The Centauri Device Read Free Page B

police action on Weber II.
    'I don't like you either, sonny, but I'm keeping quiet about it. This baiting stuff doesn't work on me, so forget it. I'm simply an executive of the World Government, doing a job. If you've got any sense, you won't make it difficult for me. I wouldn't have had you within a yard of this office if it hadn't been absolutely necessary.'
    She studied his clothing with distaste. 'I can't believe we ever had you in the Fleet,' she said. 'God, what a shambles it must have been.'
    He had been rendered uncomfortable despite every resolution.
    'You own half a world, General, and it isn't this one. Half of Earth you neither govern nor own; and to the rest of the Galaxy you have no right whatever. That lays you open.'
    'We govern the civilized world. We police the civilized colonies. Without the security we represent, scabs like you might have less freedom to speak. Would you chop logic with a UASR representative sitting in my place? There are three hundred billion people in the Galaxy and we have only one per cent of them. We're outnumbered, and we have what they want. Everything that happens out here affects us.'
    Truck shrugged. Events would carry him; it was only left to him to discover in which direction. Abruptly, two separate images welled up from the back of his head —
    He recalled the Negev, the hot boredom broken only by brief violent engagements with infiltrators from the Union of Arab Socialist Republics, the dull report of a Chambers gun, the dreadful anger that welled up when he realized he had been shot at. And he saw the packed corpse-boats orbiting Cor Caroli in Canes Venatici, their cold spectral avenues limned with a faint milky light, the plastic packing cases filled with dead children, the ranked carcasses of the adults without box of any kind, the wounds glittering at him like eyes; he smelt them.
    'Get on with it,' he said. 'Have you got anything good to smoke? — Oh well.'
    'You may have to pay a little more attention than that, laddie.'
    She swung her leg, tapped the table. Truck locked his hands in his lap and played absently with them. It looked as if it might be a long session.

    'We don't know very much (began General Gaw) about the old inhabitants of the Centauri system: they were the first of the so-called 'civilized' races too intercept the wave-front of human expansion; they were wiped out as a coherent group two centuries ago in what we've been taught to call since the 'Centauri Genocide.' Shut up, Truck. You don't understand enough of anything for your opinion to be worth anything to me. That was what the intellectuals of the time called it. I'm in favor of intellectuals as a whole, but I have reservations.
    However, it was a traumatic business for humanity, that can hardly be denied; and by the time we'd finished running round getting off on our guilt complexes, tile Centauri survivors had bolted off like rats and scattered themselves over the newly-colonized planets. They were absorbed fairly quickly — no drive, you see; they lacked cultural strength.
    They were enough like us to suggest common ancestry (it had already been discovered that two miscegenations out of three were fruitful or some such revolting thing); they weren't at all native to the Centauri system, although nobody ever discovered traces of them anywhere else; there was even some speculation that they might have originated on Earth, which really put the cat among the pigeons.
    But the rubbish died down, and at least one decent piece of thinking came out of it.
    Marsden's hypothesis of Niche Competition described the Galaxy as an ecological complex in which separate space-going races replace the separate species of a planetary ecosphere. The competition between species whose demands on the environment are identical is inevitable, natural, and harsh.
    Yes, I do believe it, as a matter of fact. Never mind that. Keep your grubby little fingers out of my head.
    Now.
    The peculiar thing about that war is that