He wanted to say, “No, to Niffelheim with it; let’s get an aircar and fly a million miles somewhere,” and watch the look of shocked incomprehension on the captain-general’s face. He couldn’t do that, though; poor old Harv Dorflay might have a heart attack. He nodded slowly.
“If you please, general.”
Dorflay nodded to the Thoran captain, who nodded to his men. Four of them took two paces forward; the rest, unslinging weapons, went scurrying up the corridor, some posting themselves along the way and the rest continuing to the main hallway. The captain and two of his men started forward slowly; after they had gone twenty feet, Paul and General Dorflay fell in behind them, and the other two brought up the rear.
“Your Majesty,” Dorflay said, in a low voice, “let me beg you to be most cautious. I have just discovered that there exists a treasonous plot against your life.”
Paul nodded. Dorflay was more than due to discover another treasonous plot; it had been ten days since the last one.
“I believe you mentioned it, general. Something about planting loose strontium-90 in the upholstery of the Audience Throne, wasn’t it?”
And before that, somebody had been trying to smuggle a fission bomb into the Palace in a wine cask, and before that, it was a booby trap in the elevator, and before that, somebody was planning to build a submachine gun into the viewscreen in the study, and—
“Oh, no, Your Majesty; that was—Well, the persons involved in that plot became alarmed and fled the planet before I could arrest them. This is something different, Your Majesty. I have learned that unauthorized alterations have been made on one of the cooking-robots in your private kitchen, and I am positive that the object is to poison Your Majesty.”
They were turning into the main hallway, between the rows of portraits of past emperors, Paul and Rodrik, Paul and Rodrik, alternating over and over on both walls. He felt a smile growing on his face, and banished it.
“The robot for the meat sauces, wasn’t it?” he asked.
“Why—! Yes, Your Majesty.”
“I’m sorry, general. I should have warned you. Those alterations were made by roboticists from the Ministry of Security; they were installing an adaptation of a device used in the criminalistics-labs, to insure more uniform measurements. They’d done that already for Prince Travann, the Minister, and he’d recommended it to me.”
That was a shame, spoiling poor Harv Dorflay’s murder plot. It had been such a nice little plot, too; he must have had a lot of fun inventing it. But a line had to be drawn somewhere. Let him turn the Palace upside down hunting for bombs; harass ladies-in-waiting whose lovers he suspected of being hired assassins; hound musicians into whose instruments he imagined firearms had been built; the emperor’s private kitchen would have to be off limits.
Dorflay, who should have been looking crestfallen but relieved, stopped short—shocking breach of Court etiquette—and was staring in horror.
“Your Majesty! Prince Travann did that openly and with your consent? But, Your Majesty, I am convinced that it is Prince Travann himself who is the instigator of every one of these diabolical schemes. In the case of the elevator, I became suspicious of a man named Samml Ganner, one of Prince Travann’s secret police agents. In the case of the gun in the viewscreen, it was a technician whose sister is a member of the household of Countess Yirzy, Prince Travann’s mistress. In the case of the fission bomb—”
The two Thorans and their captain had kept on for some distance before they had discovered that they were no longer being followed, and were returning. He put his hand on General Dorflay’s shoulder and urged him forward.
“Have you mentioned this to anybody?”
“Not a word, Your Majesty. This Court is so full of treachery that I can trust no one, and we must never warn the villain that he is suspected—”
“Good. Say nothing to anybody.” They had reached the door of the study, now. “I think I’ll be here until noon. If I leave earlier, I’ll flash you a signal.”
He entered the big oval room, lighted from overhead by the great star-map in the ceiling, and crossed to his desk, with the viewscreens and reading screens and communications screens around it, and as he sat down, he cursed angrily, first at Harv Dorflay and then, after a moment’s reflection, at himself. He was the one to blame; he’d known Dorflay’s paranoid condition for years. Have to do something about it. Any psycho-medic would certify him; be no problem at all to have him put away. But be blasted if he’d do that. That was no way to repay loyalty, even insane loyalty. Well, he’d find a way.
He lit a cigarette and leaned back, looking up at the glowing swirl of billions of billions of tiny lights in the ceiling. At least, there were supposed to be billions of billions of them; he’d never counted them, and neither had any of the seventeen Rodriks and sixteen Pauls before him who had sat under them. His hand moved to a control button on his chair arm, and a red patch, roughly the shape of a pork chop, appeared on the western side.
That was the Empire. Every one of the thousand three hundred and sixty-five inhabited worlds, a trillion and a half intelligent beings, fourteen races—fifteen if you counted the Zarathustran Fuzzies, who were almost able to qualify under the talk-and-build-a-fire rule. And that had been the Empire when Rodrik VI had seen the map
