PAGE 11
But, I Don’t Think
by
It was odd to think that, in a way, a Class Six had more freedom than he did. Presumably, she could talk, if she wanted, even during a meal.
And he was glad that she had not tried to eat at the same time. To have his food cooked and served by a Six didn’t bother him, nor was he bothered by her hovering nearby. But if she had sat down with him to eat–
But she hadn’t, so he dropped the thought from his mind.
Afterwards, he felt much better. He actually hadn’t realized how hungry he had been.
She took the dishes out and returned almost immediately.
“You thought what you going to do?” she asked.
He shook his head. He hadn’t thought. He hadn’t even wanted to think. It was as though, somewhere in the back of his mind, something kept whispering that this was all nothing but a very bad dream and that he’d wake up in his cubicle aboard the Naipor at any moment. Intellectually, he knew it wasn’t true, but his emotional needs, coupled with wishful thinking, had hamstrung his intellect.
However, he knew he couldn’t stay here. The thought of living in a Class Six environment all the rest of his life was utterly repellent to him. And there was nowhere else he could go, either. Even though he had not been tried as yet, he had effectively been Declassified.
“I suppose I’ll just give myself over to the Corporation,” he said. “I’ll tell them I was waylaid–maybe they’ll believe it.”
“Maybe? Just only maybe?”
He shrugged a little. “I don’t know. I’ve never been in trouble like this before. I just don’t know.”
“What they going to do to you, you give up to them?”
“I don’t know that, either.”
Her eyes suddenly looked far off. “Me, I got an idea. Maybe get both of us some place.”
He looked at her quickly. “What do you mean?”
Her gaze came back from the distance, and her eyes focused squarely on his. “The Misfits,” she said in her flat voice. “We could go to the Misfits.”
III
The Guesser had been fighting the Misfits for twenty years, and hating them for as long as he could remember. The idea that he could ever become one of them had simply never occurred to him. Even the idea of going to one of the Misfit Worlds was so alien that the very suggestion of it was shocking to his mind.
And yet, the suggestion that the Sixer woman had made did require a little thinking over before he accepted or rejected it.
The Misfits. What did he really know about them, anyway?
They didn’t call themselves Misfits, of course; that was a derogatory name used by the Aristarchy. But the Guesser couldn’t remember off hand just what they did call themselves. Their form of government was a near-anarchic form of ochlocracy, he knew–mob rule of some sort, as might be expected among such people. They were the outgrowth of an ancient policy that had been used centuries ago for populating the planets of the galaxy.
There are some people who simply do not, will not, and can not fit in with any kind of social organization–except the very flimsiest, perhaps. Depending on the society in which they exist and the extent of their own antisocial activities, they have been called, over the centuries, everything from “criminals” to “pioneers.” It was a matter of whether they fought the unwelcome control of the society in power or fled from it.
The Guesser’s knowledge of history was close to nonexistent, but he had heard that the expansion to the stars from Earth–a planet he had never been within a thousand parsecs of–had been accomplished by the expedient of combining volunteers with condemned criminals and shipping them off to newly-found Earth-type planets. After a generation had passed, others came in–the civilizing types–and settled the planets, making them part of the Aristarchy proper.
(Or was the Aristarchy that old? The Guesser had a feeling that the government at that time had been of a different sort, but he couldn’t for the life of him remember what it was. Perhaps it had been the prototype of the Aristarchy, for certainly the present system of society had existed for four or five centuries–perhaps more. The Guesser realized that his knowledge of ancient history was as confused as anyone’s; after all, it wasn’t his specialty. He remembered that when he was a boy, he’d heard a Teacher Exec talk about the Geological Ages of Earth and the Teacher had said that “cave men were not contemporary with the dinosaur.” He hadn’t known what it meant at the time, since he wasn’t supposed to be listening, anyway, to an Exec class, but he had realized that the histories of times past often became mixed up with each other.)