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away into space aboard the pirate vessel
Hooded Swan?'
'No,' he said. 'But I think we can make a deal. I think we can make some
arrangement which will assure us a ride out of here. Once we have the price of
our passage, there'll be no stopping us.'
'Unless they seal you in and blast you out. Believe me, Bayon, a display of
force usually breeds big trouble. Fire always gets fought with fire.'
'Not in the Splinters. Our culture is founded on talk, not on violence. We can
do it, and we will do it. You'll help us, because you're committed. You take
orders from me, now.'
I wasn't really surprised by the sudden hardness and hostility in his tone. It
was perfectly clear that Bayon saw me only as a means to his particular end.
He wanted to use me any way he thought he could. Like his followers, he could
never bring himself to trust me enough to do things my way. He thought he knew
best and he was going to push things the way he thought they ought to go.
There would be no arguing with him.
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I had to go along. He was probably more dangerous than the miners and the
Church, so far as my state of health was concerned.
And besides, if I was on anybody's side, it would have to be his. Believe it
or not, I sympathised. I wouldn't condemn anybody to live out their life in
this filthy pit if they didn't want to.
And on top of all that, this was my best chance of cutting myself into the
profits.
On Rhapsody, where the Law of New Rome was non-existent, possession might well
represent all ten points at issue when it came to deciding who owned what.
ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
9
" So now we know, said the whisper.
'Like hell we do. What kind of a fortune could possibly be buried in a cave on
Rhapsody? It doesn't make sense.'
" It has to make sense, he pointed out. Charlot is here. Sampson is here. They
may not know what it is, but it has to be real -make no mistake about that.
The problem is that you can't see the sense.
'Can you?'
" You're in a better position to guess than I am. You've been on worlds of
this type before.
'And you have access to all my memories of those worlds. But there's never
been a world quite like this one. The people on those other worlds lived and
acted like people.
This is different. It's possible the idiots only think they've found
something, and are raising hell over nothing at all.'
" You shouldn't allow your dislike of these people to lead you into
underestimating them. They would love to believe that there is nothing in that
grotto of theirs. If they do believe it, it's because they can't refuse. As
your new ally has pointed out, they are not ignorant except by conscious
effort of will, which applies only to certain areas. They have their analysts
and their logicians. Somebody knows what is in that cave and has checked their
guess very carefully indeed. It doesn't matter who did it - only that it could
be done, here no less than anywhere else. The fact that they have refused the
galaxy's values does not make them blind to its prices.
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ABC Amber LIT Converter http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
'Well, you know what kind of thing brings a price these days as well as I do.
Knowledge. Salable ability. Alien science and alien technology. But there's
none of that in the caves of Rhapsody.'
" I think you'll find that the tremendous success of New Alexandria hasn't
been simply in the collection of data. The New Alexandrians - including
Charlot - are, in their own right, great scientists. The original purpose of
the Library, don't forget, wasn't to provide leverage for galactic power, it
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was to provide for the needs of the pure research workers of the star-worlds.
'I know all that.'
" That's hardly surprising, since I'm picking it all out of your brain. But it
needs calling to your attention, because it has a bearing on the current
problem.
'I don't see how.'
" The New Alexandrians owe all their wealth not to alien knowledge but to
their own ability to use and develop what they have found there. Their
principal role is not collecting but adapting.
'In other words,' I said, 'you reckon it's something new. Not vulgar cash
convertibles like radioactives or gemstones, but something peculiar which has
properties no one's ever come across before.'
" That's about the size of it. No amount of mineral wealth could possibly
command the kind of respect that this find does. They could simply sell that
to Sampson for a new set of conversion machines, and carry on exactly as
before. This is more important than that - probably important with respect to
the ethical considerations of the
Church, as well. There seems to be more trouble here than would be warranted
by a simple question of whether to involve outsiders or by private
profiteering.
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