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followed through, you would have carried the voting. Hell, you'd probably have
wound up king of the jungle to boot.
"And you threw that one away, too."
Hazleton took his slide rule out of his pocket and moodily pushed the slide
back and forth in it. It was a gesture frequent enough with him, but
ordinarily it preceded or followed some use of the rule. Tonight it was
obviously just nervous play.
"But Mark, I didn't want to be king of the jungle," Amalfi said slowly. "I'd
much rather let the present incumbent hold that responsibility. Every crime
that's ever been committed, or will be committed in the near future, in this
jungle, will be laid at his door eventually by the Earth cops. On top of that,
the Okies here will hold him personally responsible for every misfortune that
comes their way while they're in the jungle. I never did want that job; I only
wanted the King to think that I wanted it.... Incidentally, did you try to
raise that city out on the perimeter, the one that said it had mass
chromatography?"
"Sure," Ha/leton said. "They don't answer."
"Okay. Now, about this knowledge-pooling plan: it wouldn't work, Mark. First
of all, you couldn't keep a pack of Okies working at it long enough to get any
good out of it. Okies aren't philosophers, and they aren't scientists except
in a limited way. They're engineers and merchants; in some respects they're
adventurers, too, but they don't think of themselves as adventurers. They're
practical-that's the word they use. You've heard it." "I've used it," Hazleton
said edgily. "So have I. There's a great deal of meaning packed into it It
means, among other things, that if you get Okies involved in a major
analytical project, they'll get restive. They want sets of, applications of
principles, not principles pure and useless; And it isn't in their natures to
sit still in one place for long. If you convince them that they should,
they'll try, and the whole thing will wind up in a terrific explosion.
"But that's only point one. Mark, have you any idea of the real scope of the
knowledge-pooling project? I'm not trying to put you oil the spot, believe me.
I don't think anybody in that hall realized it. If they had, they'd have
laughed me off the platform. There again, Okies aren't scientists, and their
outlook is too impatient to let them carry a really long chain of reasoning to
a.conclusion."
"You're an Okie," Hazleton pointed out. "You carried it to a conclusion. You
told them how long it would take."
"I'm an Okie. I told them it would take from two to five years to do even a
scratch job. As an Okie, I'm an expert at half-truths. It would take from two
to five years even to get the project set up! And the rest of the job, Mark,
would take centuries." "For a scratch job?"
"No such thing as a scratch job in this universe of discourse," Amalfi said,
reaching for the fuming wine and reconsidering at the last minute. "Those
cities out there represent the accumulated scientific knowledge of all the
high-technical-level cultures they've ever encountered. Even allowing for the
usual information gaps, that's about five thousand planets-full of data, at a
minimum estimate. Sure, we could pool all that knowledge-just as I said at the
meeting, the City Fathers could take it all in, and classify it, in only a
little over an hour-after we'd spent two to five years setting them up to do
it. And then we'd
have to integrate it. And you've got to integrate it, Mark; you've got to know
it thoroughly enough to be able to make it do something. You couldn't offer it
for sale unless you-did that. Would you like the job?"
"No," Hazleton said''slowly, but at once. "But Amalfi, am I ever going to know
what you're doing if you persist in proceeding like this? You didn't go to
that meeting just to waste time; I can trust you that far. So I have to assume
that the whole maneuver was a trick, designed to force the March on Earth,
rather than to defeat it. You gave the cities a clearly defined, superficially
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