“Where does Tommy Paine come in?” Ronny said. He signaled to a waiter for more beer.
“He comes in a few years later. I was the Section G agent on Goshen, understand? No planet was keener about Articles One and Two of the UP Charter. The hierarchy understood well enough that if their people ever came to know about more advanced socio-economic systems it'd be the end of Goshen's Golden Age. So they allowed practically no intercourse. No contact whatsoever between UP personnel and anyone outside the upper class, understand? All right. That's where Tommy Paine came in. It couldn't have taken him more than a couple of months at most.”
Ronny Bronston was fascinated. “What'd he do?”
“He introduced the steam engine, and then left.”
Ronny was looking at him blankly. “Steam engine?”
“That and the fly shuttle and the spinning jenny,” the Nigerian said. “That Goshen hierarchy never knew what hit them.”
Ronny was still blank. The waiter came up with the steins of beer, and Ronny took one and drained half of it without taking his eyes from the storyteller.
The other agent took it up. “Don't you see? Their system was based on chattel slavery, hand labor. Given machinery and it collapses. Chattel slavery isn't practical in a mechanized society. Too expensive a labor force, for one thing. Besides, you need an educated man and one with some initiative—qualities that few slaves possess—to run an industrial society.”
Ronny finished his beer. “Smart cooky, isn't he?”
“He's smart all right. But I've got a still better example of his fouling up a whole planetary socio-economic system in a matter of weeks. A friend of mine was working on a planet with a highly-developed feudalism. Barons, lords, dukes, counts and no-accounts, all stashed safely away in castles and fortresses up on the top of hills. The serfs down below did all the work in the fields, provided servants, artisans and foot soldiers for the continual fighting that the aristocracy carried on. Very similar to Europe back in the Dark Ages.”