“No, the sort of absolute system I’ve been talking about couldn’t work unless everyone was ignorant of what was happening. Outwardly there would have to be no change at all in everyday life. You and I and that waiter over there would have to be able to eat and drink and sleep and fall in love and get indigestion as always — so what would be the difference, anyway? Maybe such a system is already in operation — how would we know? We’re like pawns on a chessboard who do know the rules and the state of the game, but we prefer to ignore that knowledge because we have no legs, and we can’t leave our squares unless we’re moved.”

Señora Posador sat without moving, looking at nothing, for a long moment. She said at length, “You paint a bleak picture of the world, Señor Hakluyt.”

“Not very. We’re bound to accept that we’re restricted by forces beyond our control. So long as they remain beyond anyone’s control, we’re all in the same boat, and we don’t care. But to be ruled, and to know one was ruled, by people who were controlling those impersonal forces — -that would be different.”

“Yet we are ruled by people; often there have been absolute regimes, and even you, with your freedom of action — are you not ruled by men controlling economic forces, by those who pay you, in the most immediate case?”

“That’s nothing to disturb me, is it? But what I am afraid of is — let’s say the situation where in a restaurant at noon the cooks prepare exactly so many of each different dish, because they know that, faced with the day’s menu with such-and-such items on it, just that number of their patrons will select just those dishes, and nothing at all will be left over. You see, there is a subtle horror in that. No one, except the cooks, and perhaps not even the cooks, would realize that anything had changed.”

Visibly, literally, Señora Posador shivered.

“I’m sorry if I’ve upset you,” I said. She came back to herself with a start, and glanced at her watch.

“Not at all, señor. Not more than usually, to be frank. I find you a disturbing person in some ways — but I cannot say how.”

She rose to her feet, still with a faraway expression. “You will forgive me, but I have an appointment in a little while. I hope that” — she smiled slightly — “the impersonal forces will direct that we meet again before you leave. Hasta la vista, señor. And — good moves in your game.”

I stood up quickly. “Thank you. I hope the same. Will you not have dinner with me before I have to leave — perhaps help me make the best of my few days’ holiday?”

She shook her head, not smiling. “No,” she said calmly. “I cannot see you any longer as a person, you understand. I can see you only as an agent of the forces against which I am struggling. I would prefer it otherwise — but…”

She shrugged and turned away.

XXIX

I was restless that evening. I had intended to relax in the hotel bar, but I couldn’t relax at all, and in the end I decided to go for a stroll; the evening was fine and clear, and there was a light breeze.

I was thinking as I started out about the man who had been my seat-companion in the plane coming down from Florida, the one who had boasted about his European accent and his country of adoption in equal proportions. I had found his card again in my wallet as I was paying for dinner this evening. The name was Flores. I recalled telling myself that I knew more about his city than he probably did, although I had never visited it.

What had I known? Anything at all? I couldn’t have said then, as I could now, that that man driving a European sports car rather too fast through the main highway nexus was probably a supporter of the Citizens of Vados, and that consequently the long-faced Amerind lighting a candle and crossing himself before the wall shrine in the market was prepared to hate him on principle. I couldn’t have said that the old woman carrying a sleepy-eyed baby through the glittering evening streets probably worried more about the health of the family livestock than of the child — for a crippled and sickly child might still be able to beg, while a crippled and sickly animal was good for nothing at all.

Lord, there was power waiting for anyone who had the determination and patience to employ knowledge of human beings!

Of course, demagogues and dictators all through history had used such techniques. Only they had been amateurs, empiricists, and their lack of knowledge led to eventual ruin. You couldn’t rule people totally — they were, as Maria Posador put it, too cussed — unless you were responsible not only for externals like their living conditions, their right to walk the streets in freedom, their binding laws and regulations, but also for far more subtle things: for their prejudices, their fears, beliefs, and hatreds.

I’d been talking wildly about developing mathematical tools on the analogy of the ones I used every day, to cope with general as well as particularized behavior. Now it occurred to me that perhaps I already had some of those tools.

Suppose, for example, I went from here to work on the Pietermaritzburg project. It would certainly be the biggest planned traffic system in Africa if it came off. There I’d have to make allowances for the local system; I’d have to complicate simple suggestions to make provision for blankes and nie-blankes. Even here that held good. Making allowances for the local system…

Why had I been brought into this, anyway? Not because a genuine traffic problem existed; rather, because legal and political factors combined to dictate that a traffic problem be solved in order to smooth over an unpopular decision. I wanted desperately to believe that I had done the best I could. But the fact remained: I hadn’t done my job. I mean, I hadn’t done my job. I’d done the dirty work for people without the necessary special knowledge to do it themselves.

It was as well that I was an outsider. I could leave Ciudad de Vados behind me, and with it the dispute between the Nationals and the Citizens, between foreign-born and natives, between Vados and Diaz; and when the results were all in, I might be found to have set a precedent.

Oh, there were similar cases on the books — there was Baron Haussmann’s work in Paris, and there was the clearing of the St. Giles rookery in London, when street-planning and slum clearance had been used to get rid of nests of crime and vice. But there the primary object had been to improve the city. To coerce social change by altering the balance of factors that had led to undesirable conditions — that was subtler, and very different. Inherently different.

Good God, I had been right, at that!

I had been walking, lost in thought, for several hundred yards without knowing where I was going. Now I stopped in my tracks, and a young man and a girl coming arm-in-arm behind me bumped into me. I apologized, let them pass, and resumed my aimless stroll, repeating under my breath, “I was right!”

Sometimes you can have knowledge right in the palm of your hand and never use it, because you don’t recognize it for what it’s worth, or because you aren’t the kind of person it’s worth anything to. I hoped the second alternative applied to myself.

For I had just realized I had power I never knew about.

I explained it to myself step by step, saying look at it this way. Here in Vados, capital city of the “most governed country in the world,” they conceive the idea of applying my indirect leverage to enforce a desired social change. They don’t have the knowledge to work the trick themselves; they know the next best thing, though — where to lay hands on the knowledge, as I would look up figures in a table of logs.

Now it had been done, it would be copied. Recipe: specialized knowledge.