“Nihilist?”
Jakes chuckled. “When you've been in this Section for a while, you'll be [pg 020] familiar with every screwball outfit man has ever dreamed up. The Nihilists were a European group, mostly Russian, back in the Nineteenth Century. They believed that by bumping off a few Grand Dukes and a Czar or so they could force the ruling class to grant reforms. Sometimes they were pretty ingenious. Blew up trains, that sort of thing.”
“Look here,” Ronny said, “what motivates this Paine fellow? What's he get out of all this trouble he stirs up?”
“Search me. Nobody seems to know. Some think he's a mental case. For one thing, he's not consistent.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, he'll go to one planet and break his back trying to overthrow, say, feudalism. Then, possibly after being successful, he goes to another planet and devotes his energies to establishing the same socio-economic system.”
Ronny assimilated that. “You're one of those who believes he exists?”
“Oh, he exists all right, all right,” Sid Jakes said happily. “Matter of fact, I almost ran into him a few years ago.”
Ronny leaned forward. “I guess I ought to know about it. The more information I have, the better.”
“Sure, sure,” Jakes said. “This deal of mine was on one of the Aldebaran planets. A bunch of nature boys had settled there.”