Then Poblath withdrew, carefully carrying Cabot’s radio set, and leaving his assistant Trisp in charge. The captives were locked in cells, Hah Babbuh and Cabot together; and the new king departed, presumably to take charge of the palace from which he had been exiled so long. Poblath thoughtfully provided Myles with a stylus and some paper; for writing with one’s hands shackled behind one’s back was possible, although difficult.
The city remained comparatively quiet the rest of the day. Through the bars of the cell windows the prisoners could see down into the street below. All afternoon long, ant-fighters marched by, in detachments, on their way to the capitol. Gradually there were fewer and fewer Cupians to be seen in the open, as ant policemen took over the patrolling of the streets. Evidently Yuri did not trust even the faction which had put him in power. So Cupia soon came to realize what it means to be governed by a man who is at heart an ant.
And thus, all the rest of the day, Yuri consolidated his position as King of Cupia. The opposition, which even at its height had been merely sporadic, gradually died out to nearly nothing! It was amazing that the Cupians, after having so recently regained their freedom in a hard-fought war, should so easily let it slip through their fingers again with scarcely a struggle.
And yet were they to be blamed? For many generations, through five hundred years of servile peace, they had been the slaves of the ants; and, had it not been for the advent of Cabot the Minorian upon their planet, they never would have tasted even this brief two years of freedom.
All that they knew of warfare had been taught them as a game, under Cabot’s competent leadership. Leadership! That was the key to the situation. Leadership, and an ideal, a rallying point. In the great War of Liberation, Myles Cabot had furnished the leadership, and King Kew the Twelfth had furnished the rallying point with his now famous speech, which I always like to compare with Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. In fact, Cabot, too, had furnished the slogan with which that successful war had begun: “Forward into Formia, for Cupia, King Kew and Princess Lilla!”
Now, Kew lay dead in the stadium with a bullet through his loyal and sturdy heart. Lilla, their beloved Princess, was a thousand stads away to the northward. And Cabot the Minorian lay shackled in jail, deprived of his wonderful electrical headset, without which he was a mere deaf and dumb earthbeast, with no means to hold communication with his fellows, and in fact with no claim to being even human.
On the throne sat a prince of the royal house, the elder son of the sister of the late king. Apparently he was the rightful ruler of the Cupians. And if their rightful ruler chose to bring with him the domination of the ant men, it was too bad, but what could they do about it?
True, the Assembly had cancelled Yuri’s succession to the throne and had bestowed it upon his younger brother, the loyal Prince Toron; but most of the populace doubted the legality of that move. Besides, Yuri was now on the throne. Possession was nine points of the law; and the Cupians, by five hundred years of slavery, had been trained to be great respecters of authority.
If Toron would but appear and contest the succession, there might be those who would rally to his standard. But where was he? He had been at the games in the stadium that morning, but no one had seen him since the assassination. Where was he now? A fugitive, with a price set on his head! It is hard to rally around a fugitive, especially when his whereabouts are unknown.