arm
to thaw them out, beginning with the pre-dinner cocktails and continuing
through the meal. By the time they retired for coffee and brandy to the
parlor where the conference was to be held, the Lords-ex-Masters were
almost friendly.

"We've enacted the Emancipation Act," Olvir Nikkolon, who was ex officio
chairman of the committee, reported. "Every slave on the planet must be
free before the opening of the next Midyear Feasts."

"And when will that be?"

Aditya, he knew, had a three hundred and fifty-eight day year; even if
the Midyear Feasts were just past, they were giving themselves very
little time. In about a hundred and fifty days, Nikkolon said.

"Good heavens!" Erskyll began, indignantly.

"I should say so, myself," he put in, cutting off anything else the new
Proconsul might have said. "You gentlemen are allowing yourselves
dangerously little time. A hundred and fifty days will pass quite
rapidly, and you have twenty million slaves to deal with. If you start
at this moment and work continuously, you'll have a little under a
second apiece for each slave."

The Lords-Master looked dismayed. So, he was happy to observe, did Count
Erskyll.

"I assume you have some system of slave registration?" he continued.

That was safe. They had a bureaucracy, and bureaucracies tend to have
registrations of practically everything.

"Oh, yes, of course," Rovard Javasan assured him. "That's your
Management, isn't it, Sesar; Servile Affairs?"

"Yes, we have complete data on every slave on the planet," Sesar
Martwynn, the Chief of Servile Management, said. "Of course, I'd have to
ask Zhorzh about the details...."

Zhorzh was Zhorzh Khouzhik, Martwynn's chief-slave in office.

"At least, he was my chief-slave; now you people have taken him away
from me. I don't know what I'm going to do without him. For that matter,
I don't know what poor Zhorzh will do, either."

"Have you gentlemen informed your chief-slaves that they are free, yet?"

Nikkolon and Javasan looked at each other. Sesar Martwynn laughed.

"They know," Javasan said. "I must say they are much disturbed."

"Well, reassure them, as soon as you're back at the Citadel," he told
them. "Tell them that while they are now free, they need not leave you
unless they so desire; that you will provide for them as before."

"You mean, we can keep our chief-slaves?" somebody cried.

"Yes, of course--chief-freedmen, you'll have to call them, now. You'll
have to