r, a gold-plated
dustbin for the disposal of superannuated dignitaries. He'd do no harm
there, and a touch of outright lunacy might enliven and even improve the
Bench.

And in the evening, a banquet, and a reception and ball, in honor of His
Majesty Ranulf XIV, Planetary King of Durendal, and First Citizen Zhorzh
Yaggo, People's Manager-in-Chief of and for the Planetary Commonwealth
of Aditya. Bargain day; two planetary chiefs of state in one big
combination deal. He wondered what sort of prizes he had drawn this
time, and closed his eyes, trying to remember. Durendal, of course, was
one of the Sword-Worlds, settled by refugees from the losing side of the
System States War in the time of the old Terran Federation, who had
reappeared in Galactic history a few centuries later as the Space
Vikings. They all had monarchial and rather picturesque governments;
Durendal, he seemed to recall, was a sort of quasi-feudalism. About
Aditya he was less sure. Something unpleasant, he thought; the titles of
the government and its head were suggestive.

He lit another cigarette and snapped on the reading screen to see what
they had piled onto him this morning, and then swore when a graph chart,
with jiggling red and blue and green lines, appeared. Chart day, too.
Everything happens at once.

* * * * *

It was the interstellar trade situation chart from Economics. Red line
for production, green line for exports, blue for imports, sectioned
vertically for the ten Viceroyalties and sub-sectioned for the
Prefectures, and with the magnification and focus controls he could even
get data for individual planets. He didn't bother with that, and
wondered why he bothered with the charts at all. The stuff was all at
least twenty days behind date, and not uniformly so, which accounted for
much of the jiggling. It had been transmitted from Planetary
Proconsulate to Prefecture, and from Prefecture to Viceroyalty, and from
there to Odin, all by ship. A ship on hyperdrive could log light-years
an hour, but radio waves still had to travel 186,000 mps. The
supplementary chart for the past five centuries told the real
story--three perfectly level and perfectly parallel lines.

It was the same on all the other charts. Population fluctuating slightly
at the moment, completely static for the past five centuries. A slight
decrease in agriculture, matched by an increase in synthetic food
production. A slight population move