Consolator Steen and his assistant, Braun, stood watching the man as he disappeared into the distance. Then Steen turned and walked over to one of the benches in the Park near to the gates. He sat down wearily.
"Braun," he said. "I don't like it. Not at all. He should have been beside himself with worry, he should have pumped me for more information, he should have done a thousand other things. But he didn't. He just turned and left. I tell you, I don't like it at all."
Braun frowned. "He seemed to take the bait, Sir."
"And then, after sniffing it over carefully, he turned and spat it right back in our faces. We can't afford mistakes like this, Braun. Earth needs the money too badly. It's our only means of support, and we can't let a fish like Krieg get off the hook."
"There are other fish around, Sir."
Steen's face took on an angry look. "Of course there are. But none with the potentialities that Krieg showed. Don't you realize that ever since that sad day when Earth realized that she was a has-been, she's had to take advantage of every single opportunity offered her, just to keep alive? Oh, they were clever, those ancient ones who realized that if a civilization is to be kept together, it must have a myth. And so they gave our civilization its myth—that of Earth, the Great Ancestral Home. Just accidentally, it also offered Earth a means of retaining at least a part of her power."
Steen waved his hands in the air. "From an economic viewpoint it was nice too. Only the very wealthy could afford an Earth burial, and so it became a means of hidden, graduated taxation—Earth soaked the rich and ignored the poor, and cut her overt taxes while doing so. Burial became so costly that it helped break up the huge estates, it helped leaven out the wealth. Our propaganda was sharpened to the point where we could take a man like Anderman and drive him all of his life towards an almost unattainable goal, force him to expend his tremendous energies in the accumulation of great wealth, extending the frontiers of the Galaxy as he did so, building up our civilization's strength in the process, and then, in the end, make him turn all of his wealth over to Earth in one form or another. Oh, I tell you, Braun, those ancient ones were clever."
The tirade halted. The air hung silent for a moment, and the twittering of a nearby bird could be heard.
"They were very, very clever. They gave us all the tools, and somehow we've failed to use them correctly. What was it, Braun? What did we do, or fail to do, that let Krieg get away from us?"
Braun frowned. "I don't know, Sir. Perhaps he just changed his mind about Earth."