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 inMan: Twelve Millennia of Achievement or inOrigin and History of the Sentient Races. ) The Democracy did not die rapidly, nor did Man particularly want it to. From the instant that the fabled Joshua Bellows repulsed an abortive attack on Deluros VIII by the Canphor Twins and followed up by winning a quick series of battles and putting the entire Canphor system under martial law, the handwriting had been on the wall. For the second time in galactic history, the Cartography complex at distant Caliban became the most important single factor in Man's expansion, but this time it was a more mature Man, a Man who knew the bitter aftertaste of expanding too rapidly, who began gathering his empire about him. This was no hit-or-miss proposition, this expansion. There was no settling or winning of strategic systems and then moving parsecs away to new challenges. Man was more thorough this time, more methodical, more grimly efficient. Radiating out in all directions simultaneously from Deluros VIII, Earth, and Sirius V,
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 that the department lacked for work. None of the planetoids found their work easy. The Bureau of Communication was involved with implementing the first ruling passed by the first members of the Oligarchy: that Terran was to become the official language. The Treasury planetoid was continually balancing tendencies toward inflation and depression, and was not abetted by the fact that with such a multiplicity of worlds in the Oligarchic empire, there was simply no single substance rare enough to back the currency with. Four-fifths of the Labor Department was devoted to keeping the miners happy without yielding too much power to them. No one knew exactly what occurred on the Science planetoid, but there were 122 vast buildings, each hundreds of miles long, devoted to the 122 major sciences, and no one seemed to be suffering from boredom.
But as she looked out her window at the twinkling, shining mini-worlds, Ulice Ston knew that the Department of Alien Affairs was currently sitting on the biggest problem of all, and that she, as Director, was sitting on the Department of Alien Affairs. The bulk of her business concerned the legal wording, ratification recommendations, and enforcement of some half million treaties per year. All wars not involving humans were also in her domain. So were all complaints of mistreatment of aliens.