said, flinging the door open.

Orison stepped into the basement room, a cube some fifty feet in each dimension. She found herself in a corridor between huge walls of bundled paper. Kraft Gerding, behind her, pried a packet from the wall and handed it to her. "This, my dear Orison, is the lever with which I'll over-turn the Earth," he said.

The bundle was banded with a strip of paper bearing the legend, "$5,000 in 50's." Each bit of paper in the bundle bore the portrait of President U. S. Grant. "This room," Kraft Gerding said, "contains some four hundred million dollars in U.S. currency. I intend with this money, and as much more as I need, to subvert and purchase a nation. The United States will then be the beach-head for the world."

"Counterfeits," Orison said.

"But perfect counterfeits," Kraft said. "The paper was manufactured by the master-craftsmen of Chilif. The inks were compounded by the chemists of that same capital city of Empire. The plates were cut by twenty million engravers, the Microfabridae of the Storm-Planet, supervised by Elder Compassion, an ancient of the slothful race that inhabits the planet nearest our mother sun. This is but one of my treasuries. I have many such. There is the Threadneedle Room, filled with pounds-sterling, in ones, fives, fifties and hundreds. There are other rooms, boxes, trunks and trucks filled with all the currencies of Earth. I am ready now to purchase this planet from its owners. No violence, you see. Just subterfuge."

"It's violence enough, to ruin a planet," Orison said.

"It beats war," Kraft Gerding said, drawing on his cheroot.

"And that disgusting Miss Vingt?" Orison asked. "What does she do in your forces of subversion?"

"Colonel the Margrave Auga Vingt is commander of the Royal Refreshment Corps," Kraft said. "You understand that it wouldn't do to allow our men, the purple-eared scum of three planets, to live off the land in the delicate matter of women. Colonel Vingt's Corps both maintains morale and prevents incidents of fraternization that Earthmen might deplore with their fists and guns." Kraft chuckled. "You'll be amused to hear that Auga Vingt has an ambition to become my Empress, once I have overthrown my brother's tyranny and taken over Earth."

"I must sit down," Orison said.

"By all means, my dear," Kraft said. He 

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