"Mack Reynolds - Planetary Agent X" - читать интересную книгу автора (Reynolds Mack)

“Yeah. Back to nature. The trouble with the human race is
that it’s got too far away from nature. So a whole flock of them
landed on this planet. They call it Mother, of all things. They
landed and set up a primitive society. Absolute stone age. No
metals. Lived by the chase and by picking berries, wild fruit, that
sort of thing. Not even any agriculture. Wore skins. Bows and
arrows were the nearest thing they allowed themselves in the way
of mechanical devices.”
“Good grief,” Ronny said.
“It was a laugh,” Jakes told him. “I was assigned there as
Section G representative with the UP organization. Picture it. We
had to wear skins for clothes. We had to confine ourselves to two
or three long houses. Something like the American Iroquois lived
in before Columbus. Their society on Mother was based on
primitive communism. The clan, the phratry, the tribe. Their
religion was mostly a matter of knocking into everybody’s head that
any progress was taboo. Oh, it was great.”
“Well, were they happy?”
“What’s happiness? I suppose they were as happy as anybody
ever averages. Frankly, I didn’t mind the assignment. Lots of
fishing, lots of hunting.”
Ronny said, “Well, where does Tommy Paine come in?”
“He snuck up on us. Started way back in the boondocks away
from any of the larger primitive settlements. Went around putting
himself over as a holy man. Cured people of various things from
gangrene to eye diseases. Given antibiotics and such, you can
imagine how successful he was.”
“Well, what harm did he do?”
“I didn’t say he did any harm. But in that manner he made
himself awfully popular. Then he’d pull some trick like showing
them how to smelt iron, and distribute some corn and wheat seed
around and plant the idea of agriculture. The local witch doctors
would try to give him a hard time, but the people figured he was a
holy man.”
“Well, what happened finally?” Ronny wasn’t following too
well.
“Communications being what they were, before he’d been
discovered by the central organization—they had a kind of Council
of Tribes which met once a year—he’d planted so many ideas that
they couldn’t be stopped. The young people’d never go back to flint
knives, once introduced to iron. We went looking for friend
Tommy Paine, but he got wind of it and took off. We even found
where he’d hidden his little space cruiser. Oh, it was Paine, all right,
all right.”
“But what harm did he do? I don’t understand,” Ronny
scowled.
 “He threw everything on its ear. Last I heard, the planet had
broken up into three main camps. They were whaling away at each
other like the Assyrians and Egyptians. Iron weapons, chariots,
domesticated horses. Agriculture was sweeping the planet.