Chapter 1

Chakalta had a job to do. It wasn't physically demanding and with his extensive training and advanced equipment it wasn't exactly mentally taxing either. It could have been a lonely job, but he wasn't the first to have it and previous bad planning had let his superiors come to understand arrangements had to be made not only for those Chakalta had to work with, but for Chakalta too.

Though there had been much learned discussion over the matter and though the discussions always agreed men could do quite nicely with jacking off as the only outlet for their sexual needs, reality had showed the discussers they didn't know shit from Shinola.

The observable, empirical, and measurable evidence was unassailable no matter what the experts theorized. Since a candidate for the job of Population Initiator was necessarily treated with Ageing Halt therapy at twenty-one years of age and since a standard mission was mean to last two hundred and fifty Earth years, the previous mission specialist always went bat shit crazy after only two or three years. Apparently yanking the old crank didn't do quite the job the experts thought it should.

The august body of experts had been allowed to foist the first failure off as random behavior and unforeseeable. The second failure had required six months of detailed study of every second of the mission after arrival in Earth's orbit. Alas, this third failure wasn't to be explained away no matter they examined every second of the mission in slow motion.

An upper level expediter had been appointed to attend to matters. This was an unusually hasty step for a normally serious studious bureaucracy such as The Population Relocation Administration. The PRA was an established government organ normally noted for careful consideration of all possibilities. The perceived haste was not generated by the importance of the mission though. It came because of other governmental considerations.

At one time The Population Relocation Administration had started life in a rush and in response to the discovery of a scientific cold hard fact. Atalta, their one and only planet, was due to be struck by an apparent aimlessly wandering celestial body. Since it was fully one-third the size of Atalta itself, things were looking grim, and The Population Relocation Administration was put in place with a stupendous budget to match and given the job of finding a solution.

To the complete astonishment of all concerned — the entire population of Atalta — The Population Relocation Administration delivered wonderfully even though no one had expected salvation at all. Even more amazing was that The Population Relocation Administration hadn't been trying to do what they eventually did. In other words the solution just happened to crop up from other things they were doing.

Even though The Population Relocation Administration was by definition a special case, its management had been brought together from other big bureaucracies and naturally those bureaucrats knew their first job was to increase their funding for next years appropriations. These truths had been imbibed with their mother's milk.

Even these experienced money spenders were taxed by the scope of their original budget and the imperative of increasing it. As a temporary measure they had created a Population Relocation Transportation sub Administration and since there weren't enough experienced money spenders to fill all available slots they accidentally employed some people who actually knew what they were doing.

Any reasonable bureaucrat would have known better. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately in the long run, there just weren't enough experienced money spenders to fill all the available posts. After all, the original leadership team had already given up on throwing money at the problem and by now had resorted to firing money at it with the biggest guns they could requisition.

The solution to the problem came about so quickly and so efficiently the faith of the people of Atalta in their government was renewed nearly at once. No matter that the government had spent decades worth of resources on something that only accidentally solved the problem. Not to mention the solution had nothing to do with relocating even one member of said population.

The Population Relocation Transportation subsidiary Administration of the Population Relocation Administration had fired off a few hundred billion at a small private company which had discovered a way to manipulate subspace interactions with normal space.

Of course they didn't have the requisite bureaucracy in place for such and important project, but time was at a premium and the money had to be allocated and spent. When the company reported promising discoveries after only one quarter both a thrill and a spasm of terror ran through the highest levels of The Population Relocation Administration itself, not to mention near panic in The Population Relocation Transportation sub Administration.

Complete disaster was averted only by quick thinking of the now super rich former owner of the private company. By the luck of the draw he had become fabulously wealthy, but it was all for nothing if he didn't keep going until the original problem was solved. After all it didn't matter how much money he had to spend if there was no longer a planet to spend it on. The damned celestial body which had formerly been thought to be aimlessly wandering was still heading directly for them and their asses were gone if someone didn't do something about it.

Jalton knew he had the ways and means to correct the problem now and thanks to The Population Relocation Administration's Population Relocation Transportation subsidiary he now also had the money to do the job.

When he arrived at the mega-meeting his own success had caused he was able to corner the nearest career bureaucrat above him and lay down the law.

"I don't have time for this shit and I didn't hire on for this kind of ass kissing. You start another damned administration right now and get these assholes off my back while I'm busy saving the planet."

Fortunately for the whole world of Atalta the relatively low-level bureaucrat above Jalton knew a head rolling catastrophe when he heard one. He sent Jalton directly back to work, spread a few rumors that things weren't going as well as expected and recommended more funds to cure the problem. Of course everyone present understood what must be done at once.

Six months later The Rockport Company had used its new subspace technology to place more of its new subspace technology onto the offending celestial body and began busily transporting portions of the celestial body into a nearby black hole which didn't protest in the least.

Even though the immediate problem which had caused the spawning of The Population Relocation Administration was solved without any population being relocated there was nothing to say The Population Relocation Administration should be dissolved.

How unfair would that be after all? They had come together and saved the world, not to mention all the people on it. In a brave statement of selflessness The Population Relocation Administration was able to further enhance its reputation and its public popularity by actually asking for less money from next year's appropriations to boot. It was put down as one of the most efficient government administrations of all time.

In fact the tremendous efficiency demonstrated by The Population Relocation Administration's first project was the very reason their recent failures were so annoying. Even though what they were trying now had nothing to do with their original brief, and even though only one citizen was being lost per attempt, it looked bad for bureaucrats who had been getting top billing for the last hundred years on their past success.

Their grateful world had seen it as only fitting they would remain in their position of near reverence for all these intervening year. There was much too much at stake over this ancillary project now, and the squabbling of the experts was becoming an embarrassment.