the upkeep allowance for a proconsulate, and we can't pay five
hundred useless servants. The chief-freedman, and about a dozen
assistants, and a few to operate the robots, when we train them, but
five hundred...!"

"Let Zhorzh do it," Prince Trevannion suggested. "Isn't that what this
Freedmen's Management is for; to find employment for emancipated slaves?
Just emancipate them and turn them over to Khouzhik."

Khouzhik promptly placed all of them on the payroll of his Management.
Khouzhik was having his hands full. He had all his top mathematical
experts, some of whom even understood the use of the slide-rule, trying
to work up a scale of wages. Erskyll loaned him a few of his staff. None
of the ideas any of them developed proved workable. Khouzhik had also
organized a corps of investigators, and he was beginning to annex the
private guard-companies of the Lords-ex-Master, whom he was organizing
into a police force.

* * * * *

The nuclear works on Austragonia were closed down. Mykhyl Eschkhaffar
ordered a programme of rationing and priorities to conserve the stock of
plutonium and radioactive isotopes on hand, and he decided that
henceforth nuclear-energy materials would be sold instead of furnished
freely. He simply found out what the market quotations on Odin were,
translated that into stellies, and adopted it. This was just a base
price; there would have to be bribes for priority allocations, rakeoffs
for the under-freedmen, and graft for the business-freedmen of the
Lords-ex-Masters who bought the stuff. The latter were completely
unconcerned; none of them even knew about it.

The Convocation adjourned until the next regular session, at the Midyear
Feasts, an eight-day intercalary period which permitted dividing the
358-day Adityan year into ten months of thirty-five days each. Count
Erskyll was satisfied to see them go. He was working on a constitution
for the Commonwealth of Aditya, and was making very little progress with
it.

"It's one of these elaborate check-and-balance things," Lanze Degbrend
reported. "To begin with, it was the constitution of Aton, with an
elective president substituted for a hereditary king. Of course, there
are a lot of added gadgets; Atonian Radical Democrat stuff. Chmidd and
Hozhet and the other chief-slaves don't like it, either."

"Slap your mouth and say, 'Freedmen,' five times."

"Nuts," his subordinate retorted insubordinately. "I know a sl