Imperial Stars 2-Republic and Empire by Jerry Pournelle Page B

translucent eyelids closed over her quiet eyes—and then she had awakened and her eyes had opened suddenly and she had looked at him. There, wrapped in the sheets, with the morning sun streaming across the room, she had looked at him with that same expression—a kind of horrified surprise.
    The door irised shut behind them, and Stattor nodded to himself. Yes, it was probably at that moment, with the sun filling the room—and he remembered there was a bowl of oranges on a table, radiant with sunlight—it was at that moment that he decided that some way, somehow, he would do this to her, and not long after that he began giving information to the government police.
    So now it had all worked out. The loose end was tied to everything else.
    He swept his hand across the lower part of his stomach. He did not feel so bad now. Neither his arms nor his legs ached, and his stomach did not seem filled with bile.
    Stattor turned in his chair and gazed out the transparent bubble at the churning hub of the galaxy and then at his globular cluster. But beyond those stars, in the textureless black, there was what drew his eyes. When he looked into it, he almost felt his soul drawn out of his bloated and diseased body and sent into a place where there was neither light nor matter nor decay nor care. The autovox chirped.
    "Supervisor," Zallon's voice said gently, "there is the matter of the dispersal list."
    Stattor grunted and spun his chair to face the desk again. The list lay there, face up, awaiting his final decision whether or not to exempt any of the condemned. He thought of Aros waiting in some detention cell, old, haggard, half dead, and then he thought of himself and Usko, there beside the lake, so long ago. She had brought a bouquet of colored weeds up from the shoreline, and Aros had stood up, laughing, his arms wide to receive her—
    His eyes stopped on the autovox.
    Zallon had overstepped his limits. Stattor could barely see the green blossom of his nebula behind it. His emotionless aide, that sunken-eyed reptile, never revealed his feelings about anything, so how could he be trusted? He was an unknown.
    Excepting no one from execution, Stattor pushed the list away from him. He had never liked Aros. Nor Zallon. With his fatted hand, Stattor retrieved the list and entered Zallon's name at the bottom. One way or another, so many people tried to stand in his way, to annoy him, or to prevent the grand and mysterious thing that was about to happen to him. It was very close. He could feel it come nearer every hour.
    For a moment, his stomach did not burn and the beta-blocker made his life easier. He leaned back in his chair and again turned to face the absorbing blackness beyond the galaxy, and he was content to know that soon, so very soon, his flesh would turn to myth.

Editor's Introduction To:
Litany For Dictatorships
Stephen Vincent Benet
     
    Whitaker Chambers says of his education at Columbia:
"Nothing that I can remember was said about the Russian Revolution. No one in Contemporary Civilization parted the curtain of falling snow to show me Petrograd with a cold rain blowing in from the Gulf of Finland on a day in November 1917. The tottering republican government of Russia had ordered the drawbridges over the Neva River to be raised."
    Of course, Chambers had this advantage over our generation: at least he knew there had been a Republican government of Russia. Nowadays, everyone is taught that the Bolsheviks overthrew the czars, and no one remembers Alexander Kerensky and the Social Democrats who, for a few months, gave Russia the only republican rule it has ever had.
    Chambers continues his story.
"The great spans tilted slowly through the air. The Red Guards and the Communist Party resolutes had begun to execute that careful plan, the brainchild of Comrades Trotsky, Podvoisky, and Antonov-Avseenko, which proved to be a master technique for the revolutionary seizure of a modern city. The Communists were occupying the public