Executive by Piers Anthony Page A

game.”
    “You know he won't turn her down.”
    “I know. Still—”
    “She's fifteen. Old enough to wrestle with reality. And it's the only way we'll ever get Thorley's input for the Tyrancy.”
    Spirit shrugged, not debating it. We returned to the problem of the ship.
    “QYV has sources,” I said.
    “But do we want to risk exposure of that connection?”
    “If that ship lands, that and the status of Jupiter may become academic.”
    “There is that,” she agreed.
    “I have something for Reba, anyway.”
    So I put in a call to Q. A diagram flashed momentarily on the screen. “Got it, sir,” Shelia said, and put it on again as a still picture. She had captured it on her recording so that now I could study it at leisure without holding open the connection. QYV (pronounced “kife”) was a very private party.
    The diagram was a stylized map of a section of New Wash. One chamber was marked. “I'm not ready to go there yet myself,” I said. “I'll send Ebony with the package.” The package was my private narrative of my twenty years as a politician, leading to the moment I assumed the office of Tyrant; I had taken a few minutes to scribble the last sentences, so that it ended at the very point at which this present manuscript begins. QYV had become the repository for these manuscripts; I knew they were safe there.
    I gave the package and the address to Ebony to deliver. She could no longer run errands as she had when she was only our gofer, for now she was head of the Department of Population, and a Secret Service man tagged along with her, but I doubted that anyone would pay much attention. Ebony was very good at being anonymous.
    “And tell her this,” I said. “ 'I need a pretext.' She will understand.”
    “Got it, sir,” she said, and departed.
    I brooded over the blip on the screen, now four days distant. “Maybe a rogue ship, a pirate,” I said.
    “Something out of our control, seeking plunder.”
    “Can't,” Spirit said. “We cleaned the pirates out of space, remember?”
    “For the first time I wish there were a pirate left!”
    “Even if there were, it wouldn't have either the nerve or the power to take on a Saturnian ship. That's a cruiser, theoretically converted to merchant duty, but you can bet she can blast anything less than a Jupiter cruiser out of space—and will, if provoked. The Saturnians aren't lily-livered the way we are.”
    “I'll gild that lily-liver before I let that ship dock!” I swore. But she was right, as she always was. We could take out that ship, but we would have to do it directly, using the Navy—and that would be an act of war. That was to be done only as a last resort. For one thing, if we challenged the Saturn ship and it did not turn back, we would have to blast it—and that would destroy any proof we might have had of its designs.
    It seemed that we were caught between being in the wrong, which would be a very bad beginning for the Tyrancy on the interplanetary scale, and allowing Saturn to achieve a significant, perhaps critical, tactical advantage. Scylla and Charybdis—or in the contemporary parlance, CT and BH. To be caught between contra-terrene matter, whose very touch would render a person into something like a miniature nova, and a black hole, that would suck him in and crush him to the size of the nucleus of an atom. I rather liked the imagery but not the situation.
    “SeeTee and BeeAitch,” Spirit murmured, echoing my unspoken thought.
    We continued to handle routinely hectic matters, trying to get the new government formed enough to function while reassuring parties of both the planetary and interplanetary scenes that everything was under control. Many functions had continued for a while on inertia, but the existing structure was deteriorating, and we had constantly to shore it up on a patchwork basis.
    Ebony returned. “She took your package and sent you this one,” she reported, handing me a small box.
    “She said it's a fair exchange