or
nearly two centuries it had run Earth like a smoothly operating machine.
But no culture is immortal; even the U.N. must fall, and fall it did.

And, during the chaos that followed, a man named Jerris Danfors had
grabbed the loosened reins of government just as Napoleon had done after
the French Revolution. Unlike Napoleon, however, Jerris had been able to
hold his power without abusing it; he was able to declare himself
Emperor of Earth and make it stick. The people _wanted_ a single central
government, and they were willing to go back to the old idea of Empire
just to get such a government.

Jerris the First was neither a power-mad dictator nor an altruist,
although he had been called both. He was, purely and simply, a strong,
wise, intelligent man--which made him abnormal, no matter how you look
at it. Or supernormal, if you will.

Like Napoleon, he realized that wars of conquest were capable of being
used as a kind of cement to hold the people together in support of their
Emperor. But, again, unlike Napoleon, he found there was no need to sap
the strength of Earth to fight those wars. The population and productive
capacity of Earth was greater than any possible coalition among
extra-Solar planets and vastly greater than any single planet alone.

Thus the Terran Empire had come into being with only a fraction of the
internal disruption which normally follows empire-building.

But Man can flee as well as fight. Every invading army is preceded by
hordes of refugees. Ships left every planet threatened by the Empire,
seeking new, uncharted planets to settle--planets that would be safe
from the Imperial Fleet because they were hidden among a thousand
thousand stars. Mankind spread through the galaxy faster than the Empire
could. Not even Jerris the First could completely consolidate the vast
reaches of the galaxy into a single unit; one lifetime is simply not
enough.

Nor are a dozen.

Slowly, the Empire had changed. Over the next several generations, the
Emperors had yielded more and more of the absolute power that had been
left to them by Jerris. While history never exactly repeats itself, a
parallel could be drawn between the history of the Empire and the
history of England between, say, 1550 and 1950. But, while England's
empire had begun to recede with the coming of democratic government, the
Terran Empire continued to spread--more slowly than at first, but
steadily.

Until, that is, the Empire had touche