Ministry of Disturbance Read online

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  MINISTRY ... OF DISTURBANCE

  BY H. BEAM PIPER

  Illustrated by van Dongen

  +----------------------------------------------------------------+| || Transcriber's Note || || This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction || December 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence || that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. |+----------------------------------------------------------------+

  _Sometimes getting a job is harder than the job after you get it--and sometimes getting out of a job is harder than either!_

  The symphony was ending, the final triumphant paean soaring up and up,beyond the limit of audibility. For a moment, after the last notes hadgone away, Paul sat motionless, as though some part of him had followed.Then he roused himself and finished his coffee and cigarette, lookingout the wide window across the city below--treetops and towers, roofsand domes and arching skyways, busy swarms of aircars glinting in theearly sunlight. Not many people cared for Joao Coelho's music, now, andleast of all for the Eighth Symphony. It was the music of another time,a thousand years ago, when the Empire was blazing into being out of thelong night and hammering back the Neobarbarians from world after world.Today people found it perturbing.

  He smiled faintly at the vacant chair opposite him, and lit anothercigarette before putting the breakfast dishes on the serving-robot'stray, and, after a while, realized that the robot was still beside hischair, waiting for dismissal. He gave it an instruction to summon thecleaning robots and sent it away. He could as easily have summoned themhimself, or let the guards who would be in checking the room do it forhim, but maybe it made a robot feel trusted and important to relayorders to other robots.

  Then he smiled again, this time in self-derision. A robot couldn't feelimportant, or anything else. A robot was nothing but steel and plasticand magnetized tape and photo-micro-positronic circuits, whereas aman--His Imperial Majesty Paul XXII, for instance--was nothing buttissues and cells and colloids and electro-neuronic circuits. There wasa difference; anybody knew that. The trouble was that he had never metanybody--which included physicists, biologists, psychologists,psionicists, philosophers and theologians--who could define thedifference in satisfactorily exact terms. He watched the robot pivot onits treads and glide away, trailing steam from its coffee pot. It mightbe silly to treat robots like people, but that wasn't as bad as treatingpeople like robots, an attitude which was becoming entirely tooprevalent. If only so many people didn't act like robots!

  He crossed to the elevator and stood in front of it until a tinyelectroencephalograph inside recognized his distinctive brain-wavepattern. Across the room, another door was popping open in response tothe robot's distinctive wave pattern. He stepped inside and flipped aswitch--there were still a few things around that had to be manuallyoperated--and the door closed behind him and the elevator gave him aninstant's weightlessness as it started to drop forty floors.

  When it opened, Captain-General Dorflay of the Household Guard waswaiting for him, with a captain and ten privates. General Dorflay washuman. The captain and his ten soldiers weren't. They wore helmets,emblazoned with the golden sun and superimposed black cogwheel of theEmpire, and red kilts and black ankle boots and weapons belts, and thecaptain had a narrow gold-laced cape over his shoulders, but for therest, their bodies were covered with a stiff mat of black hair, andtheir faces were slightly like terriers'. (For all his humanity,Captain-General Dorflay's face was more like a bulldog's.) They werehillmen from the southern hemisphere of Thor, and as a people they madeexcellent mercenaries. They were crack shots, brave and crafty fighters,totally uninterested in politics off their own planet, and, because theyhad grown up in a patriarchial-clan society, they were fanatically loyalto anybody whom they accepted as their chieftain. Paul stepped out andgave them an inclusive nod.

  * * * * *

  "Good morning, gentlemen."

  "Good morning, Your Imperial Majesty," General Dorflay said, bowing thecouple of inches consistent with military dignity. The Thoran captainsaluted by touching his forehead, his heart, which was on the rightside, and the butt of his pistol. Paul complimented him on the smartappearance of his detail, and the captain asked how it could beotherwise, with the example and inspiration of his imperial majesty.Compliment and response could have been a playback from every morning ofthe ten years of his reign. So could Dorflay's question: "Your Majestywill proceed to his study?"

  He wanted to say, "No, to Niffelheim with it; let's get an aircar andfly a million miles somewhere," and watch the look of shockedincomprehension on the captain-general's face. He couldn't do that,though; poor old Harv Dorflay might have a heart attack. He noddedslowly.

  "If you please, general."

  Dorflay nodded to the Thoran captain, who nodded to his men. Four ofthem took two paces forward; the rest, unslinging weapons, wentscurrying up the corridor, some posting themselves along the way and therest continuing to the main hallway. The captain and two of his menstarted forward slowly; after they had gone twenty feet, Paul andGeneral Dorflay fell in behind them, and the other two brought up therear.

  "Your Majesty," Dorflay said, in a low voice, "let me beg you to be mostcautious. I have just discovered that there exists a treasonous plotagainst your life."

  Paul nodded. Dorflay was more than due to discover another treasonousplot; it had been ten days since the last one.

  "I believe you mentioned it, general. Something about planting loosestrontium-90 in the upholstery of the Audience Throne, wasn't it?"

  And before that, somebody had been trying to smuggle a fission bomb intothe Palace in a wine cask, and before that, it was a booby trap in theelevator, and before that, somebody was planning to build a submachinegun into the viewscreen in the study, and--

  "Oh, no, Your Majesty; that was--Well, the persons involved in that plotbecame alarmed and fled the planet before I could arrest them. This issomething different, Your Majesty. I have learned that unauthorizedalterations have been made on one of the cooking-robots in your privatekitchen, and I am positive that the object is to poison Your Majesty."

  They were turning into the main hallway, between the rows of portraitsof past emperors, Paul and Rodrik, Paul and Rodrik, alternating over andover on both walls. He felt a smile growing on his face, and banishedit.

  "The robot for the meat sauces, wasn't it?" he asked.

  "Why--! Yes, Your Majesty."

  "I'm sorry, general. I should have warned you. Those alterations weremade by roboticists from the Ministry of Security; they were installingan adaptation of a device used in the criminalistics-labs, to insuremore uniform measurements. They'd done that already for Prince Travann,the Minister, and he'd recommended it to me."

  That was a shame, spoiling poor Harv Dorflay's murder plot. It had beensuch a nice little plot, too; he must have had a lot of fun inventingit. But a line had to be drawn somewhere. Let him turn the Palace upsidedown hunting for bombs; harass ladies-in-waiting whose lovers hesuspected of being hired assassins; hound musicians into whoseinstruments he imagined firearms had been built; the emperor's privatekitchen would have to be off limits.

  Dorflay, who should have been looking crestfallen but relieved, stoppedshort--shocking breach of Court etiquette--and was staring in horror.

  "Your Majesty! Prince Travann did that openly and with your consent?But, Your Majesty, I am convinced that it is Prince Travann himself whois the instigator of ev
ery one of these diabolical schemes. In the caseof the elevator, I became suspicious of a man named Samml Ganner, one ofPrince Travann's secret police agents. In the case of the gun in theviewscreen, it was a technician whose sister is a member of thehousehold of Countess Yirzy, Prince Travann's mistress. In the case ofthe fission bomb----"

  The two Thorans and their captain had kept on for some distance beforethey had discovered that they were no longer being followed, and werereturning. He put his hand on General Dorflay's shoulder and urged himforward.

  "Have you mentioned this to anybody?"

  "Not a word, Your Majesty. This Court is so full of treachery that I cantrust no one, and we must never warn the villain that he is suspected--"

  "Good. Say nothing to anybody." They had reached the door of the study,now. "I think