And as ever when a leader arises, other men and women came to him as filings are attracted to a lodestone. Some were renegades, the scum of the spacelanes, whose only desire was to pillage and rob those who could not fight back. But others were the peoples of a dozen worlds in whose minds flowed the desire for freedom, whose only wish was to aid in a seemingly-hopeless fight against the oppressors. And still others were the great minds of science and art and living whose lives had been stifled by rigid rules of living imposed by the Food Administrators.
Plan after plan had been made and discarded, until one was left that showed the clever brilliance of its creators. Unlimited wealth was the one thing needed for a revolution, and the plan showed clearly that way in which it could be obtained.
Because they controlled all energy-tablet and vitamin factories, the Food Administrators held a whip hand over all the worlds. Starvation was the answer to any trouble that might arise. And should the trouble become too large to handle with the starvation threat, then the degenerate remnants of the famous Interplanetary Patrol used their weapons and brutal methods to enforce the laws.
The plan reasoned out by Curt Varga and his board of strategy had been clever enough to avoid all obstacles.
In a great asteroid, used by the Falcon for his first base, great rooms had been hollowed by gargantuan dis-guns. These rooms had been converted into living quarters for the men and women. Once established there, the men and women had worked for two years to hollow out more caverns for the growing of fruit and vegetables by hydropony. Still more rooms were manufactured for the workshops and hangars for the fitting of a huge space fleet with which the Falcon hoped to smash for all time the IP and the three men who controlled it.
And in the passing four years the gigantic task had almost reached fruition. Dead-black freighters raced the starways, carrying contraband food to all planets, there unloading, and then returning with all monies collected to buy more space equipment for the fight that was to come.
The Falcon's luck had been phenomenal; he had lost less than two percent of his men and fleet since the day his plans had been carefully organized. While IP ships had been blasted out of existence at the alarming rate of over five per cent a year.
Of course there had been trouble. There had been the internal revolution created by the rotten elements of his pirate gang. Blood had been spilled, and the war had been a deadly one that lasted for ninety days. Then the Falcon's men had conquered the others by clever maneuvering, had quashed the civil war at the cost of hundreds of lives. Telepathy and hypnotism had been used on all of the survivors, driving all thoughts of greed from their minds, fitting their mentalities for the task that was a common purpose.
And there had been the time when the IP had almost closed a trap over the Food Smugglers' leaders. Only a lucky chance had sprung the trap too soon, permitting Curt Varga and most of his board of strategy to escape.