"I see." Harris pinched the bridge of his nose again, then looked around the table. "Comments, ladies and gentlemen?"

"We've got to continue expanding our economic base if we're going to maintain the Basic Living Stipend payments," De La Sangliere said heavily, "And if the CRU did take Walter out, I think we have to be very cautious about curtailing the BLS."

Harris nodded somberly. Two-thirds of Havens home-world population was now on the Dole, and rampant inflation was an economic fact of life. Faced with a treasury which had been effectively empty for over a century, desperation had driven Frankel to propose limiting BLS adjustments to the inflation rate, maintaining its actual buying power without increase. The carefully phrased "leaks" Jessup had arranged to test-flight the idea had provoked riots in virtually every Prole housing unit, and, two months later, Kanamashi had put twelve explosive pulser darts into Frankel's chest, requiring a closed-coffin state funeral.

It was, Harris reflected grimly, one of the less ambiguous "protest votes" on record, and he understood the near panic thoughts of actual BLS cuts woke in his cabinet colleagues.

"Given those considerations," De La Sangliere went on, "we've got to gain access to the systems beyond Manticore, especially the Silesian Confederacy. If anyone knows some way we can grab them off without fighting Manticore first, I, for one, would be delighted to hear of it."

"There isn't one." Palmer-Levy looked around the table, daring anyone to disagree with her flat assertion. No one did, and Jessup endorsed her comment with a sharp nod. Bergren looked far more unhappy than either of his colleagues, but the dapper foreign minister also nodded unwilling assent. "Besides," the security minister went on, "a foreign crisis might help cool off the domestic front, at least in the short term. It always has before."