"I'm glad you showed up here, Leila darling," he was saying. "I'd
intended to catch up with you before you got out of the moons,
anyway--but you've saved me a lot of trouble. From now on, you're going
along with me."
Leila knew a sinking sensation, but she rallied bravely. "What do you
think you're going to do--convert the _Zodiac_ into a pirate warship,
with a Woolly crew? Those days are gone."
"Nothing so stupid; she'll go on schedule to Titan. I've made some
discoveries, and I intend to use them. People have been using Woollies
for fifty years, and nobody has realized their full possibilities. I'd
already begun to a year ago, when I took this job on this God-forsaken
rock; and here I've had the leisure and the opportunity to work the
possibilities out."
"For murder?" asked Leila bluntly.
"I had to get rid of Chandler--he had one of those single-track minds
full of ideas about 'loyalty to the company' and so on--But I see
you don't understand. Yet you must know better than I do just what's
happened in the Subsystem since I sent out the news that one Woolly
had killed one man." He paused, and when she did not answer, "Panic,
financial collapse, the whole system starts falling to pieces. Before
long, there are going to be more such incidents--not on Phoebe this
time, but on Titan, right in the heart of Saturnian civilization. You
can imagine what will happen then. Now suppose, in the midst of the
turmoil, appears a small group of men who have learned to control
the Woollies, fully control, so that no untrained human mind can
challenge their commands. Like I control Big Bill." He gestured at
the immobile monster. "Look at him; he thinks only what I think, he
wants only what I want--never before did two hearts beat so completely
as one.... Suppose, then, that this group--a few friends and I--take
over the central offices of the Company, and incidentally the Colonial
Government. Then, of course, the secret can come out: that Woollies
don't run wild, they don't kill unless they're ordered to, and they
won't be ordered to kill anybody who stays in line and does as he's
told. There'll be a general sigh of relief, and nobody will worry about
the change of administrations."
Leila sat very still, assimilating the picture his words built up. It
wasn't impossible; it was the ancient pattern of successful revolution:
first bring in chaos, then out of the chaos a new order of brutal
force. There was only one flaw.... She laughed.
"It ought to work very nicely, Paul. Until the Earth Government hears
about it and send a couple of battleships to blast you out of the
Universe."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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