"Lazarus, there is no such thing as Reiber's fever. When a man grounds on Secundus and all routine identifications show null, 'Reiber's fever' or some other nonexistent plague is used as an excuse to get a little tissue from him while injecting him with sterile neutral saline. You should never have been allowed to leave the skyport until your genetic pattern was identified."
"So? What do you do when ten thousand immigrants arrive in one ship?"
"Herd them into detention barracks until we've checked them out. But that doesn't happen often today with Old Home Terra in the sorry state it's in. But you, Lazarus, arriving alone in a private yacht worth fifteen to twenty million crowns-"
"Make that 'thirty.'"
"-worth thirty million crowns. How many men in the Galaxy can do that? Of those who can afford it, how many would choose to travel alone? The pattern should have set alarm bells ringing in the minds of all of them. Instead they took your tissue and accepted your statement that you would be staying at the Romulus Hilton and let you go-and no doubt you had another identity before dark."
"No doubt at all," Lazarus agreed. "But your cops have run up the price on a good phony set of ID's. If I hadn't been too tired to bother, I would have forged my own. Safer. Was that how I was caught? Did you squeeze it out of the paper merchant?"
"No, we never found him. By the way, you might let me know who he is, so that-"
"And I might not," Lazarus said sharply. "Not ratting on him was implicit in the bargain. It's nothing to me how many of your rules he breaks. And-who knows?-I might need him again. Certainly someone will need his services, somebody just as anxious to avoid your busies as I was. Ira, no doubt you mean well but I don't like setups where IDs are necessary. I told myself centuries back to stay away from places crowded enough to require them, and mostly I've followed that rule. Should have followed it this time. But I didn't expect to need any identification very long. Confoundit, two more days and I would have been dead. I think. How did you catch me?"
"The hard way. Once I knew you were on planet I stirred things up; that section chief wasn't the only unhappy one. But you disappeared in so simple a fashion that you baffled the entire force. My security chief expressed the opinion that you had been killed and your body disposed of. I told him if that were the case, he had better start thinking about offplanet migration."
"Make it march! I want to know how I goofed."
"I would not say that you goofed. Lazarus, since you managed to stay hidden with every cop and stoolie on this globe looking for you. But I felt certain that you had not been killed. Oh, we do have murders on Secundus, especially here in New Rome. But most are the commonplace husband-wife sort: We don't have many for gain since I instituted a policy of making the punishment fit the crime and holding executions in- the Colosseum. In any case I felt certain that a man who had survived more than two millennia would not let himself be killed in some dark alley.
"So I assumed that you were alive, then asked myself, 'If I were Lazarus Long, how would I go about hiding?' I went into deep meditation and thought about it. Then I tried to retrace your steps, so far as we knew them. By the way-"
The Chairman Pro Tem threw back his shoulder cloak, took out a large sealed envelope, handed it to Lazarus. "Here is the item you left in a lockbox at Harriman Trust."
Lazarus accepted it. "It's been opened."
"By me. Prematurely, I admit-but you addressed it to me. I have read it but no one else has. And now I will forget it. Except to say this: I am unsurprised that you left your wealth to the Families but I was touched that you assigned your yacht to the personal use of the Chairman. That's a sweet craft, Lazarus; I lust after it a bit. But not so much that I am anxious to inherit so quickly. But I undertook to explain why we need you-and let myself get sidetracked.?'
"I'm in no rush, Ira. Are you?"
"Me? Sir; I have no duties more important than talking with the Senior. Besides, my staff runs this planet more efficiently if I don't supervise them too closely."
Lazarus nodded agreement. "That was always my system the times I let myself get involved. Accept the whole load, then shove the work off on other people as fast as I could pick 'em. Having any trouble with democrats these days?"
"'Democrats'? Oh-you must mean 'egalitarians.' I thought at first you meant the Church of the Holy Democrat.We leave that church alone; they don't meddle. There is an equalitarian movement every few years, certainly, under various names. The Freedom Party, the League of the Oppressed-names don't matter as they all want to turn the rascals out, starting with me; and put their own rascals in. We never bother them; we simply infiltrate, then some night we round up the ringleaders and their families, and by daylight they are headed out as involuntary migrants. Transportees. 'Living on Secundus is a privilege, not a right.'"
"You're quoting me."
"Of course. Your exact words from the contract under which you deeded Secundus to the Foundation. That there was to be no government on this planet other than such rules as the current chairman found necessary to maintain order. We've stuck to our agreement with you, Senior; I am sole boss until the Trustees see fit to replace me."
"That's what I intended," Lazarus agreed. "But Son, it's your pidgin and I'll never touch that gavel again-but I have doubts about the wisdom of getting rid of troublemakers. Every loaf needs yeast. A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill. Sheep. Pyramid builders at best, decadent savages at worst. You may be eliminating your creative one-tenth of one percent. Your yeast."
"I'm afraid we are, Senior, and that's one reason why we need you-"
"I said I won't touch that gavel!"
"Will you hear me out, sir? You won't be asked to, even though it is yours by ancient custom if you care to pick it up. But I could use advice-"
"I don't give advice; people never take it."
"Sorry. Perhaps just a chance to talk over my problems with a person more experienced than I am. About these troublemakers- We haven't eliminated them in the old sense; they're still alive, or most of them. Ostracizing a man to another planet is more satisfactory than killing him for the technical crime of treason; it gets rid of him without making his neighbors too indignant. Nor have we wasted him-them-as we are using them to conduct an experiment: All transportees are shipped to the same planet, Felicity. Do you happen to know it?"
"Not by that name."
"I think you would have stumbled on it only by accident, sir; we have kept it out of public records in order to use it as a Botany Bay. It is not as good a planet as the name suggests, but it is a good one, roughly equivalent to Old Home Terra-Earth, I should say-before it was ruined, or much like Secundus when we settled here. It's rough enough to test a man and eliminate weaklings, gentle enough to let a man raise a family if he has the guts to dig in and sweat."
"Sounds like a good place; perhaps you should have hung onto it. Natives?"
"The proto-dominant race are quite fierce savages...if any are still alive. We don't know, we don't even maintain a liaison office there. This native race is neither intelligent enough to be civilized nor tractable enough to be enslaved. Perhaps they would have evolved and made it on their own, but they had the misfortune to encounter H. sapiens before they were ready for him. But that is not the experiment; the transportees are certain to win out over that competition, we do not send them empty-handed. But, Lazarus, these people believe that they can create ideal government by majority rule."
Lazarus snorted.
"Perhaps they can, sir," Weatheral persisted. "I don't know that they cannot. That is the experiment."
"Son, are you a fool? Oh, you can't be, the Trustees wouldn't keep you in office. But-How old did you say you are?"