Free Pallas by L. Neil Smith Page A

never stopped them from claiming otherwise.
    Nothing lasts forever, of course. During the same sixty years, Ame r ican industry had become almost universally decentralized as a result of the fairly recent development of small, relatively inexpensive fusion plants, computer-driven machine tools of tremendous versatility which freed the entrepreneur from union labor, and a remarkable process of ion-impregnation which made it possible to fabricate anything from bo t tle-cap lifters to fusion-electric locomotives out of easily worked mat e rials which could be hardened afterward to any desired toughness.
    With each startling innovation, the stranglehold of America’s trad i tional industrial region and the factions that controlled it was broken a bit more, the vital, energetic West, in effect, gradually seceding econom i cally from the moldering, overpopulated Rust Belt which had dominated its existence for two centuries.
    “What I don’t understand is what the Libertarians gain from acting as de facto representatives for the West.” On the screen before him, Altman watched his old friend squirm uncomfortably. “Times are changing too much, Gibbie. I’m getting too old.”
    Altman smiled sadly. It wasn’t Dodd’s age, but the age he’d lived in most of his life. He was a survivor of an era of “broker parties,” political entities representing no idea or collection of ideas (although they might pretend otherwise when tactics called for it), but which simply accrued power for its own sake.
    In a sense, the Republicans and Democrats had been professional athletic teams, striving mightily to defeat each other for the money, the spectacle, for victory itself, but for nothing else. They might even e x change members, who would be expected to play as hard for their new team as they had for their old.
    Straddling the transition between two eras, Altman could understand and sympathize with Dodd, but following the worldwide economic co l lapse, more had changed than the names of two outdated political parties. Altman knew the Libertarians as ideologues who claimed to value pri n ciple above all else, including short-term political gain. In his view, they’d remained consistent enough over the years to contaminate the other parties, which now represented ideologies of their own.
    In time, the “Sagebrush States,” also known as the “Jackelope R e public”—those west of the ninetieth meridian, popularly called the “Webb Line” after historian Walter Prescott Webb—had no longer b o thered sending delegates to Congress. Even worse, the myriad mandates of Washington were increasingly ignored as water, gas, electricity, trash hauling, postal, telephone, and other vital services to government buil d ings became mysteriously unreliable overnight. Thousands of outraged federal bureaucrats, tax collectors, and law enforcement officials found themselves harassed, disarmed, arrested, even jailed.
    Afterward, they invariably received apologies from local authorities for the “terrible mistake.”
    Others, falling into less temperate hands, simply disappeared, never to be heard from again.
    With its brightest Presidential hope attuned to the Age of Ideology and foremost among the advocates of harsher policies toward the West, the Union Democratic Party was willing to reimpose Washington’s authority by military means. In light of the location of most of America’s missile silos, obsolete fission plants, and radioactive dumps, however, this was seen as provocative by others. The Presidency and both houses of Co n gress belonged to a coalition of Conservatives (who’d followed Dem o cratic example by changing the name of their party) and Libertarians (who’d established themselves as a permanent feature of American pol i tics following the disaster they’d warned was coming for thirty years).
    What Brody had said of international politics was true as far as it went. Although the people of Earth neither fully understood nor