anything
“They'll believe me when I tell them we're standing ready to repulse any attack.” “I'm afraid not,” said Hill. “There's no way you can turn it off, Josh. You'd better start thinking about how you're going to tell the people that you're the leader they've always wanted you to be.” Hill stood up and slowly walked out of the office. Bellows spent the next two hours confirming the truth of what he'd been told, and two more hours after that frantically but fruitlessly trying to avert the coming conflict.
As night fell, the Governor of Deluros VIII sat alone in his semi-darkened office, his hands clasped in
front of him, staring intently at his fingers. He considered resigning, but realized that it wouldn't have any effect on the tide of events. He even considered having Hill make a full public confession, but knew even as the thought crossed his mind that the populace would approve of Hill's actions. Bellows was an essentially decent man. He didn't want to destroy anyone. At heart he believed that Man would emerge triumphant in the galactic scheme of things by virtue of his own endeavors. Furthermore, Man was still immensely outnumbered by the other races. The course Hill had charted would be so perilous, so fraught with danger at any misstep ... Man would have to divide and conquer on a scale never before imagined. He'd have to be quiet about it, too; would have to accomplish most of his plan before the galaxy awoke to what was happening, or everything would come down on his head, hard. And yet, if Man was capable of pulling it off, didn't he deserve to? After all, this wasn't exactly survival of the fittest so much as ascendancy of the fittest. The races of the galaxy would continue to function, and under Man's leadership they would very likely function all the more efficiently. Or was he just rationalizing? Man was capable of such splendid achievements, such generosity to other races, why did he have to have this aggressive, darker side of his nature? Or was it a dark side at all? Was Man, as Hill had said, merely making the most of every single one of his attributes, including this one?
Bellows reached for the intercom button that would summon the press. As they filed into his office, he made his decision—or rather, he thought with a bemused detachment, he acknowledged the decision that had long since been made for him. For while he had many other qualities—goodness, judgment, integrity—all had failed him in this crisis, and he was left with the foremost quality that any politician possesses: survival.
“Gentlemen,” he began, staring unblinking at them with his clear blue eyes, “it has come to my attention that a fleet of military ships has just left Canphor VI for the purpose of perpetrating a heinous sneak attack on Deluros VIII. Neither we nor any other world housing members of the race of Man will tolerate or yield to such an unprovoked action. Therefore, I have instructed the 7th, 9th, 11th, and 18th fleets to take the following steps...”
SIXTH MILLENNIUM: OLIGARCHY
11: THE ADMINISTRATORS
(No mention of the Administrators, as such, can be found in
Man took each world as it came. When a major military power stood in his way, such as Lodin XI, he
leveled it; but by and large, he still preferred the more permanent and more devastating method of economic warfare to bring rebellious worlds into line. As the fourth millennium of Man's galactic influence drew to a close, he controlled almost half the sentient worlds in the galaxy, though the Democracy still stood. Another ten centuries saw him in possession, either militarily or economically, of some eighty percent of the populated planets, and the Democracy died without a whimper.
In its place there appeared the seven-seat Oligarchy. Ostentatiously there were no restrictions on any of the seats, but all were held by Men, and had been thus held since their creation. Nor did the alien races suffer overmuch from this change, for Man was still a doer, a builder, a force for movement, and he took care of his possessions more meticulously than the alien-dominated Democracy had ever done. The administration of the Oligarchic empire was by no means an easy task. In point of fact, it redirected and sapped Man's energies for more than two centuries, as well it should have in view of the vastness of the undertaking.
There were, at the dawn of the Oligarchic era, some l,400,000 inhabited planets in the galaxy; 1,150,000 were eagerly, or willingly, or tacitly, or resentfully, within the political and economic domain of the Oligarchy.
The problems posed by such an empire were immense. For example, all member worlds paid taxes. Although the planetary governments were responsible for raising the revenues, they did so under the supervision of the Oligarchy, which supplied an average of twenty men to each nonhuman planet, and fifty to each planet populated primarily by Man. Thus, the Taxation Bureau employed more than twenty-five million field representatives, and another six million office workers. And like all the other agencies, it was woefully undermanned.
The military bureaucracy quickly expanded to unmanageable proportions. The Oligarchy had inherited a standing task force of some twenty-five billion men. To have deactivated even half of them once the Democracy had breathed its last would have destroyed the economies of literally hundreds of thousands of worlds, and so they remained in the various branches of a service which numbered far more officers in peacetime than it ever had during its days of battle. Agriculture posed a special problem. There would never be a crop failure, not with more than fifty thousand agricultural worlds. But the creation of equitable tariffs and the channeling of certain goods to certain worlds were unbelievably complex. A side product was the reintroduction of widespread narcotics addiction, complicated by the fact that there was simply no way to outlaw the growth of plants. For example, the natives of Altair III found that wheat was a powerful stimulant and hallucinogen to their systems, while opium was the staple diet of the inhabitants of Aldebaran XIII. Before two decades had passed the bureaucracy had outgrown Sixth Millennium: Oligarchy 139 the confines of Deluros VIII, despite its 28,000-mile diameter. Cartography confirmed that while there were a handful of larger planets hospitable to human life, none were of sufficient size to warrant abandoning Deluros VIII.
Ultimately a satisfactory solution was reached, and implementation began shortly thereafter. Deluros VI, another large world, though not quite so large as the Oligarchic headquarters, was ripped apart by a number of carefully placed and extremely powerful explosive charges. The smaller fragments, as well as the larger irregular ones, were then totally obliterated. The remaining forty-eight planetoids, each
approximating the size of Earth's moon, were turned over to the largest departments of the Oligarchy.
Domes were erected on each of the planetoids, construction of worldwide complexes was begun, and life-support systems were implemented. Within half a century almost the entire administrative bureaucracy had moved from Deluros VIII to one or another of the Deluros VI planetoids. The orbits had been adjusted, the planetoids circled huge Deluros millions of miles from each other, and tens of thousands of ships sped daily between the ruling world of the Oligarchy and its forty-eight extensions. Here floated Commerce, a massive red-brown rock reflecting the sunlight blindingly from its billions of steel-and-plastic offices; there raced the smallest of the planetoids, Education and Welfare, spinning on its axis every sixteen hours; on the far side of the sun was the massive Military complex, taking up four entire planetoids, and already choking for lack of room. And halfway between daytime and evening was the Investigations planetoid. With some 80 million bureaucratic appointments per year, plus the huge narcotics trade and the various alien acts of rebellion, it could hardly be said
