The Ladder in the Sky by John Brunner Page A

the people of the Dyasthala had never worked regularly or been fed and clothed without having to beg or steal. Those who had been passed by the selectors at the Berak spaceport were those who innately disliked such an existence. It would obviously have been foolish to choose recruits who had a real psychological need for theft and violence.
    Now they found themselves at a complete loss. Once, living had been a clock-round business for them, extending not only to the question of where the next meal was coming from, but as often as not to the question of where they could safely sleep the night. Free from the perennial preoccupations which had faced them, they were now fed, clothed, housed and entertained in return for undemanding work. It was said that in ten years’ time the Vashti mines would be fully automatized and would require only a token corps of engineers and surveyors to run them. Already the process had gone so far that the crying need was for labor to undertake the simple tasks which machines would take over completely in the first stage of automation. That was why Ogric had gone to Berak; unskilled labor was growing steadily rarer.
    Not a jail, for the love of life!
    Already aboard ship Kazan had begun to realize how much of his thinking had formerly been wasted on problems of survival. Already he had cast around for other things to apply himself to, and had fetched up with a crash against the blank wall of the ultimate simplicities which the greatest human thinkers of many worlds had tackled, and failed to answer. But new horizons were opening before him all the time, and it did not really seem to matter what he concerned himself with because so many things were offered.
    First there was the work he was assigned to, doing repair and maintenance under the supervision of a tubby, pleasant man with a shiny bald head named Rureth. His life in the Dyasthala had brought him no nearer to contact with machinery in general than an occasional theft of a vehicle for a job. And that was an incidental, an accessory, which did not involve his interest.
    Confronted with the machines they worked with here, he was jerked again into a new view of the universe in which he existed. They assigned a large number of illiterates and slow readers to the repair shops, because the tough, reliable equipment seldom needed more than cleaning, servicing and changing of parts which could be done by following colored diagrams. Most of the other workers were content with that. Kazan could not stop there. He wanted to know more; he had to discover the system behind the effects. This was an excavator which shifted and piled overburden at the rate of a ton a minute. What went on in the magnet-cased fusion chamber to produce so much power? This was a separator, which sorted streams of finely ground mineral dust according to its composition, into forty vertical storage tubes. How could it tell one kind of dust from another?
    At first Rureth was irritated by Kazan’s insistent questioning. Then he began to understand the reason behind it, and to think that he ought not to try and stop Kazan from improving himself. He sent him to the library.
    The library, with its stock of microfilms and recordings, was a revelation to Kazan. When he had been spending almost every free moment there for a month, Rureth decided that something ought to be done about this young man so hungry for knowledge.

    Not a jail, Clary thought dully. That was a joke, if you liked. It was all very well not to have to worry any more about where the next meal was coming from, where you were going to sleep tonight, but with that much taken out of her pattern of existence, what could she put in its place? She felt empty, and bored, and frustrated.
    And as for Kazan, who seemed not to be worried, she was disgusted with him.
    Her work was of no particular interest to her. It was simple clerking and maintenance of records. She could already read and write fairly well; she was taught to use