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came to be grateful. Landry, a product of the same sort of social background as Rutherford, could be something of an irritating know-it-all at times. But he was a true teacher, not to be confused with an educational bureaucrat who held that title. In his introduction, he managed to clarify the labyrinthine complexities of fifth century b.c. geopolitics.
    “To put it in the simplest possible terms—”
    (“Please do,” Mondrago was heard to mutter.)
    “—the Greek, and specifically Ionian, colonies on the Asiatic shore of the Aegean were loosely dominated by the kingdom of Lydia in the mid-sixth century b.c.” Landry manipulated a remote, and a cursor ran over the area in question—the western fringe of what would much later become Turkey—on the map-display that covered the rear wall of the briefing room. “Then the Persians, under their first Great King Cyrus, conquered Lydia, including the Ionians. In order to keep the Ionian city-states under control, the Persians established tyrannies in them.”
    “They must have loved that,” Modrago grimaced.
    “Actually, that word doesn’t have the blood-stained connotations it later acquired in English. A Classical Greek ‘tyrant’ was simply a man who ruled a city from outside the normal constitutional framework, with the support of one of the popular factions. The closest later-day parallel would be a North American big-city ‘boss’ of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although the position of Greek tyrant had more formal recognition than that.”
    “So he was well advised to take good care of his constituency,” Jason opined.
    “Precisely. But the tame tyrants of Ionia tended to lose sight of that because their other constituency—the one they had to keep happy—was the Great King of Persia.”
    “Why?” asked Chantal. “If their own people were behind them, couldn’t they defy him?”
    Landry gave her a look of rather supercilious annoyance, as though he considered the question naïve. Instead of answering it directly, he held up the remote and expanded the map to the east and south. And expanded it. And expanded it, until the peninsula of Greece and the entire Aegean basin had shrunk to kind of an afterthought at the upper left corner.
    “The Persian Empire,” he explained with almost patronizing care, “was the world’s sole superpower. It had conquered the entire Near East and Egypt, as well as parts of Central Asia and the Indus Valley over here to the right of the map, in western India. It is believed to have had a population of at least sixteen million people, while Greece and the Aegean islands had, at most, two and a half million. Furthermore, it was not the result of gradual expansion over a span of centuries. Cyrus didn’t begin his career of conquest until around 550 b.c. This unprecedented empire had burst on the world in a mere sixty years.”
    Mondrago studied the map intently. “How could the Persians possibly hold an empire that size together, at that technological level? I mean, infantry marching on foot. . . .”
    “Yes. The Greeks were incredulous when they learned that the Persian capital of Susa was three months’ march eastward from the Aegean shore. They would have been even more incredulous if they had known that the empire extended another three months’ march beyond that.”
    “Then how—?”
    “The Persians were the first empire-builders in history to recognize that communication was the key to control. They used a combination of fire beacons, mounted couriers using a system of highways with posting stations, and other techniques, including aural relay in mountainous regions.”
    “‘Aural relay’?” queried Mondrago.
    “Yes. They had men trained in breath control who could literally shout to each other across valleys and ravines where the acoustics were good, with lots of echoes, thus transmitting messages almost instantaneously across the right kind of terrain. By using all these various