Although he knew his rabbi would disagree, Kare had often suspected that the Manticoran domestic political arena was the direct present day heir of the same divine thinking which had led to the Book of Job. Certainly he couldn’t think of anything besides a deliberate decision on God’s part to turn the Devil loose on hapless humanity under carefully delimited conditions which could explain the current political process in the Star Kingdom.

He scolded himself, more dutifully than out of any sense of conviction, for being too hard on the Manticoran public. Up until the past few weeks, after all, there’d been plenty of evidence which could be adduced to support the thesis that the war was over. Not a shot had been fired in almost four T-years, and there was no immediate prospect of that changing. And even leaving aside the obvious assumption on the Government’s part that the Peeps had been kicked once and for all, there’d been the heady assurance that if the Peeps had been foolish enough to start something new, the technical and tactical supremacy of the Royal Manticoran Navy would crush them with ease. Not to mention the fact that the generally conciliatory tone the Republic’s diplomatic teams had pursued in the peace negotiations had been another example which could be cited by proponents of the theory that peace had actually come, whether it had been sealed by a formal treaty yet or not. Kare hadn’t happened to subscribe to that theory himself, but he could readily understand why it had been so attractive to the public at large. After the pain, losses, and fear of fighting the war, it would have been profoundly unnatural for people not to have wanted to believe that the killing and the dying were over. The inevitable (and proper) need of individuals to focus on their individual concerns, to worry about the day-to-day details of their own lives, jobs, and families, only made the electorate’s willingness to turn its attention to domestic concerns even stronger.

On the other hand, there’d also been plenty of countervailing evidence for people with the will to see it. And there’d been plenty of people like Duchess Harrington, Earl White Haven, and William Alexander who’d pointed that out. Unfortunately, in some ways the very strength and determination with which they’d made their case undermined it with those who weren’t already disposed to share their views. If a politician was unscrupulous enough, it wasn’t all that difficult for him to make his opponents look obsessed and vaguely ridiculous, or at least terminally alarmist, when they kept hammering away with warnings that the sky was falling.

Until, that was, Kare thought grimly, the sky finally came crashing down.

In his book, that was exactly what had happened the moment Thomas Theisman admitted that the Republican Navy had virtually completely rebuilt its war-fighting capabilities, apparently without anyone in the High Ridge Government even suspecting they were doing it. A sizable chunk of the electorate appeared to be inclined to agree with him, but not a large enough one. Government spokesmen—and especially “nonpartisan” representatives from the so-called strategic think tank of the Palmer Institute—had instantly begun providing tranquilizing public statements to prove things weren’t really as bad as they seemed to be, and those statements were already beginning to have their effect. Even if they hadn’t been, any immediate alarm on the part of the voters was completely unable to affect the Government’s control of the House of Lords.