A Slave is a Slave | Page 2

and unprovoked aggression!"
Erskyll was telling Shatrak, his thin face flushed and his voice
quivering with indignation. "We came here to help these people, not to
murder them."
"We didn't come here to do either, Obray," he said, turning to face the
younger man. "We came here to annex their planet to the Galactic
Empire, whether they wish it annexed or not. Commodore Shatrak used
the quickest and most effective method of doing that. It would have
done no good to attempt to parley with them from off-planet. You
heard those telecasts of theirs."
"Authoritarian," Shatrak said, then mimicked pompously: "'Everybody
is commanded to remain calm; the Mastership is taking action. The
Convocation of the Lords-Master is in special session; they will decide
how to deal with the invaders. The administrators are directed to
reassure the supervisors; the overseers will keep the workers at their
tasks. Any person disobeying the orders of the Mastership will be dealt
with most severely.'"
"Static, too. No spaceships into this system for the last five hundred
years; the Convocation--equals Parliament, I assume--hasn't been in
special session for two hundred and fifty."
"Yes. I've taken over planets with that kind of government before,"

Shatrak said. "You can't argue with them. You just grab them by the
center of authority, quick and hard."
Count Erskyll said nothing for a moment. He was opposed to the use of
force. Force, he believed, was the last resort of incompetence; he had
said so frequently enough since this operation had begun. Of course, he
was absolutely right, though not in the way he meant. Only the
incompetent wait until the last extremity to use force, and by then, it is
usually too late to use anything, even prayer.
But, at the same time, he was opposed to authoritarianism, except, of
course, when necessary for the real good of the people. And he did not
like rulers who called themselves Lords-Master. Good democratic
rulers called themselves Servants of the People. So he relapsed into
silence and stared at the viewscreens.
One, from an outside pickup on the Empress Eulalie herself, showed
the surface of the planet, a hundred miles down, the continent under
them curving away to a distant sun-reflecting sea; beyond the curved
horizon, the black sky was spangled with unwinking stars. Fifty miles
down, the sun glinted from the three thousand foot globes of the two
transport-cruisers, Canopus and Mizar.
Another screen, from Mizar, gave a clearer if more circumscribed view
of the surface--green countryside, veined by rivers and wrinkled with
mountains; little towns that were mere dots; a scatter of white clouds.
Nothing that looked like roads. There had been no native sapient race
on this planet, and in the thirteen centuries since it had been colonized
the Terro-human population had never completely lost the use of
contragravity vehicles. In that screen, farther down, the four destroyers,
Irma, Irene, Isobel and Iris, were tiny twinkles.
* * * * *
From Irene, they had a magnified view of the city. On the maps, none
later than eight hundred years old, it was called Zeggensburg; it had
been built at the time of the first colonization under the old Terran
Federation. Tall buildings, rising from wide interspaces of lawns and

parks and gardens, and, at the very center, widely separated from
anything else, the mass of the Citadel, a huge cylindrical tower rising
from a cluster of smaller cylinders, with a broad circular landing stage
above, topped by the newly raised flag of the Galactic Empire.
There was a second city, a thick crescent, to the south and east. The old
maps placed the Zeggensburg spaceport there, but not a trace of that
remained. In its place was what was evidently an industrial district,
located where the prevailing winds would carry away the dust and
smoke. There was quite a bit of both, but the surprising thing was the
streets, long curved ones, and shorter ones crossing at regular intervals
to form blocks. He had never seen a city with streets before, and he
doubted if anybody else on the Empire ships had. Long boulevards to
give unobstructed passage to low-level air-traffic, of course, and short
winding walkways, but not things like these. Pictures, of course, of
native cities on planets colonized at the time of the Federation, and
even very ancient ones of cities on pre-Atomic Terra. But these people
had contragravity; the towering, wide-spaced city beside this
cross-gridded anachronism proved that.
They knew so little about this planet which they had come to bring
under Imperial rule. It had been colonized thirteen centuries ago, during
the last burst of expansion before the System States War and the
disintegration of the Terran Federation, and it had been named Aditya,
in the fashion of the times, for some forgotten deity