For fear of its radiations revealing his hidden car to searchers—metal detectors were dangerous enough—Slinh had only turned the televisor on for a few seconds at the agreed hours. Now, as he listened to the newscasts, a dawning amazement held him motionless. “Marhal has offered compromise—Premier Voal in secret conference—Secession from League being reconsidered—”

  Holy Galaxy! Had Alak really pulled it off? If a crook like that Patrolman, hunted and alone, could overturn a planet—

  Slinh set his vehicle down on the lawn of the Premier’s city residence. The force dome was down and only a few military craft were in sight. Peace—

  Tranis Voal stood before the house with his arm about his wife’s shoulders. There were no other officials in sight, with the possible exception of Alak. The Patrolman stood to one side, his hair like coppery fire in the sun, the look of a fox who has just raided a chicken coop on his sharp face; but there was somehow a loneliness over him. Though he was the conqueror he was still one man against a world.

  Slinh led the child outside. Voal uttered a queer little choking cry and fell on his knees before her. When he looked up, tears gleamed in his eyes and ran down his haggard cheeks. “She’s all right,” he choked. “She’s all right—”

  “Of course she’s all right,” said Alak impatiently. “Now that your government has gone too far toward peace to back down, I don’t mind telling you that no matter what your attitude would have been, she wouldn’t have been harmed. Patrolmen may have no scruples, but we aren’t fiends.” He added slowly, somewhat bitterly, “Only a completely honest man, a fanatic or a fool, can be really fiendish.”

  Slinh tugged at Alak’s sleeve. “Now will you tell me just what happened?” he hissed.

  “What I hoped for,” said Alak. “After you left me on the island and took the kid into hiding, I just waited. That night Voal showed up with the money.”

  “Hm-m-m—so you also got a little personal profit out of it,” said the Rassalan slyly.

  “I didn’t want his money, I didn’t take it,” said Alak wearily. “The ransom demand was simply a device to make him think a gang of ordinary kidnapers had taken the girl. If he’d known it was the hated and untrustworthy Patrolman who had her, he’d probably have been out of his head with fear and loathing, have brought all the cops on the planet down on me, and…well, this way I got him alone and I had a club over his head. I told him the Patrol couldn’t weigh the life of one child against several million, perhaps billion, and that we’d kill the kid if he didn’t listen to reason. He did. I came here with him, secretly, and used him as my puppet. With his emergency powers, he was able to stop the scheduled assault on Marhal and swing the government toward conciliation. A truce has been declared, and a League mediator is on the way.”

  Voal came over. The wrath that had ravaged his face still smoldered sullenly in his eyes. “Now that I have her back,” he said, “how do you know I’ll continue to follow your dictates?”

  “I’ve come to know you in the last few days,” answered Alak coolly. “One thing I’ve found out is that, unlike me, you’re a perfectly honest man, and you want to do what you think is right. That makes it possible for me to take an oath of secrecy from you and reveal something which will—I hope—change your attitude on this whole matter.”

  “That will have to be something extraordinary,” said Voal icily.

  “It is. If we could find a private place—?”

  Slinh looked wistfully after the two men as they entered the house. He’d give a lot to eavesdrop on that conference. He had a shrewd suspicion that the greatest secret in the Galaxy was about to be revealed—which could have been useful to him.

  They were in Voal’s study before Alak said: “I want to get over that barrier of hostility to me you still have. I think you’re objective enough to have seen in the last few days that the Patrol has no desire to oppress Luan or discriminate against it. Our job is to keep the peace, no more and no less, but that involves a paradox which we have only been able to resolve by methods unknown to policemen of any other kind. You can’t forgive my murderousness toward your child—but I repeat that there never was any. We would not have harmed her under any circumstances. But we had to make you think otherwise till my job was done.”

  “I can stand it myself,” said Voal grimly. “But what my wife went through—”

  “That was tough, wasn’t it?” Suddenly the bitterness was alive and corrosive on Alak’s face. Contempt twisted his thin lips. “Yes, that was really rugged, all three days of it. Have you ever thought how many millions of mothers this holy war of yours would have left without any prospect of getting their children back?”

  Voal looked away from his bleak eyes and, for lack of better occupation, began to fumble with bottles and glasses. Alak accepted his drink but went on speaking:

  “The basic secret of the League Patrol—and I want your solemn oath you will never breathe a word of it to anyone—” he waited till Voal gave agreement, “is this: The Patrol may under no circumstances take life. We may not kill.”

  He paused to let it sink in, then added; “We have a few impressive-looking battleships to show the Galaxy and overawe planets when necessary, but they have never fought and never will. The rest of the mighty fleet is—nonexistent! Faked pictures and cooked news stories! Patrolmen may have occasion to carry lethal weapons, but if they ever use them it means mnemonic erasure and discharge from the service. We encourage fiction about the blazing guns of the Patrol—we write quite a bit ourselves and call it news releases—but it has absolutely no basis in fact.”

  He smiled. “So, though we might kidnap your daughter, we would certainly never kill her,” he finished.

  Voal sat down. His knees seemed suddenly to have failed him. But he looked up, it was with an expression that Alak found immensely cheering. He spoke slowly: “I can see why a reputation as formidable fighters would be a great asset to you—but why stop there? Why can’t you stand up and fight honestly? Why have you, instead, built up a record of such incredible villainy that the worst criminals of the Galaxy could not equal it?”

  Alak relaxed into a chair and sipped his cocktail. “It’s a long story,” he said. “It goes right back to the beginning of interstellar travel.”

  He searched for words a moment, then began: “After about three centuries of intercourse between the stars, it became plain that an uncoordinated Galactic civilization would inevitably destroy itself. Consider the problems in their most elementary form. Today there are over a million civilized stars, with a population running up over ten to the fifteenth, and exploration adds new ones almost daily. Even if that population were completely uniform, the sheer complexity of administrative detail is inconceivable—why, if all government services from legislators to postmen added up to only one percent of the total, and no government has ever been that efficient, that would be some ten to the thirteenth individual beings in government! Robocomputers help some, but not much. You run a system with a population of about two and a half billion, and you know yourself what a job that is.

  “And then the population is not uniform, but fantastically diverse. We are mammals, warm-blooded, oxygen breathing—but there are intelligent reptiles, birds, fish, cephalopods, and creatures Earth never heard of, among the oxygen breathers alone—there are halogen breathers covering as wide a range, there are eaters of raw energy, there are creatures from worlds almost next to a sun and creatures from worlds where oxygen falls as snow. Reconciling all their needs and wants—

  “The minds and the histories of the races differ so much that no intelligence could ever imagine them all. Could you think the way the communal race-mind of Sturvel’s Planet does? Do you have the cold emotions of a Vergan arthropod or the passionate temper of a Goldran? And individuals within the races usually differ as much as, say, humans do, if not more. And histories are utterly unlike. We try to bring the benefits of civilization to all races not obviously unfit—but often we can’t tell till too late. Or even…well, take the case of us humans. Sol has been at peace for centuries. But humans colonizing out among the stars forget their traditions until barbarians like Luanians and Marhalians go to war!”

  “That hurt,” said Voal very quietly. “But maybe I deserved it.”

  Alak looked expectantly at his empty glass. Voal refilled it and the Patrolman drank deep. Then he said:

  “And technology has advanced to a point where armed conflict, such as was at first inevitable and raged between the stars, is death for one side and ruin for another unless the victor manages completely to wipe out his foe in the first attack. In those three unorganized centuries, some hundreds of planets were simply sterilized, or even destroyed. Whole intelligent races were wiped out almost overnight. Sol and a few allies managed to suppress piracy, but no conceivable group short of an overwhelming majority of all planets—and with the diversity I just mentioned such unanimity is impossible—could ever have imposed order on the Galaxy.

  “Yet—such order was a necessity of survival.

  “One way, the ‘safest’ in a short-term sense, would have been for a powerful system, say Sol, to conquer just as many stars as it needed for an empire to defend itself against all comers, without conquering too many to administer. Such a procedure would have involved the permanent establishment of totalitarian militarism, the murder or reduction to peonage of all other races within the imperial bounds, and the ultimate decadence and disintegration which statism inevitably produces.

  “But a saner way was found. The Galactic League was formed, to arbitrate and co-ordinate the activities of the different systems as far as possible. Slowly, over some four centuries, all planets were brought in as members, until today a newly discovered system automatically joins. The League carries on many projects, but its major function is the maintenance of interstellar order. And to do that job, as well as to carry out any League mandates, the Patrol exists.”

  With a flash of defiance, Voal challenged: “Yes, and how does the Patrol do it? With thievery, bribery, lies, blackmail, meddlesome interference— Why don’t you stand up openly for the right and fight for it honestly?”

  “With what?” asked Alak wearily. “Oh, I suppose we could maintain a huge battle fleet and crush any disobedient systems. But how trustful would that leave the others? How long before we had to wipe out another aggrieved world? Don’t forget—when you fight on a planetary scale, you fight women and children and innocent males who had nothing whatsoever to do with the trouble. You kill a billion civilians to get at a few leaders. How long before the injustice of it raised an alliance against us which we couldn’t beat? Who would stay in a tyrannical League when he could destroy it?

  “As it is, the Galaxy is at peace. Eighty or ninety percent of all planets know the League is their friend and have nothing but praise for the Patrol that protects them. When trouble arises, we quietly settle it, and the Galaxy goes on its unknowing way. Those something times ten to the fifteenth beings are free to live their lives out without fear of racial extinction.”

  “Peace can be bought too dearly at times. Peace without honor—”

  “Honor!” Alak sprang from his chair. His red hair blazed about the suddenly angry face. He paced before Voal with a cold and bitter glare.

  “Honor!” he sneered. “Another catchword. I get so sick of those unctuous phrases—Don’t you realize that deliberate scoundrels do little harm, but that the evil wrought by sincere fools is incalculable?

  “Murder breeds its like. For psychological reasons, it is better to prohibit Patrolmen completely from killing than to set up legalistic limits. But if we can’t use force, we have to use any other means that comes in handy. And I, for one, would rather break any number of arbitrary laws and moral rules, and wreck a handful of lives of idiots who think with a blaster, than see a planet go up in flames or…or see one baby killed in a war it never even heard about!”

  He calmed down. For a while he continued pacing, then he sat down and said conversationally:

  “Let me give you a few examples from recent cases of Patrol methods. Needless to say, this is strictly confidential. All the Galaxy knows is that there is peace—but we had to use every form of perfidy and betrayal to maintain it.”

  He thought a moment, then began: “Sirius and Alpha Centauri fought a war just before the founding of the League which nearly ruined both. They’ve managed to reconstruct since, but there is an undying hatred between them. League or no League they mean to be at each other’s throats the first chance they get.

  “Well, no matter what methods we use to hold the Centaurians in check. But on Sirius the government has become so hopelessly corrupt, the military force so graft-ridden and inefficient, that action is out of the question.

  “Now a vigorous young reformer rose; honest, capable, popular, all set to win an election which would sweep the rascally incumbents out and bring good government to Sirius for the first time in three centuries. And—the Patrol bribed him to throw the election. He wouldn’t take the money, but he did as we said because otherwise, as he knew, we’d make it the dirtiest election in even Sirian history, ruin his business and reputation and family life, and defeat him.

  “Why? Because, of course, the first thing he’d have done if elected would have been to get the military in trim. Which would have meant the murder of several hundred million Centaurians—unless they struck first. Sure, we don’t like crooked government either—but it costs a lot less in lives, suffering, natural resources, and even money than war.

  “Then there was the matter of an obscure barbarian system whose people are carnivorous and have a psychological need of combat. Imagine them loose in the Galaxy! We have to hold them in check for several generations until sublimation can be achieved. Fortunately, they are under an absolute monarch. A native woman whom we had educated managed to become his mistress and completely dominate him. And when the great nobles showed signs of revolt, she seduced one of them to act as her agent provocateur and smoke out the rebellious ones.

  “Immoral? Sure. But two or three centuries hence, even the natives will thank us for it. Meanwhile, the Galaxy is safe from them

  “A somewhat similar case was a race by nature so fanatically religious that they were all set to go crusading among the stars with all the weapons of modern science. We wrecked that scheme by introducing a phony religion with esoteric scientific ‘miracles’ and priests who were Patrolmen trained in psychotechnology—a religion that preaches peace and tolerance. A dirty trick to play on a trusting people, but it saved their neighbors—and also themselves, since otherwise their extinction might have been necessary.

  “We really hit a moral bottom in the matter of another primitive and backward system. Its people are divided into clans whose hereditary chiefs have absolute authority. When one of the crown princes took a tour through the Galaxy, our agents managed to guide him into one of the pleasure houses we maintain here and there. And we got records. Recently this being succeeded to the chiefship of the most influential clan. We were pretty sure, from study of his psychographs, that before long he would want to throw off the League ‘yoke’ and go off on a spree of conquest—it’s a race of warriors with a contempt for all outsiders. So—the Patrol used those old records to blackmail him into refusing the job in favor of a safely conservative brother.

  “Finally we come to your present case. Marhal was ready to fight for the rich prize of Lhing, and the League arbitrator, underestimating the determination of Luan, awarded the whole planet to them. That was enough to swing an election so that a pro-League government came into power there. I was sent here to check on your reactions, and soon saw a serious mistake had been made. War seemed inevitable. I tried the scoundrelly procedure of fomenting sabotage and revolution. After all, that damage would have been negligible compared to the cost of even a short war.”

  “The cost to Marhal,” said Voal grimly.

  “Maybe. But after all, I had to think of the whole Galaxy, not Luan. Sometimes someone must suffer a little lest someone else suffer a lot more. At any rate, my scheme failed. I resorted to alliance with a dope smuggler—he ruins a very few lives, while war takes them by the millions—and to kidnapping. I threatened and bluffed until you had backed up so far that mediation was possible.

  “Well, that’s all, then. The League commission is on its way. They’ll have some other fat plum to give Luan in place of Lhing—which I suppose will make trouble elsewhere for the Patrol to settle. Your government will have to go out of power after such an about-face—you’re rejoining the League, of course—but I daresay you’ll soon get back in. And you have been entrusted with a secret which could split the Galaxy wide open.”

  “I’ll keep it,” said Voal. He smiled faintly. “From what I know of your methods—I’d better!” For a moment he hesitated, then: “And thanks. I was a fool. All Luan was populated by hysterical fools.” He soon grimaced. “Only I still wonder if that isn’t better than being a rogue.”

  “Take your choice,” shrugged Wing Alak. “As long as the Galaxy keeps going I don’t care. That’s my job.”

  To a Tavern Wench

  Vineleaf, O my vineleaf, now pour the hoarded sunshine out

  From bottles where it lay in a dream of summers lost

  To the sunsets wrought by frost

  All throughout the vineyards where grapes have swollen purple

  And well nigh sweet as kisses that from boy to girl were tossed

  When their lightfoot pathways crossed—

  Nor count the cost!

  Aldebaran is not so red within the Hyades

  As in the heartside claret heartward flowing;

  Nor gold or whiteness quivers across the winter seas

  Like that which gleams where chardonnay is glowing.