Birthright

Man took each world as it came. When a major military power stood in his way, such as Lodin XI, he

leveled it; but by and large, he still preferred the more permanent and more devastating method of economic warfare to bring rebellious worlds into line. As the fourth millennium of Man's galactic influence drew to a close, he controlled almost half the sentient worlds in the galaxy, though the Democracy still stood. Another ten centuries saw him in possession, either militarily or economically, of some eighty percent of the populated planets, and the Democracy died without a whimper.

In its place there appeared the seven-seat Oligarchy. Ostentatiously there were no restrictions on any of the seats, but all were held by Men, and had been thus held since their creation. Nor did the alien races suffer overmuch from this change, for Man was still a doer, a builder, a force for movement, and he took care of his possessions more meticulously than the alien-dominated Democracy had ever done. The administration of the Oligarchic empire was by no means an easy task. In point of fact, it redirected and sapped Man's energies for more than two centuries, as well it should have in view of the vastness of the undertaking.

There were, at the dawn of the Oligarchic era, some l,400,000 inhabited planets in the galaxy; 1,150,000 were eagerly, or willingly, or tacitly, or resentfully, within the political and economic domain of the Oligarchy.

The problems posed by such an empire were immense. For example, all member worlds paid taxes. Although the planetary governments were responsible for raising the revenues, they did so under the supervision of the Oligarchy, which supplied an average of twenty men to each nonhuman planet, and fifty to each planet populated primarily by Man. Thus, the Taxation Bureau employed more than twenty-five million field representatives, and another six million office workers. And like all the other agencies, it was woefully undermanned.

The military bureaucracy quickly expanded to unmanageable proportions. The Oligarchy had inherited a standing task force of some twenty-five billion men. To have deactivated even half of them once the Democracy had breathed its last would have destroyed the economies of literally hundreds of thousands of worlds, and so they remained in the various branches of a service which numbered far more officers in peacetime than it ever had during its days of battle. Agriculture posed a special problem. There would never be a crop failure, not with more than fifty thousand agricultural worlds. But the creation of equitable tariffs and the channeling of certain goods to certain worlds were unbelievably complex. A side product was the reintroduction of widespread narcotics addiction, complicated by the fact that there was simply no way to outlaw the growth of plants. For example, the natives of Altair III found that wheat was a powerful stimulant and hallucinogen to their systems, while opium was the staple diet of the inhabitants of Aldebaran XIII. Before two decades had passed the bureaucracy had outgrown Sixth Millennium: Oligarchy 139 the confines of Deluros VIII, despite its 28,000-mile diameter. Cartography confirmed that while there were a handful of larger planets hospitable to human life, none were of sufficient size to warrant abandoning Deluros VIII.

Ultimately a satisfactory solution was reached, and implementation began shortly thereafter. Deluros VI, another large world, though not quite so large as the Oligarchic headquarters, was ripped apart by a number of carefully placed and extremely powerful explosive charges. The smaller fragments, as well as the larger irregular ones, were then totally obliterated. The remaining forty-eight planetoids, each