At an easy cruising speed, the battleship used three days going from Sol to Valgor’s Star. Sars Heym spent most of that time getting on the right side of Tamman Goram. It involved listening to endless dreary reminiscing of border warfare and the consummate ability required to rise from simple conscript to Imperial Marshal, but the price was small if it could save Station Seventeen.

“Nobody appreciates the border garrisons who hasn’t served in them,” declared Goram, “but I tell you, if it weren’t for them the Empire wouldn’t last a year. The barbarians would sweep in, the rival empires would gobble up all they could hold and go to war over the spoils, the Spirit alone knows what the Magellanics would do—but it wouldn’t be pleasant—and the whole structure would disintegrate—three thousand years of stability might as well never have been!”

A high official would be used to open flattery. Heym disagreed just enough to seem sincerely to agree on all important points. “We couldn’t do without the border patrols,” he said, “but it’s like any organism, requiring all its parts to live—we couldn’t dispense with internal police either, and certainly not with the psychotechnicians who are the government.”

“Spirit-damned bureaucrats,” snorted Goram. “Theoreticians—what do they know of real life? Why, d’you know, I saw three stellar systems lost once to the barbarians because we didn’t have enough power to stand them off. There was a horde of them, a dozen allied suns, and we had only three garrisoned planets. For months we begged—wrote to Antares and Sirius and Sol itself begging for a single Nova-class battleship. Just one, and we could have beaten off their fleet and carried the war to them. But no, it was ‘under consideration’ or ‘deferred for more urgent use’—three suns and a hundred thousand men lost because some soft-bellied psychotechnician mislaid a file.”

“Robot-checked files don’t get mislaid,” said Heym softly. “I have friends in administration, and I’ve seen them weep at some of the decisions they had to make. It isn’t easy to abandon an army to its fate—and yet the power that could have saved them is needed elsewhere, to drive off a larger invasion or to impress the Taranians or to take a star cluster of strategic value. The Empire has sacrificed a lot for sheer survival. Humanness in government is only one thing lost.”

“The rules! How can a general in the field keep track of every ship and turn in forms in quadruplicate on their condition?”

“He can’t. Probably a million units a year are lost in recording. And yet, the vast majority of such forms are filled out and do get to the appropriate center, are recorded in electronic code and put on instantly accessible file, mathematically coordinated with all other relevant information. When Grand Strategy wants an overall picture of the military situation, it has one right there. Military planning would be impossible otherwise.

“And it isn’t only in the military field,” argued Heym. “After all, you know the Empire isn’t interested in further expansion. It wants to keep civilization alive on the planets where it exists, and keep the nonhuman imperia out. Ever since the Founder, our military policy has been basically defensive—because we can’t handle more than we have. The border is always in a state of war and flux, but the Empire is at peace, inside the marches.