"The thing is that Ades and the planets left over after we handled Sinab are the only places in the whole First Galaxy where there are no disciplinary circuits. Ades is the only place where a man can spit in the eye of another man and the two of them settle it between themselves. There's a government of sorts, on Ades, as there is here, but there's no ruler. Also there's nobody who can strut around and make other men bow to him. A woman on Ades, and here, belongs to the man she wants to belong to. She can't be seized by some lordling for his own pleasure, and turned over to his guards and underlings when he's through with her."
"That's true," said the Colony Organizer, who was still worried. "But the transmitter—"
"Gossip of the admirable state of things on Ades has gone about," said Kim hardly. "Some of our young men appointed themselves missionaries and went roaming around the planets, spreading word that Ades wasn't a bad place. That if you were exiled to Ades you were lucky. They probably bragged that we whipped the Empire of Sinab in a fight."
At this the mouth of the Organizer dropped open in astonishment.
"Of course, of course! The number of exiles arriving at Ades increased. It was excellent. We need people for the Second Galaxy, and people who earn exile are usually people with courage, willing to take risks for the sake of hope."
"Don't you realize that such things have been dangerous? When people on Markab Two began to hope?" Kim said impatiently. "When peasants on the planets of Allioth began to imagine that things might be better? When slaves on Utbeg began to tell each other in murmurs that there was a place where people weren't slaves? Don't you see that such things would alarm the rulers of such planets? How can people be held as slaves unless you keep them in despair?"
The Colony Organizer corrected his course a trifle. Far away the walls of the capital city of Terranova glinted in the sunlight.
"And there are the twenty-one planets which fell into our laps when we had to smash Sinab," said Kim. "Ades became the subject of dreams. Peasants and commoners think of it yearningly, as a sort of paradise. But kings and tyrants dream of it either as a nightmare which threatens the tranquility of their realms, or else as a very pretty bit of loot to be seized if possible. There are probably ten thousand royal courts where ambitious men rack their brains for some plausible way to wipe out Ades as a menace and take over our twenty-one planets for loot. Ades is already full of spies, sent there in the guise of exiles. There've been men found murdered after torture,—seized and tortured by spies hoping to find out the secrets by which we whipped Sinab. There's one bomb-crater on Ades already, where a bomb smuggled through the transmitter was set off in an effort to wipe out all the brains on the planet. It didn't, but it was bad."