Free The Avengers of Carrig by John Brunner

some people to be settling into a kind of complacent apathy, with no incentive to strike out in new directions. For all we know, the society on one of these isolated worlds may come up with something we’ve missed—may go further into the human sciences than we’ve gone, for example, or develop biochemistry, as we’ve developed electronics, to a high level of accomplishment. So we haven’t interfered, or made our presence known, or done anything except watch.”
    Maddalena felt the promised stir of resentment deep inside her. So far Langenschmidt had told her nothing that hadn’t been covered in her indoctrination before shewas posted here. And yet … somehow it
was
different, coming not from a faraway lecturer but from a man who cared enough about his subject to devote his hard-earned extra lifetime to it. She compelled herself to go on listening attentively.
    “Keeping watch, though, is imperative. Two reasons. First is the brand-new angle these cultures give us on human social evolution. We’ve learned more about the way new inventions and discoveries affect a civilization from a century of studying the refugee worlds than we’ve learned from a millennium of analyzing terrestrial history. Second is that the Patrol aren’t the only people who’ve come this way.”
    “Slaveworld,” Maddalena said.
    “Quite right Slaveworld. Did somebody tell you that, or did you figure it out?”
    “I guess somebody told me,” Maddalena muttered.
    “Don’t look so sheepish. The point is you remembered it in context. Good! Of course, Slaveworld wasn’t one of the planets colonized from Zarathustra in a panic; its people were systematically kidnapped from their home worlds, forced to settle on a previously uninhabited planet, and all for the sake of a labor force to exploit its resources of light metals. But the plan worked for two hundred and twelve years and proved very profitable until the Patrol was set up and found out what was really going on.”
    Langenschmidt settled himself more comfortably in his chair.
    “Even with the Patrol keeping guard, there still remains the risk that someone on a world nearer to Earth might see the possibilities of dominating a superstitious and backward populace on a rich and almost virgin planet. As it happens, in the present case the risk is a very acute one. Not that they would get away with it for long—after all, the planet concerned is on my beat and I have five agents scattered over its surface. In a matter of decades at most we’d catch on. But mere knowledge of the existence of men from beyond the sky would foul things up dreadfully, since most of their local cults are founded on fables about starflight. In some of the societies where the relapse to barbarism was never total—this one I’m worried about in particular—they’re working free of the grip of superstition,but intrusion from space would probably trigger a wave of religious hysteria and set them back a long way.
    “That’s the particular system I’m talking about, by the way.” He moved his lightwand and laid its bright beam on a system about twenty-five parsecs from the base. “ZRP—Zarathustra Refugee Planet—number fourteen. Total population, confined to one major continent and the islands immediately adjacent, a little more than two million. They started with fewer than eight hundred; just one shipload set down there. Climatically very comfortable. Also it’s a Class A planet where human beings can eat indigenous plants and the flesh of at least some native animals. The largest city on the planet is a place called Carrig, which dominates the intersection between the chief north-to-south trade route and a navigable river up which the coastal folk trade their dried fish. Carrig has seventeen thousand people and controls an area equivalent to a small nation-state. That was where our agent died, or was killed, we’ve no idea which. Unfortunately he hadn’t made a report for some time; he was posing as a