-nosed, sharp-jawed, it was rather a good-looking face. A lock of uncontrollable black hair showed beneath his hood. “You’d better give it to someone else,” he snapped. “I couldn’t organize a short walk.”

  “Are you still harping on the Others’ behavior? What makes you think you’re responsible for what they did?”

  “I should have known,” Anty responded moodily. “So should you, come to that.”

  “There’s only one kind of incurable fool–the man who can’t learn from experience,” Counce said sharply. “You’re busy building yourself a reputation as one. But you’re not very good at it. If you don’t trust yourself, I do. Come on, I’m taking you back to Main Base to set you to work.”

  Anty halted and stared at his companion as if he had never seen him before. At length he shrugged, and gave a reluctant nod.

  There was a small group of people waiting for them beside the transfax when they emerged into the brilliant equatorial sunshine again. Among them was a girl, fair-haired, blue-eyed, who stood a little apart from the rest, taking no apparent interest in her surroundings.

  “That’s Enni Zatok,” said Counce softly. “You know who she is, don’t you? You know what she’s gone through. Right now, she doesn’t really think; she barely even reacts. But before Bassett got hold of her, Jaroslav said she was the best potential recruit he’d found on Ymir. I’m giving you the most responsible job you’ve ever had, Anty. I’m telling you to fetch her back out of the fog she’s in and turn her into a valuable recruit. Don’t say you can’t do it. You can. You’re going to.”

  Slowly, Anty was peeling off the protective clothing he had worn at the arctic base. Not saying a word, he got down from the transfax platform and went across to Enni, who gave him a blank, distrustful look. When he put out his hand tentatively, she shied away.

  But after a moment, Anty smiled, and the faintest hint of a counterpart turned up the corners of Ennis mouth.

  Counce gave a contented sigh, and walked away.

  CHAPTER XVII

  “At a rough guess,” Counce had said thoughtfully, “it will take us four months to visit every world we intend sending Ymirans to–which is to say every world. That allows for traveling time.”

  Bassett had given him a cynical smile. He had come to accept Counce as a declared enemy turned temporary ally. The understanding between them was complete, if peculiar. He had said, “You could shorten that period considerably with your matter transmitter.”

  Counce had shaken his head in amusement. “For one thing,” he lied straight-faced, “we haven’t the power resources to use it regularly. For another, I’ve no doubt at all that you would then proceed to pack your entourage with technicians who would seize every chance of inspecting the machinery. You’ve got a Metchnikov driver in your private ship–that will be quite fast enough for our purposes.”

  So it was done.

  There was no doubt that Bassett’s reputation had spread since he achieved his position of influence on Earth; certainly the respect with which the Grand Lama of K’ung-fu-tse received his visitor was considerable.

  “They are indeed said to be diligent and industrious on Ymir,” the Grand Lama conceded. “From all accounts, they are compelled to be by the harsh nature of their world.”

  He glanced complacently at the pleasant expanse of greenery about him; he held audience in the open air, under a sacred tree imported from Earth, with two attendants fanning him.

  “But,” he added, “they are also reported to be hard and intolerant. I doubt that they will harmonize with my people.”

  Smoothly, with considered reasoning, the visitors demolished his misgivings. They oiled the bargain with certain valuable technical consignments which were badly needed on K’ung-fu-tse. And when they departed, the Grand Lama congratulated Bassett on his desire to assist his fellow men.

  The President of Boreas had had dealings with Bassett before, on a slightly different but essentially similar question. They got nothing better out of him than a promise of careful consideration, but they could tell from the avaricious look in his eyes that he would come around sooner or later.

  After all, a third of a million Ymirans could be given some land nobody else would think fit for use, and what they did after that was their own affair.

  “Why the devil do they want to leave Ymir?” snapped the Tryant of Zeus. “Don’t tell me,” he added, holding up a carefully manicured hand. “This is a bunch that’s finally gotten sick of living like fakirs between icebergs and mountains. A third of a million is a hell of a lot to wake up to sanity all at once, though.”

  “It seems to be a movement which has been growing for a considerable time,” Bassett explained.

  “Must have been! Well, what’s your interest in the matter?”

  Bassett gave a conspiratorial smile. “Three hundred thousand people who’ve decided that mortifying the flesh isn’t such a good idea after all are going to want to buy a lot of worldly comforts,” he explained. “A lot of them, of course, they’ll buy on Zeus, but I’d venture to suggest that I could arrange imports, dutiable imports …”

  The Tyrant gave an emphatic nod. This was his language. He called for paper and a pen to sign an agreement.

  And so it went At the end of four months they had organized homes on decent planets for all but half a million of the people of Ymir.

  “The rest Earth can take, right?” Counce demanded of Bassett. The other shrugged.

  “Probably. However, it seems to me that we’ve gone ahead rather rapidly. Do the Ymirans know yet that there are these new homes waiting for them?”

  “Not yet,” said Counce with a hint of grimness. “But I bet there are a lot of them who wish they were already off the planet. …”

  The next time the Amsterdam called on Ymir, Jaroslav was not at home. Puzzled, Captain Leeuwenhoek confronted the elders of Festerburg and demanded to know what had happened.

  “No one knows,” the elders assured him, desperately attempting to convey their sincerity. Leeuwenhoek looked them over contemptuously from his much greater height. Runts,
he reflected.

  “All right!” he snapped. “We warned you that if anything happened to Jaroslav Dubin, we’d be happy to forget about this icebox of a world. I call here out of charity more than anything else, and that goes for my colleagues too. Last time I was here, you were trying to frame Jaroslav on some charge involving a girl. I guess you realized we’d see through a fake like that one, but I should have thought experienced liars like you could come up with a better answer than a plain denial.”

  The elders exchanged cowed glances. In the holds of the Amsterdam was a supply of live sperm for their next season’s cattle; bulls fed on the exiguous diet of Ymiran cattle-food were more often sterile than not. There was also cold-resistant wheat, which they badly needed.

  But their protests were in vain, and in a towering rage Leeuwenhoek headed for space with his cargo still aboard. He knew plenty of other markets for what he carried. His parting shot was a promise never to come back.

  Shaken, the elders called their custodians and set them to searching for Jaroslav Dubin. They had never expected to want to see the man. But the truth–the surprising truth–was that until Leeuwenhoek accused them of making away with Jaroslav Dubin, they had no inkling that he was not where he always was: in his sinfully luxurious home.

  They turned Festerburg upside down; hunted his house from floor to roof. Even to discover his dead body would have meant that they could plead with the space traders. But they found nothing.

  Jaroslav had vanished off the face of Ymir.

  As one of the elders remarked, it looked as though the man had dug himself a hole, climbed in, and pulled the hole in after him. He had no idea how literally exact that was. Jaroslav had climbed through his transfax, and had pulled that off Ymir when he had used it, so the parallel was in fact precise. But all the puzzled searchers found was an empty cavity leading nowhere.

  Their puzzlement turning rapidly to apprehension, they awaited the visit of the next spaceship, and this time got their disclaimers in first. The captain of the ship was as adamant in disbelieving them as Leeuwenhoek had been, and he too departed without unloading, swearing he would not be back.

  “They cannot all say the same!” the more optimistic elders declared.

  But they did. And within two months the specter of famine hung gaunt and ghastly across the face of Ymir.

  In vain the elders tried to argue that it was a gift from heaven, enabling the weak-willed to fulfill the original aims of the founding fathers. That line cut no ice with parents whose ears were sore with the continual crying of hungry children; with mothers who could not feed their newborn babies; with adults whose conversation was always being interrupted by the grumbling of their unfilled bellies.

  The most indignant of all the population were the young people–those between childhood and maturity. Now the fruits of Jaroslav’s campaign of subversion became plain to the appalled elders. Boys and girls whom everyone had believed well-behaved and strictly moral openly admitted that they had been friendly with Jaroslav and that they believed he was right and the elders wrong. Moreover they began openly to accuse the elders of having done away with Jaroslav and thus of having brought this terrible situation about.

  Then the visits from spaceships stopped altogether. The word must have gone around. And the Ymirans realized that they were totally isolated and completely helpless, for they were too poor as a planet ever to have acquired even a single spaceship of their own. They had no means of getting a message to another inhabited planet except at the tardy velocity of light; long before an SOS had been received, they would have starved to death.

  Even the elders, faced with this prospect, were unable to maintain that they wanted to reap the rewards of righteousness forthwith.

  Now the long-pent hatreds began to burst forth. Parents could no longer cow their children; gangs of young people began to roam the streets, stoning the houses of the elders and jumping any custodians who ventured to interfere. “If they’re going to starve us to death, we might as well get back at them first!” they maintained, and proceeded to beat the custodians savagely with their own night sticks.

  But their cries grew weaker as hunger grew stronger.

  Those who had thought to hoard a little extra food, and were unwise enough not to be careful about pretending to be hungry when among strangers, found their stocks rifled; sometimes they were publicly execrated or spattered with filth. And then there came the day when a half-eaten child’s body was found on the street. …

  “Never again will an Ymiran be able to pretend he is any better than another man,” said Counce, stony-faced. He raised his eyes to meet Bassett’s. “I think we can now begin.”

  Bassett nodded. The spaceship in which he and Counce were traveling was only one of a huge fleet circling Ymir–these were the kind of resources Counce had chiefly needed to implement his careful plan. Ships and men. And power.

  Now, at Bassett’s command, the ships broached air and made towards their landing points. The most expert pilots to be found had been enlisted for this task; only a fortunate few would be able to set down at the regular port in Festerburg, and the rest would have to make do with what flat ground they could find.

  To the frightened people of Ymir, the arrival of the ships was like a miracle. When they had been sure they would die out, unknown, they found life promised them anew. Their directionless anger subsided; they looked again to their elders, and it was a quiet crowd that surrounded the first of the ships to put down.

  Counce went down with the group headed for Festerburg, since it was the capital of the planet. He had half expected the ships to be stormed by a mob demanding to be fed; as it turned out, the Ymirans seemed unable to convince themselves the ships were really there, and did not want to risk destroying the illusion.

  He came out of the lock of the ship which had brought him and found a group of elders, drawn of face, drab of dress, waiting a few paces ahead of the silent crowd of watchers. He looked down on them thoughtfully.

  “We have brought food,” he said, and an amplifier carried his words to every corner of the crowd. A ragged, half-hearted cheer broke out, died swiftly.

  “We have not brought much, and we shall bring no more,” Counce asserted. “We–all men–have better things to do than to give charity to fools.”

  A slow grumbling sound; it, like the cheer, died swiftly.

  “Yes, you’re fools! With a score or more pleasant worlds to choose from, planets on which men can live like men instead of like burrowing animals, your ancestors condemned you to dependence on the charity of others. Because this world is not fit for human beings to live on!”

  A boy of eighteen in the front rank of the crowd jumped forward a yard and shook his fist at the small group of elders. “It’s the truth!” he screamed.

  “You’ve had long enough to play at being a chosen people,” said Counce. Now he was looking straight down at the elders again, and they were shuffling their feet on the cold ground. “I think the last few weeks have taught you that you are proud, stupid, and stiff-necked. But all your pride was not proof against the complaining of your bellies.”

  The elders did not reply.

  “So we are going to give you a last chance,” Counce concluded. “Because we do not think that anyone who acts differently from ourselves is necessarily an enemy, we have gone to much trouble and much difficulty, first, to bring you food enough to keep you alive for a day or two, and secondly, to arrange homes for you on decent planets with decent climates. I’m giving you a choice now: stay and starve, or leave Ymir.”

  He waited. But not for long.

  After that, although a few fanatics maintained it was better to stay and starve, there was negligible opposition, and the ships opened their holds and discharged their cargoes. The fanatics warned those who accepted the food that they were selling their souls; the answers they got revealed that despite the rigors of Ymiran discipline a surprisingly complete vocabulary of abuse had survived.

  But the spacesh
ips did not only carry food; part of their cargo consisted of knocked-down spaceships hulls. With drivers, emergency rations, and oxygen-generators, they could shift Ymirans by the thousand, cramped, still hungry, but hopeful.

  As the reports came in from the four other cities on the planet, and revealed that the situation in all of them was the same, Bassett glanced at Counce.

  “Your agents on Ymir seem to have been remarkably efficient,” he said, drawing his eyebrows together. “I’d never have credited that such a response could be obtained from Ymirans.”

  Counce answered dryly, “Maybe you didn’t give sufficient credit to the power of the basic instincts. They don’t have hungry men on Earth these days, do they?”

  Bassett fell silent again; his eyes seemed to be looking into the future. Doubtless he still imagined he would be able to carry his schemes to fruition; doubtless he was picturing the future in which he would be the acknowledged unifier of the human race.

  Fortunately for the human race–and for the Others–he was imagining the wrong future.

  CHAPTER XVIII

  “i don’t understand,” said Lecoq savagely. “There hasn’t been any trouble! These Ymirans have just been swallowed up on every world we’ve taken them to–gone as meekly as lambs to the slaughter. Only there hasn’t been any slaughter.”

  “There’s no clue to where this man Counce went, I suppose,” Bassett said meditatively. He made it a statement, not a question.

  Outside, a dull afternoon had blurred the view of Rio; it matched the mood he was in perfectly.

  So these mysterious people had fulfilled their promise; everything had gone as they had said it would–Ymir evacuated, its people accepted, tolerated, laughed at here and there for their peculiar ways of speech and behavior, but without real problems. The dam had been breached. Now, if the possibilities were carefully developed, there could again be a flow of people from world to world. …