A PLANET FOR YOUR THOUGHTS
By JAMES NORMAN
With the grape-headed Uvans acting as the
brains of the Universe, Mankind no longer
needed to think for itself. So when a freebooter
like Bill Petrie began getting original ideas, he
caused a crisis that threatened the cosmos.
The first of the things to pass below him had round yellow eyes in the top of its head. The next one had an eye on each side, just below the ears. Soon they came in droves, crowding into the fantastic market-place, staring up at Bill with quizzical curiosity. There seemed to be no regularity at all about where they wore the eyes on their heads.
Bill Petrie didn't attempt to move. He couldn't. His chafed neck and wrists were firmly clamped within the slots of a medieval pillory. As he hung there, sweltering in the heat, he wondered how long he had been unconscious and how long in the pillory. Somehow, it was hard to believe he actually was where he was.
"Uva, north-ecliptic tangent, electric buzzer," he muttered fuzzily.
The Uva part of it made sense all right, but that was all. In the fast-paced life of 2451 A.D., Uva, or Planetoid eighty-one in the Sirius north-ecliptic tangent, held a unique position in the universe. It was the most respected, yet least visited, body in the skies. People called it the brain-register of the universe just as a certain dimly storied Wall Street had once been the cash register of the Earth.
It was generally known that there were natives on Uva whose heads resembled strange clusters of grapes and whose eyes had a disconcerting habit of never being in one regular place on their heads. Some years after the discovery of Uva by the Gonzales "space-shot" it was found that the Uvans had a peculiarly facile brain. They could take any problem, no matter how tough, and crack it down into simple formula. You gave them a problem and an equals sign—they gave you the answer. It was a wonderful discovery.
Brains were no longer at a premium. Uvans did all the thinking, technicians did the work and the Interworld Government did the administering. It was administrators that counted now.
Bill Petrie wasn't an administrator. He was a freebooter, one of that rare, declassed group who still clung to the idea that they could do their own thinking instead of having it done for them.
Source Wikipedia
