Actually it was a tyranny, ruled by members of the Prime Council. Other planets were despotisms or oligarchies and many were kingdoms, these days. Every possible form of government was represented in the three hundred million inhabited planets of the First Galaxy.
But every planet was independent and in all—by virtue of the disciplinary circuit—the government was absolute and hence tyrannical. Empires, however, were something new. On Ades, Kim barely heard that three were in process of formation.
"One's the Empire of Greater Sinab," snorted the mayor, "and we've just heard how it grows!"
"Surprise attacks, no doubt," said Kim, "through matter-transmitters."
"We'd not worry if that were all!" snapped the mayor. "It's vastly worse! You know the old fighting-beams?"
"I know them!" said Kim grimly.
2
The Deadly Beams
He did. They were the most terrible weapons ever created by men. They had ended war by making all battles mass suicide for both sides. They were beams of the same neuronic frequencies utilized in the disciplinary circuits which kept men enslaved.
But where the disciplinary circuits were used in place of police and prisons and merely tortured the individual citizen to whom they were tuned—wherever he might be upon a planet—the fighting-beams killed indiscriminately. They induced monstrous, murderous currents in any living tissue containing the amino-chains normally a part of human flesh.