As much as she hated to do it, Edna Stanley was forced to resort to strong socialist measures. All old money was declared invalid. All former debts were erased. All items of real or personal property valued above a hundred rubles became the property of the state. Every family, every farm, and every business must make an immediate inventory of its assets, and produce that list on demand. Hoarding or hiding personal possessions would be a capital offense, just as looting and profiteering were. The Empire’s citizens all had to work together. Edna stressed, or they would all fail together.
First consideration had to be given to the necessities of life. Shelter was the simplest. Everyone who had a home could stay there rent-free for the duration of the crisis; those temporarily without a place to live would be assigned lodging as it was available. Water, power, heating, and cooling would be provided free by the government, though anyone caught squandering needlessly would find himself in trouble.
Food was the crucial concern. Since few people had the means to buy it and mass starvation could not be permitted, food had to be given away to all who needed it. Each baron was charged with the responsibility of setting committees of responsible citizens in each neighborhood of his city. These committees would oversee the distribution of food, and make sure one person didn’t end up with all steaks and another with only beans. Allocations were bound to be haphazard and some inequities were inevitable; for that reason, the counts were to establish review boards to monitor the work of the barons’ committees. If there were too many complaints, members of the local committees might find themselves on trial, charged with profiteering. That was something few of them would risk.
Clothing would be handled in the same way. Obviously expensive, luxury clothing was simply confiscated by the crown to avoid fights. Everything else was as signed on an as-needed basis – but a person had to prove his wardrobe was running low before he could receive anything.
Trading in all nonessential items, like jewelry, furs, and major appliances, was barred altogether. People had to band together now to look after their necessities; the luxuries could come later, when the survival of civilization had been assured.
Edna Stanley concluded her speech by reminding her subjects that the Empire was only as strong as the people who comprised it. She pledged all her strength and all her will to restoring the Empire to greatness and to restoring a decent life for all its citizens. As a symbol of her dedication she removed her imperial robes to reveal a set a common work clothes beneath them. She promised to work with her people to make the Empire of Earth the greatest society in human history.
Some people took her speech calmly, others went into hysterics. Some people reacted by smashing innocent little household computers. Some immediately went out and tested the limits of the laws on looting, hoarding, and profiteering. Enforcement of those regulations was spotty at first – but as local police forces began pulling themselves together and more people were publicly executed for those crimes, the incidents dropped off dramatically.
Many people found themselves out of work, as jobs that were not connected to vital services were no longer needed. Sales clerks, business executives, government paper pushers, and people in hundreds of other professions found themselves totally useless. Many simply stayed home and complained. A few decided this would be a good time to start a hobby. And a good many public-spirited individuals went out looking to see how they could help their communities. Some volunteered to help at the food distribution centers, some joined neighborhood militia to help the overburdened police, some cared for the elderly and sick who couldn’t help them selves through this time of crisis.
The people of Earth stuck together, and slowly they began to rebuild their world.
—
But Earth was only one world, and there were hundreds more within the Empire. As Head of the Service of the Empire, the task of worrying about their safety fell largely on the shoulders of Zander von Wilmenhorst.
The big problem again lay in communication. For those first few fitful days, Earth – which had until now been the hub of galactic intercourse – was cut off from the rest of humanity. Less than two dozen worlds man aged to keep the lines of communication open during that crucial period, and even those reports were spotty.
Where local SOTE personnel survived the initial chaos, they were given extraordinary powers, ranking even above their local dukes. Whenever communication could be re-established, the Empress’s message was relayed to that planet and a recovery program similar to Earth’s was put into effect.
But the number of worlds SOTE could reach was pitifully small. Some of the worlds, whose major nobility had already been seduced into the rebellion, were completely independent of imperial control. Other worlds were bullied into submission by the appearance of the conspiracy’s space fighters in orbit above them, threatening them with TCN-14 if they refused to surrender. The majority of worlds did not have d’Alemberts ready to leap to their defense, and could not avoid falling into the enemy’s clutches.
Planets that had large naval bases were not attacked by enemy ships; even though many of the Navy’s vessels were wiped out when their computers went haywire, the conspiracy didn’t want to risk losing any of its reduced fleet where there was significant chance of opposition. If the naval base planet had a loyal duke, the planet did not fall into enemy hands – though it did suffer the same catastrophic disruptions as the other loyal worlds.
With the staff of SOTE Headquarters on Earth temporarily displaced and all their records destroyed, it took many hours to resume any semblance of normal operations. Were it not for the fact that the SOTE personnel were the best trained, most skilled, and most dedicated of public servants, the task would have been impossible. Once the initial shock wore off, these tireless workers labored around the clock to restore some of the Service’s vaunted efficiency.
The worst part was that the Service’s files, built up slowly and painstakingly over centuries, had been totally erased. SOTE had no way of knowing which people or organizations might be criminal and which ones were honest. They had no way of knowing who was working for them in their field offices, which agents were in the field, or what their assignments were. They had no reports of potential danger spots and no notion of who was on their payroll. The Service of the Empire was an organization that depended on information to keep it alive, and now there was no information to feed it.
Much of the older information was irretrievably lost, information about past cases that SOTE had solved or that were still open in the files. Also gone were all methods of identifying key people; there were no more fingerprint or retinal pattern records, either for SOTE personnel or for wanted criminals. For a while it might be difficult to tell who were the cops and who were the robbers.
Some of the more recent information, though, could still be salvaged. Clerical personnel – who had to be vouched for by other known people, to prevent infiltration of the Service by outsiders – were asked first to write summaries of all the current cases they were administering; second, to write summaries of as many past cases as they could remember; and third, to record as much as they could about the way their job was handled and how it was done, who their contacts were on other worlds, and how those people could be identified. It was a monstrous job, but the SOTE personnel fell to it with enthusiasm.
Amidst all the gloom, the Service discovered a surprising resource. Many retired officers, some well into their eighties and nineties, came forward to volunteer their services once again – and while they were usually too old to work in the field, they provided a wealth of information about SOTE’s history that might otherwise have been lost. These veterans could remember all the old cases, all the old scandals, and could call them up at will to replenish the Service’s empty files.
Whenever contact was re-established with another loyal world, communications priority was given to SOTE. If any field personnel were still alive, they were asked to make the same detailed reports that their colleagues on Earth were making about their past assignments and everything they could think of that related to their jobs. At the same time they were given the heavy burden of seeing that their world carried out the recovery program initiated by the Empress. Eating and sleeping were optional activities to which, unfortunately, not much time could be allotted.
The ranks of SOTE personnel had been drastically thinned, though, by the catastrophe, and there were just a comparative handful of planets where this method could work. Thus, when the Circus of the Galaxy showed up in orbit around Earth four days after the breakdown of technology and order, the Head felt a major prayer had been answered.