Read Online John Brunner by A Planet of Your Own - Free Book Online

on her.
    Short
of finding some crazy hermit, who might go out of his head and start
systematically sabotaging the fabulously complex automatics here, the company
stood no chance at all of getting a permanent supervisor. This followed from
the obvious premise that they advertised annually. After a
period of several years, there would be,
scattered around the local star-systems, several ex-supervisors of Zygra . Some enterprising rival firm might pick the
brains of all of them, and thus gain sufficient data to make a successful raid
on the Zygra Company. An accumulation of small facts
might reveal far more than the superficially attractive method of planting a
company spy to apply for the post.
    She
frowned. So far she had reached two diametrically opposite conclusions, one
reassuring and one terrifying. On the one hand, she felt that the Zygra Company had to watch its step extremely carefully,
but on the other, she felt it was probably desperately— paranoically —afraid
that its secrets might somehow leak out and afford the opportunity for another
firm to pirate its source of wealth.
    What
could she do, stranded here with the powerful Zygra Company as her opponent, to ensure that the balance would tip the right way at
the end of her tour? She had to take it for granted that the company could not
just minder her and dump her body over the side of the station; if this were
possible without the Nefertiti government stepping in, then she had been as
good as lost the minute she had entered Shus-ter's office.
    After
a little thought she decided it was safe to accept that the reason for her
being the best-qualified candidate ever interviewed for the job was a little
more complicated than had at first appeared.
    Typically,
her predecessors would have been in what she had called category one: social
misfits without permanent careers or outstanding qualifications enabling them
to switch jobs with impunity. Even people like that, however, would normally
have some kind of ties—wives, parents, brothers and sisters—and hence if they
disappeared on Zygra someone might come making
inquiries. None of the previous nine supervisors, Sinister had boasted, had
lasted through his year of office. But if nine sets of relatives had proceeded
to kick up a fuss, this might easily had excited
enough public concern to cause the Nefertitian government to expropriate the company. So the company would ideally seek
candidates who, first, were unskilled, and second, lacked kinfolk to ask awkward
questions.
    (A corollary of this was the depressing point
that it might well have been her remote Earthside origin, not her qualifications, that had secured her
the post. She scowled at the idea and shoved it to the back of her mind.)
    But
people with neither skills nor family would be very rare indeed on planets like
Nefertiti. For one thing, under-population implied an almost obsessive urge to
exploit human resources; for another, isolation would have made family ties
more precious than at home on Earth; and finally, if the potential candidate
got to a stage where he was actively antisocial, rather than just asocial, the
government would step in and order psychiatric treatment to restore him or her
as a contributing member of society.
    She
nodded very slowly. This was a comforting conclusion to have reached, and it
would be best to cling to it as long as she could. Kynance Foy, with Earthside college degrees in qua-space
physics and interstellar commerce, not to mention her earlier study of business
law and practical engineering, was a very different proposition from some
neurotic Neferti-tian precariously poised between nonconformity
and psychotherapy.
    Just
as she had brought a load of trammeling mental baggage with her from Earth, in
the shape of her preconceptions about the force of law and the way society
ought to operate, so too the Zygra Company—including
the computers which made the ultimate decisions—would predicate its future
plans on a set of