asked.
Dallum thought for a moment. “I’ve never heard of him inspecting anything.”
“The historians believe that long ago the aristocracy was much more concerned with practical affairs. The art and literature that survives support that conclusion. Down through the centuries the aristocrats gradually lost interest in everything except their own pleasures.”
“I see,” Dallum mused. “And one couldn’t expect intelligent agricultural management from a starving ol. He’d be too much in a hurry to eat to pay any attention to plant heredity. If for centuries these people have been eating the best grain and saving the worst for seed, it may take much longer than I’d thought to breed plants with a decent productive capacity.”
“Why don’t you import some?” Farrari asked.
“Ha! Read your IPR Field Manual lately?”
“I don’t have a field manual.”
“You’re the lucky one,” Dallum said with a grin.
The other inhabitant of Farrari’s corridor was Semar Kantz, a military scientist and a devoted student of the kru’s army and its tactics. Kantz had a vast collection of teloids of art works depicting weapons and soldiers and battles. Working together, the two of them arranged these in chronological order, Farrari classifying according to art styles and techniques and Kantz according to weapon types and shapes and tactical formations. Both were startled and delighted at the ease with which their respective specialties dovetailed.
Farrari was enjoying himself and keeping furiously occupied, but as the months slipped by uneventfully he became increasingly concerned that he was somehow failing to fulfill his assignment.
“How do you study an IPR problem from the Cultural Survey point-of-view?” he asked Heber Clough.
Clough regarded him with astonishment.
“That’s what my orders say I’m to do,” Farrari explained, “and I don’t know how to go about it.”
“What do you think you’ve been doing?” Clough demanded. “You’ve been looking at all of our problems, and if it hasn’t been from the Cultural Survey point-of-view I don’t know what you’d call it. Didn’t your academy give you any suggestions?”
Farrari laughed bitterly. “At the academy no one had the vaguest notion as to what IPR wanted with us. There’s this deadly tradition that every cadet must have a personal interview with the commandant on promotion day. You walk in and salute, and the commandant says, ‘Congratulations, Cadet Blank. Your work this past year has been excellent.’ Or ‘good’ or ‘satisfactory’—if the work hadn’t been satisfactory the cadet would have been informed earlier, in an entirely different kind of interview. ‘You are promoted one grade and for the coming year you are ordered to this academy to continue your studies. Are there any questions, Cadet Blank? Dismissed!”’ Clough laughed heartily. “It sounds hauntingly familiar, except that at the IPR Academy we also had to listen to a restatement of the academy’s position on overnight passes.”
“Anyway, my class was lined up and waiting for the interviews to start, and suddenly the commandant walked out looking as if the Cultural Survey had been abolished and announced that we’d all been promoted and transferred in rank to the Interplanetary Relations Bureau for assignment as the Bureau directed. He couldn’t tell us why, or what IPR expected of us, because no one had bothered to inform him. We shipped out four hours later. Most of the four hours was spent in figuring how to include a two-year issue of texts and manuals in the fifty kilograms of luggage we were allowed, it being fairly certain that we’d be working a long way from a CS reference library. I did manage ten minutes of research because I wanted to find out what the IPR Bureau was.”
“Did you succeed?”
“No. It is alleged to have the largest annual appropriation of any governmental department, which I believe. My transfer in rank doubled my salary. Other than that, it functions only outside the organized territory of the Federation, and no one seems to know what it does there.”
“It was once the most important agency of the Federation government,” Clough said. “When relations between worlds became a matter of routine regulation instead of heroic improvisation it faded into insignificance—within the Federation. Outside Federation boundaries it runs the galaxy and maybe the universe, too, to whatever extent the universe condescends to take notice of it. Put in simplest terms, IPR is the sole link between the Federation and any world that isn’t a member, and its most important function is preparing non-members for membership.”
“That’s more or less what I’d concluded. Unfortunately, none of it helps me to figure out what I’m supposed to be doing.”
“Has the coordinator said anything to you?”
“No. I haven’t talked with him since the day I signed in.”
“Believe me, if he had any complaints you would have talked with him,” Clough said fervently. “The more Coordinator Paul leaves a man alone, the better the job he’s doing. If you have any doubts about your work, why don’t you ask him?”
“It seems like an awfully silly thing to be bothering the coordinator with,” Farrari said.
But more days passed, and finally Farrari could contain his uncertainty no longer. He humbly went to see the coordinator.
CHAPTER 3
Ingar Paul, a large, untidy man with a brilliantly tidy mind, greeted Farrari cordially, placed a chair for him, lit up a monstrous, hand-carved pipe—both artifact and habit were souvenirs of a primitive society he had once worked with—and sat back to compose himself for whatever problems the Cultural Survey trainee proposed to aim at him.
Farrari allowed his gaze to linger briefly on the framed motto that hung on the wall just above the coordinator’s head. DEMOCRACY IMPOSED FROM WITHOUT IS THE SEVEREST FORM OF TYRANNY.
Paul exhaled gently. “Well, Farrari?”
“I have a confession to make, sir—though it probably won’t be news to you.”
Paul smiled. “Confession is said to be healthful. I’m no authority on that, because to tell the truth I don’t often get to hear one. What do you want to confess?”
“I can’t figure out what it is I’m supposed to be doing.”
Paul’s smile broadened.
“My orders say I’m supposed to study IPR problems from the CS point-of-view,” Farrari went on.
“I know.”
“What the devil does that mean?” Farrari demanded, momentarily forgetting his lowly AT/I rank.
Coordinator Paul took no offense. “I have no idea what an IPR problem would look like from the CS point-of-view.”
“I don’t know what an IPR problem looks like, period,” Farrari said. “I’ve listened carefully to everything that goes on at the conferences, and talked with your specialists as much as I could, and it doesn’t seem to me that you have any problems. Unanswered questions, yes, but not problems. You’re just collecting information, and organizing it and studying it, and I suppose when you’ve finished someone will give this
