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

has nothing to do with modesty. The government of Virtue says
that’s fine but they wear Mother Hubbards or they don’t dance.
Xanadu says it’ll withdraw from United Planets.”
Ronny Bronston said painfully, “Why not let them?”
Ross Metaxa poured himself a Denebian tequila, offered his
subordinate a drink again with a motion of the bottle. Ronny shook
his head.
Metaxa said, “If we didn’t take steps to soothe these things
over, there wouldn’t be any United Planets. In any given century
every member in the organization threatens to resign at least once.
Even Earth. And then what’d happen? You’d have interplanetary
war before you knew it. What’d you want, Ronny?”
“I’m about set to take up my search for this Tommy Paine.”
“Ah, yes, Tommy Paine. If you catch him, there are a dozen
planets where he’d be eligible for the death sentence.”
Ronny cleared his throat. “There must be. What I wanted was
the file on him, sir.”
“File?”
“Yes, sir. I’ve got to the point where I want to cram up on
everything we have on him. So far, all I’ve got is verbal information
from individual agents and from Supervisor Jakes.”
“Don’t be silly, Ronny. There isn’t any file on Tommy Paine.”

Ronny stared at him.
Ross Metaxa said impatiently, “The very knowledge of the
existence of the man is top secret. Isn’t that obvious? Suppose
some reporter got the story and printed it. If our member planets
knew there was such a man and that we haven’t been able to scotch
him, why, they’d drop out of UP so fast the computers couldn’t
keep up with it. There’s not one planet in ten that feels secure
enough to lay itself open to subversion. Why, some of our planets
are so far down the ladder of social evolution they live under
primitive tribal society; their leaders, their wise men and
witch-doctors, whatever you call them, are scared someone will
come along and establish chattel slavery. Those planets that have a
system based on slavery are scared to death of developing
feudalism, and those that have feudalism are afraid of creeping
capitalism. Those with an anarchistic basis—and we have
several—are afraid of being subverted to statism, and those who
have a highly developed government are afraid of anarchism. The
socio-economic systems based on private ownership of property
hate the very idea of socialism or communism, and vice versa, and
those planets with state capitalism hate them both.”
He glared at Ronny. “What do you think the purpose of this
Section is, Bronston? Our job is to keep our member planets from
being afraid of each other. If they found that Tommy Paine and his
group, if he’s got a group, were buzzing through the system
subverting everything they could foul up, they’d drop out of UP
and set up quarantines that a space mite couldn’t get through. No
sir, there is no file on Tommy Paine and there never will be. And if