“I’ll just have to report you as accidentally killed on the planet.” Goram smiled. “I don’t think you’ll find life exile on this world, out of sight of the observers, uncongenial. And we might as well see about making your successor one of our men. It was about ready for that.”

He added thoughtfully: “In fact, the Galaxy may be ready for a new Solarian Emperor.”

There Will Be Other Times

There will be other times, my comrades, there will be
A day of trumpets. This we must believe.
Now when all flags guide corpses to the sea
And ships lie hollow on a smoking shore,
Broken of bone, and windy shadows weave
A dark about tall windows turning whore
To feed gashed children, I must say that more
Days shall remain then hobnailed victors thieve.
And if our iron’s broken, there’s still ore—
Stones of our sharded cities lying free
To sharpen it; and if you should perceive
Rust and the dimness in us, do it silently.

The Live Coward

The fugitive ship was pursued for ten light-years. Then, snapping in and out of subspace drive with a reckless disregard of nearby suns and tracer-blocking dust clouds, it shook the Patrol cruiser.

The search that followed was not so frantic as the danger might seem to warrant. Haste would have done no good; there are a million planetary systems affiliated with the League, and their territory includes several million more too backward for membership. Even a small planet is such a wilderness of mountains, valleys, plains, forests, oceans, icefields, cities, and loneliness—much of it often quite unexplored—that it was hopeless to ransack them meter by meter for a single man. The Patrol knew that Varris’ boat had a range of three hundred parsecs, and in the course of months and man-years of investigation it was pretty well established that he had not refueled at any registered depot. But a sphere two thousand light-years across can hold a lot of stars.

The Patrol offered a substantial reward for information leading to the arrest of Samel Varris, human, from the planet Caldon (No. so-and-so in the Pilots’ Manual), wanted for the crime of inciting to war. It circulated its appeal as widely as possible. It warned all agents to keep an eye or a feeler or a telepathic organ out for a man potentially still capable of exploding a billion living entities into radioactive gas. Then it waited.

A year went by.

Captain Jakor Thymal of the trading ship Ganash, operating out of Sireen in the primitive Spiral Cluster area, brought the news. He had seen Varris, even spoken to the fellow. There was no doubt of it. Only one hitch: Varris had taken refuge with the king of Thunsba, a barbarous state in the southern hemisphere of a world known to the Galactics—such few as had ever heard of it—as Rylin’s Planet. He had gotten citizenship and taken the oath of service as a royal guardsman. Loyalty between master and man was a powerful element in Thunsban morality. The king would not give up Varris without a fight.