The World Swappers - John Brunner, ebook, Temp
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The World Swappers
By John Brunner
Scanned, proofed and formatted by BW-SciFi
Release Date: January, 11
th
, 2003
Version 1.0
 THE WORLD SWAPPERS
Copyright
©,
1959 by Ace Books, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by
any means, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review, without
permission in writing from the publisher.
All characters in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, is purely coincidental.
An ACE Book
Printed in U.S.A.
 CHAPTER I
Counce launched the end of his cigarette into the air with a gentle
flick of his fingers. It soared out over the side of the boat and
extinguished itself with the faintest of hisses in the green water of
mid-Pacific. Otherwise he did not move.
He was half-sitting, half-lying, with his back against the hard,
sun-warmed cover of the propulsor. One excessively long leg was
stretched out along the fender which rimmed the gunwale, barely sinking
into the resilient plastic; the other dangled over the reactor well.
A gull which had been circling down to look him over, and which had
almost decided he was not worth paying attention to, saw the white
object arc overboard, swooped, and neatly lifted the disintegrating butt
out of the sea. At once it dropped the sour-tasting thing again with a
mewing cry of dismay, gave Counce a hurt look, and flapped off with
injured dignity. Counce followed its movements idly for a few yards.
Then his face suddenly lost all traces of awareness, as if he had cut
himself off from the present. For a while he remained quite still, seeming
to listen, before his right hand shot out and twitched the helm and
accelerator levers together. The boat described a quarter turn and came
to rest again, rocking slightly in its own ripples, the steam from the
propulsor hanging around the stern like a patch of localized fog. The blind
panes of Counce's dark glasses turned towards the blue horizon, facing
the one point where no one else would have expected to see anything.
No one else, that is, except someone who had come to this precise place
for this precise reason.
Behind him now, though very far away, the tentacles of the
purification and extraction plants spread yearly further southward; to his
right, somewhat nearer, were the kelp farms of Pacific Nutrition; to his
left and nearer again, though still below the skyline, was the smart and
somewhat snobbish residential district of Sealand. In the direction in
which Counce faced, there was nothing for a thousand miles bar a few
scattered islands.
Then there was a gleam as if Venus had become visible in the middle
of the day and too far from the plane of the ecliptic. It was very faint,
and the sun competed with it, but the dark glasses helped, and the
distance was closing rapidly - at about twelve hundred miles an hour, he
judged.
The gleam took on form by degrees. The hull showed first, as a
darker blob; then the wings, their leading edges glowing sullen red; and
 last of all the thin lines of the hydrofins. Counce nodded approval as the
spaceship slanted down toward the water. The pilot knew his job - he,
Counce, could hardly have chosen the angle of approach better himself.
The first hydrofin bit the water, and the rate of increase of the ship's
apparent size dropped abruptly. It was still more than twenty miles away,
but a vessel capable of carrying a crew of a dozen on hundred-parsec
hops could not very well be inconspicuously small.
The spray from the second layer of hydrofins turned to steam as they
touched and briefly left the water again; with a cry of tortured metal the
hot wings were suddenly struck and chilled. The ship skimmed over the
ocean, settling slowly to its normal riding attitude as it bore down on
Counce's boat. It threw out first a sea anchor, then, when its detectors
had checked the bottom profile, a tractor beam focused on the crest of
the nearest submarine peak. It came to a halt less than a half mile away.
And disappeared.
Counce sighed, taking off his dark glasses and putting them away in
the pouch of his trunks. The deck of the boat was heating up under him,
which meant that someone aboard the spaceship had put two and two
together in an unusually inspired manner. Had Bassett somehow been
warned about him? Counce thought it unlikely, but he would have to
make allowances for the possibility.
He gathered himself in a single movement and tossed himself
languidly after the cigarette just as the sonic found the critical resonance
of the metal hull and the boat shivered into steaming fragments.
Immediately the heavy weight of the shielded propulsor dropped towards
the floor of the ocean, its automatic capsize guards going up with a
succession of sharp clicking noises. In this much water, it would hardly
be worth salvaging.
Feeling the brief wave of warmth from the shattered boat wash about
his body, Counce trod water and stared at the place where the spaceship
had been. Even with the guards up, the propulsor would have shed
enough radioactivity in the immediate vicinity to fog the detectors for a
while, so he was at liberty to go about the task of superoxygenating his
bloodstream with deep breaths before he needed to duck. They would,
he supposed, have shielded the underside of the ship as well as the
superstructure in case one of the local fishguards in his submersible
spotted it and remembered. However, from underneath was the logical
mode of approach - he couldn't fly.
Dodging a shoal of frightened fish bearing the Dateline Fisheries
brand on their dorsal fins, Counce began to swim towards the point at
 which the ship had vanished. He reached the edge of the barrier sooner
than he had expected, and trod water again as he felt the tingling of the
blanking frequencies greet his outstretched fingertips. They'd set it for
maximum output, then - they weren't taking any chances. Except,
naturally, the ones they didn't know about.
He made a swift calculation. He had been under for six minutes three
seconds already, and the additional six minutes or so which it would take
him to negotiate the barrier would bring him perilously close to his safety
margin. He would have surfaced if he could, but the problem of
navigating through these screens partly in a liquid and partly in gas added
unnecessary complications to the job. From below was not just the logical
way - it was the only way.
He swung his mental compass, closed his eyes, and deliberately
committed himself to his own personal inertial guidance system. He
forced himself to disregard all sensory impressions except the changing
pressure of water on his skin and the position of the fluid in his
semicircular canals, telling him which way was up. Gravity was the one
thing he could expect to remain constant within the barrier; the ship was
on Earth, and Counce knew perfectly well that for the time being it was
meant to remain here, so that at least they would not be monkeying with
the value of g. But if he deviated from the straight path he was going to
be in
trouble.
Exactly six minutes later he surfaced and opened his eyes to the
greenish light which was all that soaked past the barrier - the light from
below
the surface, not from above. He found two men looking at him.
That implied that Bassett did not have implicit faith in his excellent
defenses, and that in turn suggested he had heard about Counce after all.
Counce trod water, waiting to die.
The men who stood on the wing of the spaceship regarded him
curiously while he replenished his lungs. The one on the left had a gun
leveled at Counce's chest - not at the point where his chest appeared to
be; this man knew all about refraction. The other one, Counce presumed,
would be Bassett. Interesting.
Finally, the one he took to be Bassett gestured to his companion, and
the latter lowered his gun. Counce felt a surge of relief. It was pretty
much an axiom that little is to be feared from a man who comes naked
and unarmed, but Bassett had got where he was by disregarding axioms
like that.
"All right, you," said the man with the gun. "Come aboard." He kicked
the catch of the disembarkation ladder, and hiduminium legs plopped into
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