“Lord, it’s impossible,” whispered Sevulan. “We’re spread so thin already that we could never mount such an undertaking. It’s just a trick of theirs to lure us out—”

“We’ll turn the trick on them!” Hurulta’s bellow rattled between the walls. “I’m still the supreme commander here!”

Slowly, as he regarded his chief, Sevulan’s eyes narrowed.

* * *

“We have, of course, been propagandizing Ulugan,” said Wing Alak. “Radio, message-scattering robombs, and so on—the usual techniques. I think we’ve gotten it across to them that, while League membership means a loss of imperial glories, it means a definite gain in material comfort and security.”

“For the commoners,” said Jorel Meinz. He was annoyed; three days aboard ship, with Alak engaged in directing some obscure maneuver and parrying every significant question when the two men did meet, had worn down his nerves. “But it’s the aristocrats and the industrialists who run things.”

“To be sure. However, they aren’t stupid. They just need a hard lesson to convince them that imperialism doesn’t pay.”

“They were all set to make it pay.”

“Of course, till we interfered. But as long as there is a Patrol, conquest will mean a money loss. We’ll see to that! Once they’re convinced that it’s to their advantage too to come to terms with us, they’ll do it.”

“I see your general strategy, of course,” said Meinz. “You’ve led them into taking over one unprofitable planet after another. Except this Umung, now…I can’t see where that could fail to pay off.”

“Oh, that was my proudest achievement,” said Alak smugly. “I planned that years in advance. I had a cowardly little part-time agent who got to know Umung quite well. As far as he could tell, I meant to use it for the Patrol’s benefit. Ulugan got hold of him, as I thought they would, and learned this. So naturally Ulugan had to grab it first.

“But don’t you see, I’ve studied their economy for years. It’s an archaic form of capitalism, like Terra’s during the First Industrial Revolution. It depends on buying cheap and selling dear—and it must sell manufactured goods. In short, a colony which can manufacture better and cheaper than the mother country is, in the long run, impossible; it must be abandoned or ruined, or else the homeland’s economic system must be changed. After a while, Ulugan’s financiers realized that. And they’re a powerful element.”

He lit a cigarette and leaned back in his chair. “If I might generalize a bit,” he said, “history shows pretty conclusively that an empire must form a natural socioeconomic unit if it is to be stable. Most empires of the past grew slowly, by accretion; or if they were conquered fast, they had to be reorganized swiftly. We forced the Ulugani into taking on more real estate than they could handle, most of it more than useless; and we kept them off balance so that they couldn’t get a chance to organize it properly. Result—an unstable situation which is now rapidly deteriorating.”