Barnard was the most respected man in town, perhaps the most knowledgeable elder in the whole area. You could tell from how he had immediately recognized that we were not tourists from a major city. But in the end, his knowledge was still limited to the level of ordinary folk.
Considering how ignorant and insular this world was as a whole, Old Man Barnard's shrewdness and worldly experience probably did not even measure up to any Wang Daye lounging in an Earth apartment building corridor. I had always firmly believed that every residential building and every deep alleyway on Earth had its own Wang Daye. It was practically a matter of faith.
After all, Barnard had spent his entire life dealing with the Metal Station. In this backwater, everyone was a metal sorter. Other than working every day and collecting their rations from the Food Synthesizer, they had almost nothing to think about. A person might not get many chances in an entire lifetime to scheme against others. He had seen people from real major cities and advanced spacecraft purely because he had lived long enough, but that had nothing to do with being shrewd. So Barnard had made a rather big mistake when judging our identities: he had been frightened by his own guesswork, then took everything for granted. He had never seriously considered whether he should be so candid with a group of strangers like us, telling us everything that should and should not have been said. Of course, perhaps he had considered it. Everything he said could be found out with a little effort. More than one person in town probably knew that Old Gerrick had boarded the Hope. Besides that, Barnard had not said much, so naturally there was nothing else he should not have said.