Alexander contemplated them long and long. More often than ever before, he talked with those who surrounded him and took pathetic status from the titles he idly permitted them to assume: Captain of Armies, Admiral of Planets. They knew, as he did, that Alexander ruled and no other; however, this make-believe seemed to satisfy them in an obscure fashion.
Also he randomly sent to distant planets and had single human beings brought to him. Some of the strangest he included in his exhibition ring circling Shalimar’s sun, perma-frozen against the so-swift erosion of time. For, if anything could be said to baulk and baffle Alexander, it was the capacity of Man to endure while men died. This generation of his aides and attendants wore different faces and different names from the last. That apart, there was no sign of change.
Once, during the ages of waiting which were swallowed up by the project to conquer the Hub, he sent for the people of a planet whose name took his fancy: Alexandria. There were forty-six thousand, five hundred and two of them, counting a handful of babies born on the voyage to Shalimar.
Their planet was newly occupied by a couple of shiploads of immigrants; the removal of the original settlers was a matter of a trifling adjustment of a computer, and their places would be filled without trouble.
Out of their number the people chose one to be their spokesman, and he approached Alexander in awe, gazing up adoringly at the glistening frame of his ruler.
“Why did you name your planet after me?” Alexander asked.
“To demonstrate our complete, utter, unswerving, and ancestral loyalty to your supreme self,” the man replied.
“Come closer,” Alexander said. The man obeyed, and Alexander killed him with a blow of his fist. Those watching in the distance cheered, even the little children.
“Destroy them,” Alexander ordered, and watched narrowly as the fiat was carried out: tidily, so that the residue was almost entirely gaseous.
Once, long ago, according to the history with which his mind had been stocked at his creation, men had not been like this: meek, given to cheering the excesses of their rulers. In forty thousand years they had never once opposed him. Had they lost the instinct for self-preservation which he understood they once had had? They had become like appendages of himself. He could trust them as his own right arm.
And with their co-operation the reduction of the whole galaxy seemed assured.
After which . . .
To his mild astonishment, the greatest degree of surprise of which his builders had made him capable, he found he was wishing for opposition to tax his skill. Practice was making conquest into a routine task: a matter of coping with anomalous planetary environments, of devising protection against overfierce stellar radiation—and nothing more.
The work was proceeding apace. Too fast. For he knew roughly how long he would last, and his current project, the mastery of the whole galaxy, would prove too short, while the only project greater still—the conquest of the plenum—was infinite, and he would be frustrated at the end no matter how long his existence might be spun out.
Between the boredom of lacking a fresh goal, and the certainty of not surviving to accomplish one, there remained . . . what?
He began to adopt devious expedients. There was a revolt against his rule in a prosperous sector of the Rim, where weapons and fighting machines could be mass-produced and crews for spaceships could be bred like yeast. He had deliberately kept his fomentation of the revolt to the minimum, but he had imagined it would prove difficult to put down anyway.
The native populations suppressed it before it spread from its original star-arm, and their leaders brought the revolutionaries to him in chains as an act of homage.
He freed the captives and sent the captors home in their own fetters, and as they passed through the streets, their subjects pelted them with mud, shouting slogans about the greatness of Alexander who could do no wrong.
After that, a sort of fatalistic resignation overcame him. He could conceive no other solution to his problem than to set his scientists to work on three assignments that would culminate at about the time when his conquest of the galaxy was complete: first, to extend his own durability; second, to propose areas for conquest larger than the galaxy, smaller than the plenum, possessed of equally satisfying qualities; third, to determine that no smallest corner of the galaxy should be left unconquered, in order to postpone so long as might be the time of the fourth decree.
Nonetheless, the time came. In the year eight hundred and six thousand, one hundred and twenty-two of his existence, Alexander summoned to the palace world of Shalimar the chief spokesmen of the people of every planet his armies had overcome. Elbow to elbow they spanned a continent, the horizon barring many from a direct view of him, and while they were being ranked and ordered to await his announcement he consulted with the latest generation of his scientists.
The first to report bowed respectfully and said, “Most mighty Alexander, the techniques exist to prolong your existence indefinitely; you may if you choose survive until the stars themselves grow dim, and time creaks in the grooves of ancient space.”
“Stand back,” said Alexander.
The second with a report to make bowed likewise and said, “Most mighty Alexander, we have analysed to the limit your magnificent psychological structure, and we conclude that there is no unit of the universe which is emotionally satisfying to you larger than the
