* * *
To begin with, Horsip sent envoys to the wavering planets, to urge their leaders to stand by the Integral Union. It quickly developed that most of leaders could not have cared less for the Integral Union, it being only the power of the Holy Brotherhood and popular sentiment that kept the planets from joining the dictators.
Horsip quietly initiated military training on a number of the planets most loyal to the Integral Union. He at once ran into shortages of all kinds. While Horsip had squads practicing with pitchforks, the dictators stood with upraised arms on reviewing platforms while troops thundered past forty and fifty abreast.
Horsip scraped together all of the Fleet that had yet trickled in, reinforced it with his own crack squadron, and sent it as a quiet show of strength to planets wavering on the edge of submission to the dictators. The dictators got word of this, and sent their own fleets around, creating unfavorable comparisons.
Horsip quietly hinted to the Columbians that they would find a warm welcome in the Integral Union. The Columbians politely explained that they preferred independence.
Horsip labored to solve the aggravating problems of infant or decrepit armaments industries on the few industrial planets under his control. Meanwhile, the dictators turned out battle fleets by mass production, and had the crews ready to board the ships as they came off the production lines.
Horsip struggled to create the impression of a quiet powerful force that might at its choice intervene decisively in the situation. The impression that came across was of a collection of antique relics manned by a team of amateur cheerleaders.
As one day succeeded the next, Horsip could sense that the tide, so far from turning, was gathering momentum in the other direction.
Meanwhile, the reports came in, more and more frequently, of Mikeril raids, and the raids were growing larger.
And now the swaggering envoys of the dictators began dropping in on diplomatic “courtesy calls,” to urge Horsip with none too subtle arguments to stop trying to kid anybody, and pick out which side could do him the most good. Horsip was very polite. Next, the representatives of half-lunatic revolutionary organizations started coming around, to put forth grandiose plans that Horsip, trying to get enough straws together to make a raft, was in no position to reject. On the other hand, when he tried to combine these tiny organizations, to make something useful, he at once ran into a little difficulty: Each revolutionary wanted only his own revolution.
As time went, the revolutionaries grew shriller, the Mikerils more numerous and bolder, and the dictators’ envoys more smilingly suggestive.
As his position wavered on the edge of disaster, with his weakness daily more plain for all to see, the governing body of Horsip’s largest industrial planet met to decide which dictators to join. Horsip examined the latest reports from the Holy Brotherhood on the planet, sent iron-clad instructions on his authority from the Council of Brothers, then sent an order on his authority from the High Council, stripping the planet’s governing body of all authority, and placing its troops under command of a loyal Centran officer. Horsip’s ships, approaching the planet on a courtesy call, received new orders. As dawn broke over the capital, the Brotherhood, with threats of fire and damnation, sent mobs of the faithful surging through the streets, the warships of the Integral Union appeared in the skies, and Horsip’s crack bodyguard massed on the steps of the government buildings, to raise the Centran flag to the roll of drums and the delirious roar of the crowd.
As the shock from this event momentarily immobilized the dictators, Horsip summoned their envoys to a specially built audience chamber. Here, seated in an elaborate chair with the Supreme Staff in a curving row behind and above him, and with sixteen of Able Hunter’s men seated in a curving row behind and above the Staff, Horsip met the envoys. The envoys, incredulous and angry, glanced from Horsip to the Staff, sneered, and then saw the Earthmen. Horsip spoke quietly. “Gentlemen, the situation is not what you may think. The basis of power has changed fundamentally, and I request that you notify your principals that any attempt to interfere with the proper exercise of Centran authority may lead to serious consequences. This is all that I am free to say. I ask that you consider it carefully.”
As Horsip spoke, more of Able Hunter’s Earthmen came and went, conferring briefly with this or that impressively uniformed Earthman in the top row of the dais, looking down coldly on the perspiring envoys.
Swallowing nervously, the envoys bowed low to Horsip, and left the room.
No one interfered with Horsip’s occupation of the planet.
No one said a public word against it.
No one was at all disrespectful.
And when Horsip moved his command ship forward, to set it down in the planetary capital and make the planet the formal site of his headquarters, no one objected to that, either. The dictators said nothing at all. Only Moffis had his doubts.
“Look,” said Moffis, “what happened is that the sight of Hunter’s Earthmen, dressed in those uniforms, convinced the envoys that we were being backed by Earth, isn’t that right?”
“Moffis,” Horsip protested, “I didn’t say that. All I said was that the basis of power had changed fundamentally—and it had, hadn’t it? And I suggested that the situation was not what they might think. How can I be blamed if they jumped to the wrong conclusion?”
“What happens if they reach the right conclusion?”
“Let’s hope,” said Horsip, “that they don’t.”
* * *
On the days following Horsip’s forward move, there followed a momentary suspension of action on the part of the dictators, as if they were waiting cautiously to see what might happen next.
Horsip used this pause to renew his offer to Columbia, to strengthen his grip on the planets that were loyal, and to bring as many of the waverers as possible into line. To reinforce the bluff, Able Hunter’s Special Effects Team labored overtime to create a fleet of imitation warships realistic to the last welded seam. As the dictators, cautiously probing Horsip’s position, sent little unmarked scout ships to check on what Horsip might have, this fleet was briefly exposed, lurking in the asteroid belt that ringed the planet’s sun.
Moffis objected, “But they will be able to find out, from the Earthmen, that we aren’t allied with Earth.”
“Truth. We never said we were.”
“The idea is to make them uncertain what we have?”
“Yes,” said Horsip, “because anything they might imagine is better than what we do have.”
Moffis looked serious, but said nothing.
Horsip, however, stayed determinedly optimistic.
The dictators, baffled by Horsip’s arrangements, avoided any direct clash, but went to work to undermine him indirectly, each side bringing over to it those planets that were the most subject to coercion or bribery. Each time, they took pains to have heavy forces on hand as the planet ‘voluntarily’ proclaimed its change of loyalty.
Each time, Horsip, seeing the hopelessness of intervening, did nothing, but continued to study his charts and maps, and the reports of his agents on planets in and out of the dictator’s worlds. Particularly, he studied the reports from one small planet where popular dissatisfaction with the local Snard ruler was combined with relative closeness to Horsip’s worlds, and where the Holy Brotherhood had gone underground but remained powerful.
As the dictators’ power surged ahead, and their confidence revived, one fine day Able Hunter’s Special Effects Team swamped the planet’s primitive detection system, the populace rose in wrath and raised the Centran flag, the new president, elected on the spot, appealed to Centra for protection, and Horsip’s elite guard came down on the planet to overawe the local soldiery. Officers in the local detection center reported a gigantic fleet standing off the planet, with monster transports ready to land hundreds of thousands of troops. The local sub-dictator blasted off in his escape ship, and poured on the fuel for far places.
The news of the event was broadcast and rebroadcast on the Centran planets, and combined in various ways with Horsip’s take-over of the first planet, one report emphasizing the huge fleet, another bearing down hard on the weakness of the dictators under stress, another pointing out the popular rejoicing at the event, in such a way that suddenly the Integral Union appeared the new force in the universe, and the dictators seemed almost feeble by comparison. As ringing sermons proclaimed the victory of the Old Ways, there was an outburst of popular enthusiasm for the new rise of the almost forgotten power. Abruptly, the reports from Horsip’s agents began to turn optimistic, while the agents of the gigantic dictatorships began reporting a disastrous shift in public opinion.
As cheering events occupied the public eye, however, Horsip was just starting to replace new recruits’ pitchforks with rifles, waves of Mikeril attacks were devastating the planet he had made his headquarters, and the latest confidential comparison of fleet strengths put him a tenth of the way up from the bottom of the page, while Snard and Ganfre were off the top of the chart.