Produced by Greg Weeks, LN Yaddanapudi and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net [Illustration] MINISTRY ... OF DISTURBANCE BY H. BEAM PIPER Illustrated by van Dongen +----------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | Transcriber's Note | | | | This etext was produced from Astounding Science Fiction | | December 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence | | that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. | +----------------------------------------------------------------+ _Sometimes getting a job is harder than the job after you get it--and sometimes getting out of a job is harder than either!_ [Illustration] The symphony was ending, the final triumphant pæan soaring up and up, beyond the limit of audibility. For a moment, after the last notes had gone away, Paul sat motionless, as though some part of him had followed. Then he roused himself and finished his coffee and cigarette, looking out the wide window across the city below--treetops and towers, roofs and domes and arching skyways, busy swarms of aircars glinting in the early sunlight. Not many people cared for João Coelho's music, now, and least of all for the Eighth Symphony. It was the music of another time, a thousand years ago, when the Empire was blazing into being out of the long night and hammering back the Neobarbarians from world after world. Today people found it perturbing. He smiled faintly at the vacant chair opposite him, and lit another cigarette before putting the breakfast dishes on the serving-robot's tray, and, after a while, realized that the robot was still beside his chair, waiting for dismissal. He gave it an instruction to summon the cleaning robots and sent it away. He could as easily have summoned them himself, or let the guards who would be in checking the room do it for him, but maybe it made a robot feel trusted and important to relay orders to other robots.