A Spaceship Named: 45 Sci-Fi Novels & Stories in One Volume. Randall Garrett

idea of what the PRS is actually doing.

      He could almost hear Lou's voice again. "Yes," she was saying. "I remember the book. It was put in our reference library for its humorous aspects."

      That's right, Malone thought. It would be only funny to you. But it would be frightening and terrible to an awful lot of people simply because they wouldn't understand what the Society was all about.

      "All right," Lou's voice said helpfully. "And what is it all about?"

      Malone settled back in the driver's seat as the car continued to spin along the road. It seems to me, he thought carefully, that any telepath has to go one of two ways. Either, like Her Majesty or the others we found when we discovered her two years ago, the telepath ends up insane--or perhaps commits suicide, which is simply one step further in retreat--or else he learns to understand and control his own powers, and to understand other human beings so well that, if he actually did control the world, everyone would benefit in the long run.

       The difference between the two kinds is the difference between Her Majesty and the PRS.

      "That's good thinking," he could hear Lou say.

      No, it isn't, he thought; it's no more than guessing, and it could be just as wild as you please. But there is one thing I do know: the way to get a better world, or anyhow the first step, is to clear the road ahead. And that means getting rid of the fools, idiots, maniacs, blockheads, morons, psychopaths, paranoids, timidity-ridden, fear-worshipers, fanatics, thieves, criminals and a whole lot more.

      "Get rid of them?" Lou's voice said.

      Well, Malone thought, I don't mean they've got to be killed or driven out of the civilized world. You've just got to get them out of any place where their influence is heavily felt on society as a whole.

      "All right," Lou's voice said pleasantly. "And how could we go about that? Do we write nasty letters to the editor?"

      There's a much more effective way, Malone thought. There's no trouble in getting rid of a man if you can make him expose himself. And you've managed that pretty well. You've thwarted their idiotic plans, made them stumble over their own fumble-mindedness, played on their neuroses, concocted errors for them to fight and, in general, rigged things in any possible way so that they'd quit, or get fired, or lose elections, or get arrested, or just generally get put out of circulation somehow.

       It's extremely effective--and it works very well.

       Sometimes, you've only had to put the blocks to individuals. Sometimes whole nations have had to go. And sometimes it's been in-between, and you've managed to foul up whole organizations with misplaced papers missent messages, error, and changed minds and everything else you can think of.

       As a matter of fact, it sounds like fun.

      "Well," he imagined Lou saying, "it is fun, in away. But it's a deadly serious business, too."

      Sure it is, Malone thought. I think the first time that came home to me was when I saw what was happening in Russia, and compared it to what had been going on over here. Tom Boyd saw that, too, when I pointed it out to him--as you probably know if you were spying on my mind at the time.

       Not that I mind that in the least.

       Come more often, by all means.

       But Tom, in case you weren't listening, said: "Over here there are a lot of confused jerks and idiots... And in Russia there's a lot of confusion."

       Now, that's perfectly true, and it spells out the difference. Over here, you've been confusing the jerks and the idiots, getting rid of them so the system can work properly. Over in Russia, on the other hand, you've left the jerks and the idiots all alone to do their dirty work, and you've just added to the confusion where necessary, so that the system will break down of its own weight.

      "But, after all," Lou said, "things look pretty bad over here, too. Look at the papers."

      Everybody, Malone thought, has been telling me to go and look at the newspapers. And when I do look at them I find all sorts of evidence of confusion. Teachers resigning, senators and representatives goofing up bills on Congress, gang wars cluttering up the streets with cadavers and making things tough for the Sanitation Department, factional fights in various organizations. Now, all of that looks pretty horrible in the papers, but do you know something? It isn't horrible at all.

       It's pretty damn good, as a matter of fact.

       The teachers who are resigning, for instance, are the nincompoops who've got to be pruned out so that competent teachers can come in. And, with the higher salaries, more and more competent men and women are going to be attracted to the job. The universities are going to be freer and better places to work in; they won't be monopolies any more.

      "Monopolies?" Lou said.

      In restraint of knowledge, Malone thought. The old monopoly was in restraint of trade, and legal action helped to kill that kind. The monopoly in restraint of knowledge took a little more killing, but you're doing the job quite nicely. And not only in the schools.

       The factional fights are having the same result. Look at the AAAM, for instance. That organization is a monopoly, pure and simple. Simple, anyhow. And what the factional fights are doing to it is just breaking up the monopoly and letting knowledge free again.

       And then we come to Congress. Senators and representatives are having a terrible time, some of them. There's a fight going on between Furbisher and Deeks because Deeks has discovered some evidence against Furbisher. Who's having the terrible time?

       All of them?

       Nope. Furbisher is. Deeks isn't.

       And that's the way it's going all over. The useful, necessary legislation is going through Congress now without being cluttered up by stupid dam bills and water bills and other idiocies that simply clog the works.

       And then, of course, there are the gang wars. Now, I feel as sorry for the Sanitation Department as anybody, but at least they're cleaning the streets for good now. The boys who are dying off and getting sent to hospitals and jails are just the ones who should have been sent away long ago. Everybody knows that, but nobody can prove it.

       Except the PRS.

       And the PRS is busy doing just what it can about that proof.

       And all it takes is a few of you. I don't know how many--I don't know how many of you there really are, for that matter. But it must be a fair number to stock all your branches with "top-level" executives and the lower-level men and women who really believe in the PRS blind, and do their best to keep it working.

       There are probably a lot of ways it might work, but the simplest and best way I can think of is this one: there's a clearing-house sort of set-up, and information comes in from various telepathic spies working for the PRS, about various projected activities of the imbecile contingent.

       And, from this information, you figure out the best time and place for lightning to strike, and you select the kind of lightning it's going to be. Here it's a misplaced letter, there some "facts" that aren't facts, and somewhere else a dropped package of secret records. Somebody goofs--and is exposed.

       Maybe it works on the local-organization level. Maybe there are teams all over the country, all ready to synchronize their minds and jab somebody in the thought processes at just the right time, in just the right way, as soon as they get the word. That's one way of doing it, maybe the best way.

       There are others, but it doesn't really matter how that end of it works. The important thing is that it does work.

       And, when it works, it can certainly