The prime minister's feet pattered over the floor again. The door to the room closed.

Merssu smiled quietly. He rose, and opened the concealed door behind his chair. Closing it behind him, he slipped into a passage of which no one knew, and ten minutes later he was in a private tubeway that led half-way across the continent into the heart of an old and barren mountain range.

As he sat comfortably in the padded upholstery of the tube car, Merssu smiled again. Poor Tors! So excitable. Always the hysteric—a perfect rabblerouser, perhaps, but not a clever man. No, never a clever man. A clever man knew when the game was over. And Merssu laughed.

The game had been worth it. Five years ago, he had been a revolutionary, slinking through the alleys at night, always in danger—and always clever. Four years of that, and then—Empire. Absolute rule over the entire Greater Magellanic Cloud. Now he was once again in danger. But it was a danger he had long ago foreseen, and planned for. And the past year had been worth it. He laughed again. Poor, addle-witted Tors! Left with the empty bag in his hands.

The spaceship rested like a crouching bullet in its chamber. As he slid the tubeway door shut behind him, Merssu admired the savage sleekness of its lines once again. Even more, he admired his cleverness in having it built. A clever man always has a back door. He crossed the hangar floor unhurriedly, and climbed into the ship.

The control room was small, but efficient. A hundred controls lay closely around the padded chair, some of them for the standard drive, others for the hyperspatial warp.

The hyperspatial warp! Merssu smiled. There was his escape—and more. Here were the means for his future rulership over nothing so small as the Cloud—here were entire galaxies waiting for his hand.

Hyperspace! There was something to make a man think! Another universe, not beyond, but alongside his own, hidden in the complex byways of Reimannian geometry and the mathematics of Einstein. A universe where time itself ran slower, where a year of normal time encompassed centuries. A ship could twist itself into that universe and travel just below the speed of light, the limit which, in normal space, was the barrier no ship could cross. But, in hyperspace, while the same barrier existed, a man from normal space could travel for centuries, covering great distances, while, for him, only a few months passed.

Merssu chuckled. Behind him, stored in 

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