FullReads

He lit another cigarette and snapped on the reading screen to see what they had piled onto him this morning, and then swore when a graph chart, with jiggling red and blue and green lines, appeared. Chart day, too. Everything happens at once.

* * * * *

It was the interstellar trade situation chart from Economics. Red line for production, green line for exports, blue for imports, sectioned vertically for the ten Viceroyalties and sub-sectioned for the Prefectures, and with the magnification and focus controls he could even get data for individual planets. He didn’t bother with that, and wondered why he bothered with the charts at all. The stuff was all at least twenty days behind date, and not uniformly so, which accounted for much of the jiggling. It had been transmitted from Planetary Proconsulate to Prefecture, and from Prefecture to Viceroyalty, and from there to Odin, all by ship. A ship on hyperdrive could log light-years an hour, but radio waves still had to travel 186,000 mps. The supplementary chart for the past five centuries told the real story–three perfectly level and perfectly parallel lines.

It was the same on all the other charts. Population fluctuating slightly at the moment, completely static for the past five centuries. A slight decrease in agriculture, matched by an increase in synthetic food production. A slight population movement toward the more urban planets and the more densely populated centers. A trend downward in employment–nonworking population increasing by about .0001 per cent annually. Not that they were building better robots; they were just building them faster than they wore out. They all told the same story–a stable economy, a static population, a peaceful and undisturbed Empire; eight centuries, five at least, of historyless tranquility. Well, that was what everybody wanted, wasn’t it?

He flipped through the rest of the charts, and began getting summarized Ministry reports. Economics had denied a request from the Mining Cartel to authorize operations on a couple of uninhabited planets; danger of local market gluts and overstimulation of manufacturing. Permission granted to Robotics Cartel to—- Request from planetary government of Durendal for increase of cereal export quotas under consideration–they wouldn’t want to turn that down while King Ranulf was here. Impulsively, he punched out a combination on the communication screen and got Count Duklass, Minister of Economics.

Count Duklass had thinning red hair and a plump, agreeable, extrovert’s face. He smiled and waited to be addressed.

“Sorry to bother Your Lordship,” Paul greeted him. “What’s the story on this export quota request from Durendal? We have their king here, now. Think he’s come to lobby for it?”

Count Duklass chuckled. “He’s not doing anything about it, himself. Have you met him yet, sir?”

“Not yet. He’s to be presented this evening.”

“Well, when you see him–I think the masculine pronoun is permissible–you’ll see what I mean, sir. It’s this Lord Koreff, the Marshal. He came here on business, and had to bring the king along, for fear somebody else would grab him while he was gone. The whole object of Durendalian politics, as I understand, is to get possession of the person of the king. Koreff was on my screen for half an hour; I just got rid of him. Planet’s pretty heavily agricultural, they had a couple of very good crop years in a row, and now they have grain running out their ears, and they want to export it and cash in.”

“Well?”

“Can’t let them do it, Your Majesty. They’re not suffering any hardship; they’re just not making as much money as they think they ought to. If they start dumping their surplus into interstellar trade, they’ll cause all kinds of dislocations on other agricultural planets. At least, that’s what our computers all say.”

And that, of course, was gospel. He nodded.

“Why don’t they turn their surplus into whisky? Age it five or six years and it’d be on the luxury goods schedule and they could sell it anywhere.”