Warlord of Kor | Page 6

this is
what I was after when I took this damned job. Survey teams are a dime a dozen out here,
Lee; it's no job for a man."
"We've got sort of a special case here," Rynason said evenly, glancing at Mara. She
smiled at him. "We haven't run into any alien races before that were intelligent."
Manning laughed, and took a long swallow of his drink. "Twenty-six lousy
horsefaces--now there's an important discovery for you. No, Lee, this is peanuts. For that
matter, they may be running into intelligent aliens all over the Edge by
now--communication isn't so reliable out here that we'd necessarily know about it. What
we've found here isn't any more important than all the rubble and trash the Outsiders left
behind."
"Still, it is unique so far," Mara said.
"I'll tell you exactly how unique it is," Manning said, leaning forward and setting down
his glass with a bang. "It's just unique enough that I can make it sound important in my
report to the Council. I can make myself sound a little impressive. That's how important it
is; no more than that."
Rynason pursed his lips, but didn't say anything. The waiter arrived with his drink; he
threw a green coin onto the table which was scooped up before it had finished ringing to
a stop, and sat back with the glass in his hand.
"Is that your pitch to the Council?" he asked. "You're telling them that Hirlaj is an
important archaeological area and that's why you should get the governorship?"
"Something like that," Manning nodded. "That, and my friend at Seventeenth Cluster
headquarters. Incidentally, he's an idiot and a slob--turns on quadsense telemuse instead
of working, drinks hopsbrau from his own sector. I can't stand him. But I did him a few

favors, just in case, and they're paying off."
"I think it's marvelous the way our frontier policy caters to the colonists," Mara said
quietly. She was still smiling, but it was an ironic smile which suddenly struck Rynason
as characteristic of her.
He knew exactly what she meant. Manning's little push for power was nothing new or
shocking in Terran frontier politics. With the rapid expansion of the Edge through the
centuries, the frontier policy of the Confederation had had to adapt itself to comparatively
slipshod methods of setting up governments in the newly-opened areas. Back in the early
days they'd tried sending out trained men from each Cluster headquarters, but that had
been foredoomed to failure: travel between the stars was slow, and too often the
governors had arrived after local officialdoms had already been established, and there had
been clashes. The colonists had almost always backed the local governments, and there
were a few full-scale revolts when the system had been backed too militantly by Cluster
headquarters.
So the Local Autonomy System had been sanctioned. The colonists would always
support their own men, who at least knew conditions in the areas they were to govern.
But since this necessarily limited the choice of Edge governorships to the roustabouts and
drifters who wandered the outworlds, the resulting administrations were probably even
more corrupt than they had been under the old system of what had amounted to
centralized graft. The Cluster Councils retained the power of appointing the local
governors, but aside from that the newly-opened worlds of the Edge were completely
under their own rule. Some of the more vocal critics of the Local Autonomy System had
dubbed it instead the Indigenous Corruption System; it was by now a fairly standard
nickname in the outworlds.
The system made for a wide-open frontier--bustling, wild, hectic, and rich. For the worlds
of the Edge were untamed worlds, raw and forbidding, and the policy of the Councils was
calculated to attract the kind of men who not only could but would open these frontiers.
The roustabouts, the low drifters of the spaceways ... men who were hard and strong from
repeated knocks, who were looking for a way to work or fight their way up. The lean and
hungry of the outworlds.
Rynason glanced across the table at Manning. He was neither lean nor hungry, but he had
that look in his eyes. Rynason had been around the Edge for years--his father had
travelled the spacers in the commercial lines--and he had seen that look on many men, in
the fields and mines, in the spaceports, in the quickly-tarnished prefab towns that sprang
up almost overnight when a planetfall was made. He could recognize it on Manning
despite the man's casual, self-satisfied expression.
"You don't have to worry about the colonists here," Manning was saying to the girl. "I'll
treat 'em decently. There'll be money to be made here, and I can make it without stepping
on too many toes."
Mara seemed amused.