"Naturally? Why should they be? Most of them are a little short
of living space--unless they're willing to put up with frontier
conditions--but otherwise humanity's never had it so good. They're not
repressed; they're babied along--nine-tenths of the time anyway. They
do just about as they damn well please. Thirty percent of them won't
turn out a stroke of honest work from the beginning of their lives to
the end."
"True enough. And you've described an almost perfect setting for
profound discontent. Which is being carefully maintained, by the way.
We don't want humanity to go to sleep entirely just yet. Gus, how much
do you know personally about Ym-400?"
"Nothing," said Fry. "Now and then some rumor about it comes to the
IPA's attention. Rumors of that kind go into our files as a matter of
course. I see the files."
"Well, then," said Camhorn, "what rumors have you seen?"
"I can give you those," Fry said, "in a few sentences. YM--or
Ym-400--is an element rather recently discovered by the
Overgovernment's scientists; within the past few decades. It has
the property of 'transmuting space-time stresses'--that's the rumor,
verbatim. In that respect, it has some unspecified association with
Riemann space phenomena. It has been located in a star system which
lies beyond the areas officially listed as explored, and which at
present is heavily guarded by Overgovernment ships. In this system is
an asteroid belt, constituting the remnants of a planet broken up in an
earlier period by YM action. And there," Fry added, grinning wolfishly,
"I can even bring in a factual detail. I know that there is such a
guarded system, and that it contains nothing but its star and the
asteroid belt referred to. I could give you its location, but I'm sure
you're familiar with it."