Birthright

insoluble of situations. The trick—and this was Ngana's specialty—was to introduce monied economies

to the various worlds until they were so dependent upon continued commerce with the Republic that revolt and isolationism became the most repugnant and unfeasible of concepts. On about a third of the sentient worlds, the problems had been slight, for economic structures already existed. It was the remaining worlds that wound up as Ngana's pet projects. And he was very good at his work.

There was, for example, Balok VII, a small world possessed of a totally self-reliant society relatively low on the evolutionary scale, but sentient nonetheless. The natives, vaguely humanoid in type, were completely herbivorous, and the continual search for the vast quantities of food they needed to sustain themselves prevented them from developing many other skills. There was some attempt at farming, but the climate was too uncertain for crops to be depended upon, and the economy never developed beyond a one-for-one trading stage.

Ngana had looked the world over, ordered in some twenty thousand “agrarian assistants,” and quintupled the amount of available food in three years’ time, never once extracting any payment or promise of payment from the natives, and never once allowing them to discover the methods the Republic used to multiply the food supply. At the end of three years a noticeable increase in the population took place, and the agricultural equipment was then sold or leased to private interests within the Republic. It functioned for five more years, and then, at a word from Ngana, all “assistance” came to a halt. Amid hoarse outcries of misery, disease raised its ugly head, and the Republic sent in free medical supplies. After six months, the flow of supplies stopped. The supplies were then sold to the Republic's merchants, who rented out the agricultural machinery to the natives in exchange for harvests of certain crops, and after the first payments were made on the machinery, the medical supplies were sold on credit against future crops. Within five more years the natives of Balok VII had need of neither equipment nor medicine, being quite capable of manufacturing their own, but by that time they had a growing agricultural economy, and the first paper Republic credits had already been introduced into the society, with which they purchased newer and better farming machines. And, of course, the continuous introduction of more advanced equipment ensured the production of more and more crops, with the Republic as the only interested speculator.

That had been easy. Korus XVI was a little more difficult. It held a race of silicon-based life forms that inhaled ammonia, excreted a carbon compound, and had a very viable economy that was based predominantly on rare metals. The inhabitants were quite happy to be isolated from the mainstream of the Republic's commerce and evinced no desire to trade with any race other than their own. Ngana authorized fifty merchants to artificially reproduce the rarest of the rare metals that formed the staple of Korus XVI's financial structure and to flood the planet with them, trading them to private individuals for elements that were of equivalent value to Man. Fifty percent of the merchants’ profits went back into continuous market flooding, until the various coins of the Korusian realm became all but worthless. The remaining fifty percent of the profits were applied to “saving” the Korusian economy by putting it into synchronization with that of the Republic, for which the merchants were granted fifty years of exclusive trading rights to the planet. Within a decade, Korus XVI had been added to the list of the Republic's economic satellites.

Now and again a planet would attempt to withdraw from economic association with the Republic; rarely was it successful. Total trade embargo was the first means of reprisal. If this proved unsatisfactory, any