Free Harvest of Stars by Poul Anderson Page B

Kyra. When she remarked on it, he explained wryly, “This isn’t my kind of escapade. I’ve led a pretty quiet life.”
    “Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “You’ve knocked around with lots of odd people, haven’t you? And gotten familiar with ’em, too, which is more than I probably could.”
    “Bueno, my work demands that.”
    Yes, she thought, an intuitionist had to be a peculiar combination of intellect and sensitivity. S/he must possess a basic grasp not just of modern science and technology but of society; not just history, diagrammed structures, analyzed dynamics, but individual human beings; not just the High World but enough of the relatively backward cultures and subcultures that s/he could see—no, feel—something of their interactions with it. On that basis s/he was supposed to develop models and write programs, to generate ideas and make proposals that had a fair likelihood of being partially right. S/he might thus anticipatethe results of some change, especially on the human level, and indicate ways to forestall or mitigate those that were undesirable.
    Guthrie had created the profession, Kyra remembered. He set in motion the first studies and experiments, then the first recruitments. Fireball gained so much thereby, even at that early stage, that other companies were quick to imitate, and finally governments did. She harked back to a lesson in school. As part of her education, she was to know about this, whether or not it ever impinged directly on her. Guthrie himself had recorded the lecture. He didn’t appear in the multi. A faceless box wouldn’t appeal to youngsters, and he reserved recreations of his mortal image for occasions more special. Artfully prepared scenes accompanied the homely voice.
    “The classic example from the past is the automobile. You’ve seen it in historicals, a live-piloted ground vehicle fuelled by hydrocarbons. It became practical and started taking over from the horse in a single generation. Well, any fool in those days could’ve seen that happening. A smart fellow could’ve predicted that this’d lead to a major industry. The subsidiary industries, like oil and highway work, would join in to make a combination that’d dominate the economies of whole nations. But I don’t believe anybody planned for oil reserves gaining vital strategic importance, till possession of them was suddenly one of the considerations that wars were being fought over. The explosion of suburbs and the dry rotting of inner cities, strangulated traffic, air not fit to breathe, all these caught people more or less by surprise. I’ll barely mention a revolution in sexual styles, to titillate you and make you want to study further on your own.
    “I don’t say the auto was the exclusive cause of all this, but it sure had a lot to do with it. Nor do I say the auto should’ve been suppressed, or kept for an elite while
hoi polloi
crammed into public transit. But with foresight, assorted entrepreneurs could’ve done plenty of good and, not so incidentally, made plenty of money.
    “For instance, the internal combustion engine was a ghastly mistake. With a proper flash boiler, which wouldn’thave been hard to engineer, steam could’ve edged it out, burning a great deal cleaner. Autos could’ve been banned in city centers early on. The public would’ve gone along with that if small, nimble runabouts like our bubbletrikes had been available. This would have helped keep the cities pleasant to live in, and they might have sprawled less.
    “I repeat, there wouldn’t have been any final answers. No doubt the solutions would’ve generated problems of their own. Brains by themselves aren’t enough. That they are, that’s the grand perennial delusion of the intellectuals. But damn it, our brains were meant to be used!
    “Now think about your world today. Look around you and think. Tech innovations; changing relationships between institutions; as simple-seeming a question as where to locate a