in. "Yes, New Texas is the butcher shop of the
galaxy. In more ways than one, I'm afraid you'll find. They just
butchered one of our people there a short while ago. Our Ambassador, in
fact."

That would be Silas Cumshaw, and this was the first I'd heard about it.

I asked when it had happened.

"A couple of months ago. We just heard about it last evening, when the
news came in on a freighter from there. Which serves to point up
something you stressed in your article--the difficulties of trying to
run a centralized democratic government on a galactic scale. But we have
another interest, which may be even more urgent than our need for New
Texan meat. You've heard, of course, of the z'Srauff."

That was a statement, not a question; Natalenko wasn't trying to insult
me. I knew who the z'Srauff were; I'd run into them, here and there. One
of the extra-solar intelligent humanoid races, who seemed to have been
evolved from canine or canine-like ancestors, instead of primates. Most
of them could speak Basic English, but I never saw one who would admit
to understanding more of our language than the 850-word Basic
vocabulary. They occupied a half-dozen planets in a small star-cluster
about forty light-years beyond the Capella system. They had developed
normal-space reaction-drive ships before we came into contact with
them, and they had quickly picked up the hyperspace-drive from us back
in those days when the Solar League was still playing Missionaries of
Progress and trying to run a galaxy-wide Point-Four program.

In the past century, it had become almost impossible for anybody to get
into their star-group, although z'Srauff ships were orbiting in on every
planet that the League had settled or controlled. There were z'Srauff
traders and small merchants all over the galaxy, and you almost never
saw one of them without a camera. Their little meteor-mining boats were
everywhere, and all of them carried more of the most modern radar and
astrogational equipment than a meteor-miner's lifetime earnings would
pay for.

I also knew that they were one of the chief causes of ulcers and
premature gray hair at the League capital on Luna. I'd done a little
reading on pre-spaceflight Terran history; I had been impressed by the
parallel between the present situation and one which had culminated, two
and a half centuries before, on the morning of 7 December, 1941.

"What," Natalenko inquired, "do you think Machiavelli, Junior would do