The remaining twenty-five per cent was bitter, waiting its chance,
muttering of a day of revenge--and some portion of this segment was
spreading propaganda, secretly manufacturing and distributing weapons,
engaging in clandestine military drill, and maintaining contact with
the shadowy Legion of Freedom.
Childish, melodramatic name! But it had been well chosen to appeal to a
certain type of mind. The real, organized core of the anarch movement
was highly efficient. In those months I spent wandering and waiting,
its activities mounted almost daily.
* * * * *
The illegal radio carried unending programs, propaganda, fabricated
stories of Valgolian brutality. I knew from personal experience that
some were false, and I knew the whole Imperial system well enough to
spot most of the rest at least partly invented. I realized we couldn't
trace such a well-organized setup of mobile and coordinated units, and
jamming would have been poor tactics, but even so--
_The day is coming.... Earthmen, free men, be ready to throw off your
shackles.... Stand by for freedom!_
I stuck to my role. When autumn came, I drifted into one of the native
cities, New Chicago, a warren of buildings near the remains of the old
settlement, the same gigantic slum that its predecessor had been. I got
a room in a cheap hotel and a job in a steel mill.
I was Conrad Haugen, Norwegian-American, assigned to a spaceship by the
labor draft and liking it well enough to re-enlist when my term was
up. I had wandered through much of the Empire and had had a great deal
of contact with Eridanians, but was most emphatically not a Terrie. In
fact, I thought it would be well if the redskin yoke could be thrown
off, both because of liberty and the good pickings to be had in the
Galaxy if the Empire should collapse. I had risen to second mate on an
interstellar tramp, but could get no further because of the law that
the two highest officers must be Valgolian. That had embittered me and
I returned to Earth, foot-loose and looking for trouble.
* * * * *
I found it. With officer's training and the strength due to a home
planet with a gravity half again that of Earth, I had no difficulty at
all becoming a foreman. There was a big fellow named Mike Riley who
thought he was entitled to the job. We settled it behind a shed, with
the workmen looking on, and I beat him unconscious as fast as possible.
The raw, sweating savagery of it made me feel ill inside. _They'd let_
this _loose among the stars_!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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