initial commit of ebook 20728HEADmain

1 files changed, 8625 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/20728.txt b/20728.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fb9da56
--- /dev/null
+++ b/20728.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,8625 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Space Viking, by Henry Beam Piper
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Space Viking
+
+Author: Henry Beam Piper
+
+Release Date: March 3, 2007 [EBook #20728]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPACE VIKING ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, William Woods and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+[Transcriber's note:
+This etext was produced from Analog Science Fact--Science Fiction
+November 1962, December 1962, January 1963, February 1963.
+Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the copyright
+on this publication was renewed.]
+
+
+[Illustration: SPACE VIKING
+A great new novel by H. Beam Piper]
+
+[Illustration][Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+Space Viking
+
+
+            Vengeance is a strange human motivation--
+                 it can drive a man to do things
+     which he neither would nor could achieve without it ...
+         and because of that it lies behind some of the
+               greatest sagas of human literature!
+
+
+by H. Beam Piper
+
+Illustrated by Schoenherr
+
+They stood together at the parapet, their arms about each other's
+waists, her head against his cheek. Behind, the broad leaved
+shrubbery gossiped softly with the wind, and from the lower main
+terrace came music and laughing voices. The city of Wardshaven
+spread in front of them, white buildings rising from the wide spaces
+of green treetops, under a shimmer of sun-reflecting aircars above.
+Far away, the mountains were violet in the afternoon haze, and the
+huge red sun hung in a sky as yellow as a ripe peach.
+
+His eye caught a twinkle ten miles to the southwest, and for an
+instant he was puzzled. Then he frowned. The sunlight on the two
+thousand-foot globe of Duke Angus' new ship, the _Enterprise_, back
+at the Gorram shipyards after her final trial cruise. He didn't want
+to think about that, now.
+
+Instead, he pressed the girl closer and whispered her name, "Elaine,"
+and then, caressing every syllable, "Lady Elaine Trask of Traskon."
+
+"Oh, no, Lucas!" Her protest was half joking and half apprehensive.
+"It's bad luck to be called by your married name before the wedding."
+
+"I've been calling you that in my mind since the night of the Duke's
+ball, when you were just home from school on Excalibur."
+
+She looked up from the corner of her eye.
+
+"That was when I started calling me that, too," she confessed.
+
+"There's a terrace to the west at Traskon New House," he told her.
+"Tomorrow, we'll have our dinner there, and watch the sunset together."
+
+"I know. I thought that was to be our sunset-watching place."
+
+"You have been peeking," he accused. "Traskon New House was to be
+your surprise."
+
+"I always was a present-peeker, New Year's and my birthdays. But I only
+saw it from the air. I'll be very surprised at everything inside,"
+she promised. "And very delighted."
+
+And when she'd seen everything and Traskon New House wasn't a surprise
+any more, they'd take a long space trip. He hadn't mentioned that to
+her, yet. To some of the other Sword-Worlds--Excalibur, of course, and
+Morglay and Flamberge and Durendal. No, not Durendal; the war had
+started there again. But they'd have so much fun. And she would see
+clear blue skies again, and stars at night. The cloud-veil hid the stars
+from Gram, and Elaine had missed them, since coming home from Excalibur.
+
+The shadow of an aircar fell briefly upon them and they looked up
+and turned their heads, in time to see it sink with graceful dignity
+toward the landing-stage of Karval House, and he glimpsed its
+blazonry--sword and atom-symbol, the badge of the ducal house of
+Ward. He wondered if it were Duke Angus himself, or just some of
+his people come ahead of him. They should get back to their guests,
+he supposed. Then he took her in his arms and kissed her, and she
+responded ardently. It must have been all of five minutes since
+they'd done that before.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A slight cough behind them brought them apart and their heads
+around. It was Sesar Karvall, gray-haired and portly, the breast of
+his blue coat gleaming with orders and decorations and the sapphire
+in the pommel of his dress-dagger twinkling.
+
+"I thought I'd find you two here," Elaine's father smiled. "You'll
+have tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow together, but need I remind
+you that today we have guests, and more coming every minute."
+
+"Who came in the Ward car?" Elaine asked.
+
+"Rovard Grauffis. And Otto Harkaman; you never met him, did you, Lucas?"
+
+"No; not by introduction. I'd like to, before he spaces out." He had
+nothing against Harkaman personally; only against what he represented.
+"Is the Duke coming?"
+
+"Oh, surely. Lionel of Newhaven and the Lord of Northport are coming
+with him. They're at the Palace now." Karvall hesitated. "His nephew's
+back in town."
+
+Elaine was distressed; she started to say: "Oh, dear! I hope he doesn't--"
+
+"Has Dunnan been bothering Elaine again?"
+
+"Nothing to take notice of. He was here, yesterday, demanding to
+speak with her. We got him to leave without too much unpleasantness."
+
+"It'll be something for me to take notice of, if he keeps it up
+after tomorrow."
+
+For his seconds and Andray Dunnan's, that was; he hoped it wouldn't
+come to that. He didn't want to have to shoot a kinsman to the house
+of Ward, and a crazy man to boot.
+
+"I'm terribly sorry for him," Elaine was saying. "Father, you should
+have let me talk to him. I might have made him understand."
+
+Sesar Karvall was shocked. "Child, you couldn't have subjected
+yourself to that! The man is insane!" Then he saw her bare
+shoulders, and was even more shocked. "Elaine, your shawl!"
+
+Her hands went up and couldn't find it; she looked about in confused
+embarrassment. Amused, Lucas picked it from the shrub onto which she
+had tossed it and draped it over her shoulders, his hands lingering
+briefly. Then he gestured to the older man to precede them, and
+they entered the arbored walk. At the other end, in an open circle,
+a fountain played; white marble girls and boys bathing in the
+jade-green basin. Another piece of loot from one of the Old Federation
+planets; that was something he'd tried to avoid in furnishing
+Traskon New House. There'd be a lot of that coming to Gram, after
+Otto Harkaman took the _Enterprise_ to space.
+
+"I'll have to come back, some time, and visit them," Elaine
+whispered to him. "They'll miss me."
+
+"You'll find a lot of new friends at your new home," he whispered
+back. "You wait till tomorrow."
+
+"I'm going to put a word in the Duke's ear about that fellow," Sesar
+Karvall, still thinking of Dunnan, was saying. "If he speaks to him,
+maybe it'll do some good."
+
+"I doubt it. I don't think Duke Angus has any influence over him at all."
+
+Dunnan's mother had been the Duke's younger sister; from his father
+he had inherited what had originally been a prosperous barony. Now
+it was mortgaged to the top of the manor-house aerial-mast. The Duke
+had once assumed Dunnan's debts, and refused to do so again. Dunnan
+had gone to space a few times, as a junior officer on trade-and-raid
+voyages into the Old Federation. He was supposed to be a fair
+astrogator. He had expected his uncle to give him command of the
+_Enterprise_, which had been ridiculous. Disappointed in that,
+he had recruited a mercenary company and was seeking military
+employment: It was suspected that he was in correspondence with
+his uncle's worst enemy, Duke Omfray of Glaspyth.
+
+And he was obsessively in love with Elaine Karvall, a passion which
+seemed to nourish itself on its own hopelessness. Maybe it would
+be a good idea to take that space trip right away. There ought to
+be a ship leaving Bigglersport for one of the other Sword-Worlds,
+before long.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They paused at the head of the escalators; the garden below was
+thronged with guests, the bright shawls of the ladies and the coats
+of the men making shifting color-patterns among the flower-beds and
+on the lawns and under the trees. Serving-robots, flame-yellow and
+black in the Karvall colors, floated about playing soft music and
+offering refreshments. There was a continuous spiral of changing
+costume-color around the circular robo-table. Voices babbled happily
+like a mountain river.
+
+As they stood looking down, another aircar circled low; green and
+gold, lettered PANPLANET NEWS SERVICE. Sesar Karvall swore in
+irritation.
+
+"Didn't there use to be something they called privacy?" he asked.
+
+"It's a big story, Sesar."
+
+It was; more than the marriage of two people who happened to be in love
+with each other. It was the marriage of the farming and ranching barony
+of Traskon and the Karvall steel mills. More, it was public announcement
+that the wealth and fighting-men of both baronies were now aligned
+behind Duke Angus of Wardshaven. So it was a general holiday. Every
+industry had closed down at noon today, and would be closed until
+morning-after-next, and there would be dancing in every park and
+feasting in every tavern. To Sword-Worlders, any excuse for a holiday
+was better than none.
+
+"They're our people, Sesar; they have a right to have a good time
+with us. I know everybody at Traskon is watching this by screen."
+
+He raised his hand and waved to the news car, and when it swung
+its pickup around, he waved again. Then they went down the long
+escalator.
+
+Lady Lavina Karvall was the center of a cluster of matrons and
+dowagers, around which tomorrow's bridesmaids fluttered like
+many-colored butterflies. She took possession of her daughter
+and dragged her into the feminine circle. He saw Rovard Grauffis,
+small and saturnine, Duke Angus' henchman, and Burt Sandrasan,
+Lady Lavina's brother. They spoke, and then an upper-servant,
+his tabard blazoned with the yellow flame and black hammer of
+Karvall mills, approached his master with some tale of domestic
+crisis, and the two went away together.
+
+"You haven't met Captain Harkaman, Lucas," Rovard Grauffis said.
+"I wish you'd come over and say hello and have a drink with him.
+I know your attitude, but he's a good sort. Personally, I wish
+we had a few like him around here."
+
+That was his main objection. There were fewer and fewer men of
+that sort on any of the Sword-Worlds.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+A dozen men clustered around the bartending robot--his cousin
+and family lawyer, Nikkolay Trask; Lothar Ffayle, the banker;
+Alex Gorram, the shipbuilder, and his son Basil; Baron Rathmore;
+more of the Wardshaven nobles whom he knew only distantly.
+And Otto Harkaman.
+
+Harkaman was a Space Viking. That would have set him apart, even
+if he hadn't topped the tallest of them by a head. He wore a short
+black jacket, heavily gold-braided, and black trousers inside
+ankle-boots; the dagger on his belt was no mere dress-ornament. His
+tousled red-brown hair was long enough to furnish extra padding in
+a combat-helmet, and his beard was cut square at the bottom.
+
+He had been fighting on Durendal, for one of the branches of the
+royal house contesting fratricidally for the throne. The wrong one;
+he had lost his ship, and most of his men and, almost, his own life.
+He had been a penniless refugee on Flamberge, owning only the
+clothes he stood in and his personal weapons and the loyalty of
+half a dozen adventurers as penniless as himself, when Duke Angus
+had invited him to Gram to command the _Enterprise_.
+
+"A pleasure, Lord Trask. I've met your lovely bride-to-be, and
+now that I meet you, let me congratulate both." Then, as they
+were having a drink together, he put his foot in it by asking:
+"You're not an investor in the Tanith Adventure, are you?"
+
+He said he wasn't, and would have let it go at that. Young Basil
+Gorram had to get his foot in, too.
+
+"Lord Trask does not approve of the Tanith Adventure," he said
+scornfully. "He thinks we should stay home and produce wealth,
+instead of exporting robbery and murder to the Old Federation
+for it."
+
+The smile remained on Otto Harkaman's face; only the friendliness
+was gone. He unobtrusively shifted his drink to his left hand.
+
+"Well, our operations are definable as robbery and murder," he
+agreed. "Space Vikings are professional robbers and murderers.
+And you object? Perhaps you find me personally objectionable?"
+
+"I wouldn't have shaken your hand or had a drink with you if I did.
+I don't care how many planets you raid or cities you sack, or how
+many innocents, if that's what they are, you massacre in the Old
+Federation. You couldn't possibly do anything worse than those
+people have been doing to one another for the past ten centuries.
+What I object to is the way you're raiding the Sword-Worlds."
+
+"You're crazy!" Basil Gorram exploded.
+
+"Young man," Harkaman reproved, "the conversation was between Lord
+Trask and myself. And when somebody makes a statement you don't
+understand, don't tell him he's crazy. Ask him what he means.
+What _do_ you mean, Lord Trask?"
+
+"You should know; you've just raided Gram for eight hundred of our
+best men. You raided me for close to forty vaqueros, farm-workers,
+lumbermen, machine-operators, and I doubt I'll be able to replace
+them with as good." He turned to the elder Gorram. "Alex, how many
+have you lost to Captain Harkaman?"
+
+Gorram tried to make it a dozen; pressed, he admitted to a score and
+a half. Roboticians, machine-supervisors, programmers, a couple of
+engineers, a foreman. There was grudging agreement from the others.
+Burt Sandrasan's engine-works had lost almost as many, of the same
+kind. Even Lothar Ffayle admitted to losing a computerman and
+a guard-sergeant.
+
+And after they were gone, the farms and ranches and factories would
+go on, almost but not quite as before. Nothing on Gram, nothing on
+any of the Sword-Worlds, was done as efficiently as three centuries
+ago. The whole level of Sword-World life was sinking, like the east
+coastline of this continent, so slowly as to be evident only from
+the records and monuments of the past. He said as much, and added:
+
+"And the genetic loss. The best Sword-World genes are literally
+escaping to space, like the atmosphere of a low-gravity planet,
+each generation begotten by fathers slightly inferior to the last.
+It wasn't so bad when the Space Vikings raided directly from the
+Sword-Worlds; they got home once in a while. Now they're conquering
+planets in the Old Federation for bases, and staying there."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Everybody had begun to relax; this wouldn't be a quarrel. Harkaman,
+who had shifted his drink back to his right hand, chuckled.
+
+"That's right. I've fathered my share of brats in the Old
+Federation, and I know Space Vikings whose fathers were born on
+Old Federation planets." He turned to Basil Gorram. "You see, the
+gentleman isn't crazy, at all. That's what happened to the Terran
+Federation, by the way. The good men all left to colonize, and the
+stuffed shirts and yes-men and herd-followers and safety-firsters
+stayed on Terra and tried to govern the galaxy."
+
+"Well, maybe this is all new to you, captain," Rovard Grauffis
+said sourly, "but Lucas Trask's dirge for the Decline and Fall
+of the Sword-Worlds is an old song to the rest of us. I have
+too much to do to stay here and argue."
+
+Lothar Ffayle evidently did intend to stay and argue.
+
+"All you're saying, Lucas, is that we're expanding. You want us
+to sit here and build up population pressure like Terra in the
+First Century?"
+
+"With three and a half billion people spread out on twelve planets?
+They had that many on Terra alone. And it took us eight centuries
+to reach that."
+
+That had been since the Ninth Century, Atomic Era, at the end of
+the Big War. Ten thousand men and women on Abigor, refusing to
+surrender, had taken the remnant of the System States Alliance navy
+to space, seeking a world the Federation had never heard of and
+wouldn't find for a long time. That had been the world they had
+called Excalibur. From it, their grandchildren had colonized Joyeuse
+and Durendal and Flamberge; Haulteclere had been colonized in the
+next generation from Joyeuse, and Gram from Haulteclere.
+
+"We're not expanding, Lothar; we're contracting. We stopped
+expanding three hundred and fifty years ago, when that ship came
+back to Morglay from the Old Federation and reported what had
+been happening out there since the Big War. Before that, we were
+discovering new planets and colonizing them. Since then, we've
+been picking the bones of the dead Terran Federation."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Something was going on by the escalators to the landing stage.
+People were moving excitedly in that direction, and the news cars
+were circling like vultures over a sick cow. Harkaman wondered,
+hopefully, if it mightn't be a fight.
+
+"Some drunk being bounced." Nikkolay, Lucas' cousin, commented.
+"Sesar's let all Wardshaven in here, today. But, Lucas, this Tanith
+adventure; we're not making any hit-and-run raid. We're taking over
+a whole planet; it'll be another Sword-World in forty or fifty
+years."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Inside another century, we'll conquer the whole Federation," Baron
+Rathmore declared. He was a politician and never let exaggeration
+worry him.
+
+"What I don't understand," Harkaman said, "is why you support Duke
+Angus, Lord Trask, if you think the Tanith adventure is doing Gram
+so much harm."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"If Angus didn't do it, somebody else would. But Angus is going to
+make himself King of Gram, and I don't think anybody else could do
+that. This planet needs a single sovereignty. I don't know how much
+you've seen of it outside this duchy, but don't take Wardshaven as
+typical. Some of these duchies, like Glaspyth or Didreksburg, are
+literal snake pits. All the major barons are at each other's
+throats, and they can't even keep their own knights and petty-barons
+in order. Why, there's a miserable little war down in Southmain
+Continent that's been going on for over two centuries."
+
+"That's probably where Dunnan's going to take that army of his,"
+a robot-manufacturing baron said. "I hope it gets wiped out, and
+Dunnan with it."
+
+"You don't have to go to Southmain; just go to Glaspyth," somebody
+else said.
+
+"Well, if we don't get a planetary monarchy to keep order, this
+planet will decivilize like anything in the Old Federation."
+
+"Oh, _come_, Lucas!" Alex Gorram protested. "That's pulling it out
+too far."
+
+"Yes, for one thing, we don't have the Neobarbarians," somebody
+said. "And if they ever came out here, we'd blow them to
+Em-See-Square in nothing flat. Might be a good thing if they
+did, too; it would stop us squabbling among ourselves."
+
+Harkaman looked at him in surprise. "Just who do you think the
+Neobarbarians are, anyhow?" he asked. "Some race of invading nomads;
+Attila's Huns in spaceships?"
+
+"Well, isn't that who they are?" Gorram asked.
+
+"Nifflheim, no! There aren't a dozen and a half planets in the Old
+Federation that still have hyperdrive, and they're all civilized.
+That's if 'civilized' is what Gilgamesh is," he added. "These are
+homemade barbarians. Workers and peasants who revolted to seize and
+divide the wealth and then found they'd smashed the means of
+production and killed off all the technical brains. Survivors on
+planets hit during the Interstellar Wars, from the Eleventh to
+the Thirteenth Centuries, who lost the machinery of civilization.
+Followers of political leaders on local-dictatorship planets.
+Companies of mercenaries thrown out of employment and living by
+pillage. Religious fanatics following self-anointed prophets."
+
+"You think we don't have plenty of Neobarbarian material here on
+Gram?" Trask demanded. "If you do, take a look around."
+
+Glaspyth, somebody said.
+
+"That collection of over-ripe gallows-fruit Andray Dunnan's
+recruited," Rathmore mentioned.
+
+Alex Gorram was grumbling that his shipyard was full of them;
+agitators stirring up trouble, trying to organize a strike to
+get rid of the robots.
+
+"Yes," Harkaman pounced on that last. "I know of at least forty
+instances, on a dozen and a half planets, in the last eight
+centuries, of anti-technological movements. They had them on Terra,
+back as far as the Second Century Pre-Atomic. And after Venus
+seceded from the First Federation, before the Second Federation
+was organized."
+
+"You're interested in history?" Rathmore asked.
+
+"A hobby. All spacemen have hobbies. There's very little work
+aboard ship in hyperspace; boredom is the worst enemy. My
+guns-and-missiles officer, Vann Larch, is a painter. Most of his
+work was lost with the _Corisande_ on Durendal, but he kept us from
+starving a few times on Flamberge by painting pictures and selling
+them. My hyperspatial astrogator, Guatt Kirbey, composes music; he
+tries to express the mathematics of hyperspatial theory in musical
+terms. I don't care much for it, myself," he admitted. "I study
+history. You know, it's odd; practically everything that's happened
+on any of the inhabited planets happened on Terra before the first
+spaceship."
+
+The garden immediately around them was quiet, now; everybody was
+over by the landing-stage escalators. Harkaman would have said more,
+but at that moment he saw half a dozen of Sesar Karvall's uniformed
+guardsmen run past. They were helmeted and in bullet-proofs; one of
+them had an auto-rifle, and the rest carried knobbed plastic
+truncheons. The Space Viking set down his drink.
+
+"Let's go," he said. "Our host is calling up his troops; I think
+the guests ought to find battle-stations, too."
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+The gaily-dressed crowd formed a semicircle facing the landing-stage
+escalators; everybody was staring in embarrassed curiosity, those
+behind craning over the shoulders of those in front. The ladies had
+drawn up their shawls in frigid formality; many had even covered
+their heads. There were four news-service cars hovering above;
+whatever was going on was getting a planetwide screen showing. The
+Karvall guardsmen were trying to get through; their sergeant was
+saying, over and over, "Please, ladies and gentlemen; your pardon,
+noble sir," and getting nowhere.
+
+Otto Harkaman swore disgustedly and shoved the sergeant aside.
+"Make way, here!" he bellowed. "Let these guards pass." With that,
+he almost hurled a gaily-dressed gentleman aside on either hand;
+they both turned to glare angrily, then got hastily out of his way.
+Meditating briefly on the uses of bad manners in an emergency, Trask
+followed, with the others; the big Space Viking plowed to the front,
+where Sesar Karvall and Rovard Grauffis and several others were standing.
+
+Facing them, four men in black cloaks stood with their backs to
+the escalators. Two were commonfolk retainers; hired gunmen, to be
+precise. They were at pains to keep their hands plainly in sight,
+and seemed to be wishing themselves elsewhere. The man in front wore
+a diamond sunburst jewel on his beret, and his cloak was lined with
+pale blue silk. His thin, pointed face was deeply lined about the
+mouth and penciled with a thin black mustache. His eyes showed
+white all around the irises, and now and then his mouth would twitch
+in an involuntary grimace. Andray Dunnan; Trask wondered briefly how
+soon he would have to look at him from twenty-five meters over the
+sights of a pistol. The face of the slightly taller man who stood at
+his shoulder was paper-white, expressionless, with a black beard.
+His name was Nevil Ormm, nobody was quite sure whence he had come,
+and he was Dunnan's henchman and constant companion.
+
+"You lie!" Dunnan was shouting. "You lie damnably, in your stinking
+teeth, all of you! You've intercepted every message she's tried to
+send me."
+
+"My daughter has sent you no messages, Lord Dunnan," Sesar Karvall
+said, with forced patience. "None but the one I just gave you, that
+she wants nothing whatever to do with you."
+
+"You think I believe that? You're holding her a prisoner; Satan
+only knows how you've been torturing her to force her into this
+abominable marriage--"
+
+There was a stir among the bystanders; that was more than
+well-mannered restraint could stand. Out of the murmur of
+incredulous voices, one woman's was quite audible:
+
+"Well, really! He actually _is_ crazy!"
+
+Dunnan, like everybody else, heard it. "Crazy, am I?" he blazed.
+"Because I can see through this hypocritical sham? Here's Lucas
+Trask, he wants an interest in Karvall mills, and here's Sesar
+Karvall, he wants access to iron deposits on Traskon land. And
+my loving uncle, he wants the help of both of them in stealing
+Omfray of Glaspyth's duchy. And here's this loan-shark of a Ffayle,
+trying to claw my lands away from me, and Rovard Grauffis, the fetchdog
+of my uncle who won't lift a finger to save his kinsman from ruin,
+and this foreigner Harkaman who's swindled me out of command of
+the _Enterprise_. You're all plotting against me--"
+
+"Sir Nevil," Grauffis said, "you can see that Lord Dunnan's not
+himself. If you're a good friend to him, you'll get him out of here
+before Duke Angus arrives."
+
+Ormm leaned forward and spoke urgently in Dunnan's ear. Dunnan
+pushed him angrily away.
+
+"Great Satan, are you against me, too?" he demanded.
+
+Ormm caught his arm. "You fool, do you want to ruin everything,
+now--" He lowered his voice; the rest was inaudible.
+
+"No, curse you, I won't go till I've spoken to her, face to face--"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was another stir among the spectators; the crowd was parting,
+and Elaine was coming through, followed by her mother and Lady
+Sandrasan and five or six other matrons. They all had their shawls
+over their heads, right ends over left shoulders; they all stopped
+except Elaine, who took a few steps forward and confronted Andray
+Dunnan. He had never seen her look more beautiful, but it was the
+icy beauty of a honed dagger.
+
+"Lord Dunnan, what do you wish to say to me?" she asked. "Say it
+quickly and then go; you are not welcome here."
+
+"Elaine!" Dunnan cried, taking a step forward. "Why do you cover
+your head; why do you speak to me as a stranger? I am Andray,
+who loves you. Why are you letting them force you into this
+wicked marriage?"
+
+"No one is forcing me; I am marrying Lord Trask willingly and
+happily, because I love him. Now, please, go and make no more
+trouble at my wedding."
+
+"That's a lie! They're making you say that! You don't have to marry
+him; they can't make you. Come with me now. They won't dare stop
+you. I'll take you away from all these cruel, greedy people. You
+love me, you've always loved me. You've told me you loved me,
+again and again--"
+
+Yes, in his own private dream-world, a world of fantasy that had now
+become Andray Dunnan's reality, in which an Elaine Karvall whom his
+imagination had created existed only to love him. Confronted by the
+real Elaine, he simply rejected the reality.
+
+"I never loved you, Lord Dunnan, and I never told you so. I never
+hated you, either, but you are making it very hard for me not to.
+Now go, and never let me see you again."
+
+With that, she turned and started back through the crowd, which
+parted in front of her. Her mother and her aunt and the other ladies
+followed.
+
+"You lied to me!" Dunnan shrieked after her. "You lied all the time.
+You're as bad as the rest of them, all scheming and plotting against
+me, betraying me. I know what it's about; you all want to cheat me
+of my rights, and keep my usurping uncle on the ducal throne. And
+you, you false-hearted harlot, you're the worst of them all!"
+
+Sir Nevil Ormm caught his shoulder and spun him around, propelling
+him toward the escalators. Dunnan struggled, screaming inarticulately
+like a wounded wolf. Ormm was cursing furiously.
+
+"You two!" he shouted. "Help me, here. Get hold of him."
+
+Dunnan was still howling as they forced him onto the escalator, the
+backs of the two retainers' cloaks, badged with the Dunnan crescent,
+light blue on black, hiding him. After a little, an aircar with the
+blue crescent blazonry lifted and sped away.
+
+"Lucas, he's crazy," Sesar Karvall was insisting. "Elaine hasn't
+spoken fifty words to him since he came back from his last voyage--"
+
+He laughed and put a hand on Karvall's shoulder. "I know that,
+Sesar. You don't think, do you, that I need assurance of it?"
+
+"Crazy, I'll say he's crazy," Rovard Grauffis put in. "Did you
+hear what he said about his rights? Wait till his Grace hears
+about that."
+
+"Does he lay claim to the ducal throne, Sir Rovard?" Otto Harkaman
+asked, sharply and seriously.
+
+"Oh, he claims that his mother was born a year and a half before
+Duke Angus and the true date of her birth falsified to give Angus
+the succession. Why, his present Grace was three years old when she
+was born. I was old Duke Fergus' esquire; I carried Angus on my
+shoulder when Andray Dunnan's mother was presented to the lords
+and barons the day after she was born."
+
+"Of course he's crazy," Alex Gorram agreed. "I don't know why
+the Duke doesn't have him put under psychiatric treatment."
+
+"I'd put him under treatment," Harkaman said, drawing a finger
+across under his beard. "Crazy men who pretend to thrones are bombs
+that ought to be deactivated, before they blow things up."
+
+"We couldn't do that," Grauffis said. "After all, he's Duke Angus'
+nephew--"
+
+"I could do it," Harkaman said. "He only has three hundred men in
+this company of his. Why you people ever let him recruit them Satan
+only knows," he parenthesized. "I have eight hundred; five hundred
+ground-fighters. I'd like to see how they shape up in combat, before
+we space out. I can have them ready for action in two hours, and
+it'd be all over before midnight."
+
+"No, Captain Harkaman; his Grace would never permit it," Grauffis
+vetoed. "You have no idea of the political harm that would do among
+the independent lords on whom we're counting for support. You
+weren't here on Gram when Duke Ridgerd of Didreksburg had his sister
+Sancia's second husband poisoned--"
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+They halted under the colonnade; beyond, the lower main terrace was
+crowded, and a medley of old love songs was wafting from the sound
+outlets, for the sixth or eighth time around. He looked at his
+watch; it was ninety seconds later than the last time he had done
+so. Give it fifteen more minutes to get started, and another fifteen
+to get away after the marriage toasts and the felicitations. And
+no marriage, however pompous, lasted more than half an hour. An
+hour, then, till he and Elaine would be in the aircar, bulleting
+toward Traskon.
+
+The love songs stopped abruptly; after a momentary silence, a
+trumpet, considerably amplified, blared; the "Ducal Salute." The
+crowd stopped shifting, the buzz of voices ceased. At the head of
+the landing-stage escalators there was a glow of color and the ducal
+party began moving down. A platoon of guards in red and yellow, with
+gilded helmets and tasseled halberds. An esquire bearing the Sword
+of State. Duke Angus, with his council, Otto Harkaman among them;
+the Duchess Flavia and her companion-ladies. The household gentlemen,
+and their ladies. More guardsmen. There was a great burst of cheering;
+the news-service aircars got into position above the procession.
+Cousin Nikkolay and a few others stepped out from between the pillars
+into the sunlight; there was a similar movement at the other side of
+the terrace. The ducal party reached the end of the central walkway,
+halted and deployed.
+
+"All right; let's shove off," Cousin Nikkolay said, stepping forward.
+
+Ten minutes since they had come outside; another five to get into
+position. Fifty minutes, now, till he and Elaine--Lady Elaine Trask
+of Traskon, for real and for always--would be going home.
+
+"Sure the car's ready?" he asked, for the hundredth time.
+
+His cousin assured him that it was. Figures in Karvall black and
+flame-yellow appeared across the terrace. The music began again,
+this time the stately "Nobles' Wedding March," arrogant and at
+the same time tender. Sesar Karvall's gentleman-secretary, and
+the Karvall lawyer; executives of the steel mills, the Karvall
+guard-captain. Sesar himself, with Elaine on his arm; she was
+wearing a shawl of black and yellow. He looked around in sudden
+fright; "For the love of Satan, where's our shawl?" he demanded, and
+then relaxed when one of his gentlemen exhibited it, green and tawny
+in Traskon colors. The bridesmaids, led by Lady Lavina Karvall.
+Finally they halted, ten yards apart, in front of the Duke.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Who approaches us?" Duke Angus asked of his guard-captain.
+
+He had a thin, pointed face, almost femininely sensitive, and a
+small pointed beard. He was bareheaded except for the narrow golden
+circlet which he spent most of his waking time scheming to convert
+into a royal crown. The guard-captain repeated the question.
+
+"I am Sir Nikkolay Trask; I bring my cousin and liege-lord,
+Lucas, Lord Trask, Baron of Traskon. He comes to receive the
+Lady-Demoiselle Elaine, daughter of Lord Sesar Karvall, Baron
+of Karvall mills, and the sanction of your Grace to the marriage
+between them."
+
+Sir Maxamon Zhorgay, Sesar Karvall's henchman, named himself and
+his lord; they brought the Lady-Demoiselle Elaine to be wed to
+Lord Trask of Traskon. The Duke, satisfied that these were persons
+whom he could address directly, asked if the terms of the
+marriage-agreement had been reached; both parties affirmed this.
+Sir Maxamon passed a scroll to the Duke; Duke Angus began to read
+the stiff and precise legal phraseology.
+
+Marriages between noble houses were not matters to be left open
+to dispute; a great deal of spilled blood and burned powder had
+resulted from ambiguity on some point of succession or inheritance
+or dower rights. Lucas bore it patiently; he didn't want his
+great-grandchildren and Elaine's shooting it out over a matter
+of a misplaced comma.
+
+"And these persons here before us do enter into this marriage
+freely?" the Duke asked, when the reading had ended. He stepped
+forward as he spoke, and his esquire gave him the two-hand Sword of
+State, heavy enough to behead a bisonoid. Trask stepped forward;
+Sesar Karvall brought Elaine up. The lawyers and henchmen obliqued
+off to the sides. "How say you, Lord Trask?" he asked, almost
+conversationally.
+
+"With all my heart, your Grace."
+
+"And you, Lady-Demoiselle Elaine?"
+
+"It is my dearest wish, your Grace."
+
+The Duke took the sword by the blade and extended it; they laid
+their hands on the jeweled pommel.
+
+"And do you, and your houses, avow us, Angus, Duke of Wardshaven,
+to be your sovereign prince, and pledge fealty to us and to our
+legitimate and lawful successors?"
+
+"We do." Not only he and Elaine, but all around them, and all the
+throng in the gardens, answered, the spectators in shouts. Very
+clearly, above it all, somebody, with more enthusiasm than
+discretion, was bawling: "_Long live Angus the First of Gram!_"
+
+"And we, Angus, do confer upon you two, and your houses, the right
+to wear our badge as you see fit, and pledge ourself to maintain
+your rights against any and all who may presume to invade them. And
+we declare that this marriage between you two, and this agreement
+between your respective houses, does please us, and we avow you two,
+Lucas and Elaine, to be lawfully wed, and who so questions this
+marriage challenges us, in our teeth and to our despite."
+
+That wasn't exactly the wording used by a ducal lord on Gram. It was
+the formula employed by a planetary king, like Napolyon of Flamberge
+or Rodolf of Excalibur. And, now that he thought of it, Angus had
+consistently used the royal first-person plural. Maybe that fellow
+who had shouted about Angus the First of Gram had only been doing
+what he'd been paid to do. This was being telecast, and Omfray of
+Glaspyth and Ridgerd of Didreksburg would both be listening; as of
+now, they'd start hiring mercenaries. Maybe that would get rid of
+Dunnan for him.
+
+The Duke gave the two-hand sword back to his esquire. The young
+knight who was carrying the green and tawny shawl handed it to him,
+and Elaine dropped the black and yellow one from her shoulders,
+the only time a respectable woman ever did that in public, and her
+mother caught and folded it. He stepped forward and draped the Trask
+colors over her shoulders, and then took her in his arms. The
+cheering broke out again, and some of Sesar Karvall's guardsmen
+began firing a pom-pom somewhere.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It took a little longer than he had expected to finish with the
+toasts and shake hands with those who crowded around. Finally, the
+exit march started, down the long walkway to the landing stage,
+and the Duke and his party moved away to the rear to prepare for
+the wedding feast at which everybody but the bride and groom would
+celebrate. One of the bridesmaids gave Elaine a huge sheaf of
+flowers, which she was to toss back from the escalator; she held it
+in the crook of one arm and clung to his with the other.
+
+"Darling; we really made it!" she was whispering, as though it were
+too wonderful to believe.
+
+Well, wasn't it?
+
+One of the news cars--orange and blue, that was Westlands Telecast
+& Teleprint--had floated just ahead of them and was letting down
+toward the landing stage. For a moment, he was angry; that went
+beyond the outer-orbit limits of journalistic propriety, even for
+Westlands T & T. Then he laughed; today he was too happy for anger
+about anything. At the foot of the escalator, Elaine kicked off her
+gilded slippers--there was another pair in the car; he'd seen to
+that personally--and they stepped onto the escalator and turned
+about. The bridesmaids rushed forward, and began struggling for the
+slippers, to the damage and disarray of their gowns, and when they
+were half way up, Elaine heaved the bouquet and it burst apart among
+them like a bomb of colored fragrance, and the girls below snatched
+at the flowers, shrieking deliriously. Elaine stood, blowing kisses
+to everybody, and he was shaking his clasped hands over his head,
+until they were at the top.
+
+When they turned and stepped off, the orange and blue aircar had
+let down directly in front of them, blocking their way. Now he was
+really furious, and started forward with a curse. Then he saw who
+was in the car.
+
+Andray Dunnan, his thin face contorted and the narrow mustache
+writhing on his upper lip; he had a slit beside the window open
+and was tilting the barrel of a submachine gun up and out of it.
+
+He shouted, and at the same time tripped Elaine and flung her down.
+He was throwing himself forward to cover her when there was a
+blasting multiple report. Something sledged him in the chest;
+his right leg crumpled under him. He fell--
+
+He fell and fell and fell, endlessly, through darkness, out of
+consciousness.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+He was crucified, and crowned with a crown of thorns. Who had they
+done that to? Somebody long ago, on Terra. His arms were drawn out
+stiffly, and hurt; his feet and legs hurt, too, and he couldn't move
+them, and there was this prickling at his brow. And he was blind.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+No; his eyes were just closed. He opened them, and there was a white
+wall in front of him, patterned with a blue snow-crystal design, and
+he realized that it was a ceiling and that he was lying on his back.
+He couldn't move his head, but by shifting his eyes he saw that he
+was completely naked and surrounded by a tangle of tubes and wires,
+which puzzled him briefly. Then he knew that he was not on a bed,
+but on a robomedic, and the tubes would be for medication and
+wound drainage and intravenous feeding, and the wires would be
+to electrodes imbedded in his body for diagnosis, and the
+crown-of-thorns thing would be more electrodes for an encephalograph.
+He'd been on one of those robomedics before, when he had been gored
+by a bisonoid on the cattle range.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+That was what it was; he was still under treatment. But that seemed
+so long ago; so many things--he must have dreamed them--seemed to
+have happened.
+
+Then he remembered, and struggled futilely to rise.
+
+"Elaine!" he called. "Elaine, where are you?"
+
+There was a stir and somebody came into his limited view; his
+cousin, Nikkolay Trask.
+
+"Nikkolay; Andray Dunnan," he said. "What happened to Elaine?"
+
+Nikkolay winced, as though something he had expected to hurt had
+hurt worse than he had expected.
+
+"Lucas." He swallowed. "Elaine ... Elaine is dead."
+
+Elaine is dead. That didn't make sense.
+
+"She was killed instantly, Lucas. Hit six times; I don't think
+she even felt the first one. She didn't suffer at all."
+
+Somebody moaned, and then he realized that it had been himself.
+
+"You were hit twice," Nikkolay was telling him. "One in the leg;
+smashed the femur. And one in the chest. That one missed your heart
+by an inch."
+
+"Pity it did." He was beginning to remember clearly, now. "I threw
+her down, and tried to cover her. I must have thrown her straight
+into the burst and only caught the last of it myself." There was
+something else; oh, yes. "Dunnan. Did they get him?"
+
+Nikkolay shook his head. "He got away. Stole the _Enterprise_ and
+took her off-planet."
+
+"I want to get him myself."
+
+He started to rise again; Nikkolay nodded to someone out of sight.
+A cool hand touched his chin, and he smelled a woman's perfume,
+nothing at all like Elaine's. Something like a small insect bit
+him on the neck. The room grew dark.
+
+Elaine was dead. There was no more Elaine, nowhere at all. Why,
+that must mean there was no more world. So that was why it had
+gotten so dark.
+
+He woke again, fitfully, and it would be daylight and he could see
+the yellow sky through an open window or it would be night and the
+wall-lights would be on. There would always be somebody with him.
+Nikkolay's wife, Dame Cecelia; Rovard Grauffis; Lady Lavina
+Karvall--he must have slept a long time, for she was so much older
+than he remembered--and her brother, Burt Sandrasan. And a woman
+with dark hair, in a white smock with a gold caduceus on her breast.
+
+Once, Duchess Flavia, and once Duke Angus himself. He asked where
+he was, not much caring. They told him, at the Ducal Palace.
+
+He wished they'd all go away, and let him go wherever Elaine was.
+
+Then it would be dark, and he would be trying to find her, because
+there was something he wanted desperately to show her. Stars in the
+sky at night, that was it. But there were no stars, there was no
+Elaine, there was no anything, and he wished that there was no
+Lucas Trask, either.
+
+But there was an Andray Dunnan. He could see him standing
+black-cloaked on the terrace, the diamonds in his beret-jewel
+glittering evilly; he could see the mad face peering at him over
+the rising barrel of the submachine gun. And then he would hunt
+for him without finding him, through the cold darkness of space.
+
+The waking periods grew longer, and during them his mind was clear.
+They relieved him of his crown of electronic thorns. The feeding
+tubes came out, and they gave him cups of broth and fruit juice.
+He wanted to know why he had been brought to the Palace.
+
+"About the only thing we could do," Rovard Grauffis told him.
+"They had too much trouble at Karvall House as it was. You know,
+Sesar got shot, too."
+
+"No." So that was why Sesar hadn't come to see him. "Was he killed?"
+
+"Wounded; he's in worse shape than you are. When the shooting
+started, he went charging up the escalator. Didn't have anything
+but his dress-dagger. Dunnan gave him a quick burst; I think that
+was why he didn't have time to finish you off. By that time, the
+guards who'd been shooting blanks from that rapid-fire gun got in
+a clip of live rounds and fired at him. He got out of there as fast
+as he could. They have Sesar on a robomedic like yours. He isn't
+in any danger."
+
+The drainage tubes and medication tubes came out; the tangle of
+wires around him was removed, and the electrodes with them. They
+bandaged his wounds and dressed him in a loose robe and lifted him
+from the robomedic to a couch, where he could sit up when he wished;
+they began giving him solid food, and wine to drink, and allowed him
+to smoke. The woman doctor told him he'd had a bad time, as though
+he didn't know that. He wondered if she expected him to thank her
+for keeping him alive.
+
+"You'll be up and around in a few weeks," his cousin added. "I've
+seen to it that everything at Traskon New House will be ready for
+you by then."
+
+"I'll never enter that house as long as I live, and I wish that
+wouldn't be more than the next minute. That was to be Elaine's
+house. I won't go to it alone."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The dreams troubled his sleep less and less as he grew stronger.
+Visitors came often, bringing amusing little gifts, and he found
+that he enjoyed their company. He wanted to know what had really
+happened, and how Dunnan had gotten away.
+
+"He pirated the _Enterprise_," Rovard Grauffis told him. "He had
+that company of mercenaries of his, and he'd bribed some of the
+people at the Gorram shipyards. I thought Alex would kill his chief
+of security when he found out what had happened. We can't prove
+anything--we're trying hard enough to--but we're sure Omfray of
+Glaspyth furnished the money. He's been denying it just a shade
+too emphatically."
+
+"Then the whole thing was planned in advance."
+
+"Taking the ship was; he must have been planning that for months;
+before he started recruiting that company. I think he meant to do
+it the night before the wedding. Then he tried to persuade the
+Lady-Demoiselle Elaine to elope with him--he seems to have actually
+thought that was possible--and when she humiliated him, he decided
+to kill both of you first." He turned to Otto Harkaman, who had
+accompanied him. "As long as I live, I'll regret not taking you
+at your word and accepting your offer, then."
+
+"How did he get hold of that Westlands Telecast and Teleprint car?"
+
+"Oh. The morning of the wedding, he screened Westlands editorial
+office and told them he had the inside story on the marriage and
+why the Duke was sponsoring it. Made it sound as though there was
+some scandal; insisted that a reporter come to Dunnan House for a
+face-to-face interview. They sent a man, and that was the last they
+saw him alive; our people found his body at Dunnan House when we
+were searching the place afterward. We found the car at the
+shipyard; it had taken a couple of hits from the guns at Karvall
+House, but you know what these press cars are built to stand. He
+went directly to the shipyard, where his men already had the
+_Enterprise_; as soon as he arrived, she lifted out."
+
+He stared at the cigarette between his fingers. It was almost
+short enough to burn him. With an effort, he leaned forward to
+crush it out.
+
+"Rovard, how soon will that second ship be finished?"
+
+Grauffis laughed bitterly. "Building the _Enterprise_ took
+everything we had. The duchy's on the edge of bankruptcy now. We
+stopped work on the second ship six months ago because we didn't
+have enough money to keep on with her and still get the _Enterprise_
+finished. We were expecting the _Enterprise_ to make enough in the
+Old Federation to finish the second one. Then, with two ships and
+a base on Tanith, the money would begin coming in instead of going
+out. But now--"
+
+"It leaves me where I was on Flamberge," Harkaman added. "Worse.
+King Napolyon was going to help the Elmersans, and I'd have gotten
+a command in that. It's too late for that now."
+
+He picked up his cane and used it to push himself to his feet.
+The broken leg had mended, but he was still weak. He took a few
+tottering steps, paused to lean on the cane, and then forced
+himself on to the open window and stood for a moment staring out.
+Then he turned.
+
+"Captain Harkaman, it might be that you could still get a command,
+here on Gram. That's if you don't mind commanding under me as
+owner-aboard. I am going hunting for Andray Dunnan."
+
+They both looked at him. After a moment, Harkaman said:
+
+"I'd count it an honor, Lord Trask. But where will you get a ship?"
+
+"She's half finished now. You already have a crew for her. Duke
+Angus can finish her for me, and pay for it by pledging his new
+barony of Traskon."
+
+He had known Rovard Grauffis all his life; until this moment,
+he had never seen Duke Angus' henchman show surprise.
+
+"You mean, you'll trade Traskon for that ship?" he demanded.
+
+"Finished, equipped and ready for space, yes."
+
+"The Duke will agree to that," Grauffis said promptly. "But, Lucas;
+Traskon is all you own."
+
+"If I have a ship, I won't need them. I am turning Space Viking."
+
+That brought Harkaman to his feet with a roar of approval. Grauffis
+looked at him, his mouth slightly open.
+
+"Lucas Trask--Space Viking," he said. "Now I've heard everything."
+
+Well, why not? He had deplored the effects of Viking raiding on
+the Sword-Worlds, because Gram was a Sword-World, and Traskon was
+on Gram, and Traskon was to have been the home where he and Elaine
+would live and where their children and children's children would
+be born and live. Now the little point on which all of it had
+rested was gone.
+
+"That was another Lucas Trask, Rovard. He's dead, now."
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+Grauffis excused himself to make a screen call and then returned to
+excuse himself again. Evidently Duke Angus had dropped whatever he
+was doing as soon as he heard what his henchman had to tell him.
+Harkaman was silent until after he was out of the room, then said:
+
+"Lord Trask, this is a wonderful thing for me. It's not been
+pleasant to be a shipless captain living on strangers' bounty.
+I'd hate, though, to have you think, some time, that I'd advanced
+my own fortunes at the expense of yours."
+
+"Don't worry about that. If anybody's being taken advantage of,
+you are. I need a space-captain, and your misfortune is my own
+good luck."
+
+Harkaman started to pack tobacco into his pipe. "Have you ever been
+off Gram, at all?" he asked.
+
+"A few years at the University of Camelot, on Excalibur. Otherwise, no."
+
+"Well, have you any conception of the sort of thing you're setting
+yourself to?" The Space Viking snapped his lighter and puffed.
+"You know, of course, how big the Old Federation is. You know the
+figures, that is, but do they mean anything to you? I know they
+don't to a good many spacemen, even. We talk glibly about ten to the
+hundredth power, but emotionally we still count, 'One, Two, Three,
+Many.' A ship in hyperspace logs about a light-year an hour. You
+can go from here to Excalibur in thirty hours. But you could send
+a radio message announcing the birth of a son, and he'd be a father
+before it was received. The Old Federation, where you're going to
+hunt Dunnan, occupies a space-volume of two hundred billion cubic
+light-years. And you're hunting for one ship and one man in that.
+How are you going to do it, Lord Trask?"
+
+"I haven't started thinking about how; all I know is that I have to
+do it. There are planets in the Old Federation where Space Vikings
+come and go; raid-and-trade bases, like the one Duke Angus planned
+to establish on Tanith. At one or another of them, I'll pick up word
+of Dunnan, sooner or later."
+
+"We'll hear where he was a year ago, and by the time we get there,
+he'll be gone for a year and a half to two years. We've been raiding
+the Old Federation for over three hundred years, Lord Trask. At present,
+I'd say there are at least two hundred Space Viking ships in operation.
+Why haven't we raided it bare long ago? Well, that's the answer:
+distance and voyage-time. You know, Dunnan could die of old age--which
+is not a usual cause of death among Space Vikings--before you caught up
+with him. And your youngest ship's-boy could die of old age before he
+found out about it."
+
+"Well, I can go on hunting for him till I die, then. There's nothing
+else that means anything to me."
+
+"I thought it was something like that. I won't be with you, all your
+life. I want a ship of my own, like the _Corisande_, that I lost on
+Durendal. Some day, I'll have one. But till you can command your own
+ship, I'll command her for you. That's a promise."
+
+Some note of ceremony seemed indicated. Summoning a robot, he had it
+pour wine for them, and they pledged each other.
+
+Rovard Grauffis had recovered his aplomb by the time he returned
+accompanied by the Duke. If Angus had ever lost his, he gave no
+indication of it. The effect on everybody else was literally seismic.
+The generally accepted view was that Lord Trask's reason had been
+unhinged by his tragic loss; there might, he conceded, be more than
+a crumb of truth in that. At first, his cousin Nikkolay raged at him
+for alienating the barony from the family, and then he learned that
+Duke Angus was appointing him vicar-baron and giving him Traskon
+New House for his residence. Immediately he began acting like one
+at the death-bed of a rich grandmother. The Wardshaven financial
+and industrial barons, whom he had known only distantly, on the
+other hand, came flocking around him, offering assistance and
+hailing him as the savior of the duchy. Duke Angus' credit, almost
+obliterated by the loss of the _Enterprise_, was firmly
+re-established, and theirs with it.
+
+There were conferences at which lawyers and bankers argued
+interminably; he attended a few at first, found himself completely
+uninterested, and told everybody so. All he wanted was a ship; the
+best ship possible, as soon as possible. Alex Gorram had been the
+first to be notified; he had commenced work on the unfinished
+sister-ship of the _Enterprise_ immediately. Until he was strong
+enough to go to the shipyard himself, he watched the work on the
+two-thousand-foot globular skeleton by screen, and conferred either
+in person or by screen with engineers and shipyard executives. His
+rooms at the ducal palace were converted, almost overnight, from
+sickrooms to offices. The doctors, who had recently been urging
+him to find new interests and activities, were now warning of the
+dangers of overexertion. Harkaman finally added his voice to theirs.
+
+"You take it easy, Lucas." They had dropped formality and were
+on a first-name basis now. "You got hulled pretty badly; you let
+damage-control work on you, and don't strain the machinery till
+it's fixed. We have plenty of time. We're not going to get anywhere
+chasing Dunnan. The only way we can catch him is by interception.
+The longer he moves around in the Old Federation before he hears
+we're after him, the more of a trail he'll leave. Once we can
+establish a predictable pattern, we'll have a chance. Then, some
+time, he'll come out of hyperspace somewhere and find us waiting
+for him."
+
+"Do you think he went to Tanith?"
+
+Harkaman heaved himself out of his chair and prowled about the room
+for a few minutes, then came back and sat down again.
+
+"No. That was Duke Angus' idea, not his. He couldn't put in a base
+on Tanith, anyhow. You know the kind of a crew he has."
+
+There had been an extensive inquiry into Dunnan's associates and
+accomplices; Duke Angus was still hoping for positive proof to
+implicate Omfray of Glaspyth in the piracy. Dunnan had with him
+a dozen and a half employees of the Gorram shipyards whom he had
+corrupted. There was some technical ability among them, but for the
+most part they were agitators and trouble-makers and incompetent
+workmen. Even under the circumstances, Alex Gorram was glad to see
+the last of them. As for Dunnan's own mercenary company, there were
+about a score of former spacemen among them; the rest graded down
+from bandits through thugs and sneak-thieves to barroom bums.
+Dunnan himself was an astrogator, not an engineer.
+
+"That gang aren't even good enough for routine raiding," Harkaman
+said. "They'd never under any circumstances be able to put in a base
+on Tanith. Unless Dunnan's completely crazy, which I doubt, he's gone
+to some regular Viking base planet, like Hoth or Nergal or Dagon or
+Xochitl, to recruit officers and engineers and able spacemen."
+
+"All that machinery and robotic equipment and so on that was going
+to Tanith--was that aboard when he took the ship?"
+
+"Yes, and that's another reason why he'd go to some planet like Hoth
+or Nergal or Xochitl. On a Viking-occupied planet in the Old
+Federation, that stuff's almost worth its weight in gold."
+
+"What's Tanith like?"
+
+"Almost completely Terra-type, third of a Class-G sun. Very much
+like Haulteclere or Flamberge. It was one of the last planets the
+Federation colonized before the Big War. Nobody knows what happened,
+exactly. There wasn't any interstellar war; at least, you don't find
+any big slag-puddles where cities used to be. They probably did
+a lot of fighting among themselves, after they got out of the
+Federation. There's still some traces of combat-damage around. Then
+they started to decivilize, down to the pre-mechanical level--wind
+and water power and animal power. They have draft-animals that look
+like introduced Terran carabaos, and a few small sailboats and big
+canoes and bateaux on the rivers. They have gunpowder, which seems
+to be the last thing any people lose.
+
+"I was there, five years ago. I liked Tanith for a base. There's one
+moon, almost solid nickel iron, and fissionable-ore deposits. Then,
+like a fool, I hired out to the Elmersans on Durendal and lost my
+ship. When I came here, your Duke was thinking about Xipototec. I
+convinced him that Tanith was a better planet for his purpose."
+
+"Dunnan might go there, at that. He might think he was scoring one
+on Duke Angus. After all, he has all that equipment."
+
+"And nobody to use it. If I were Dunnan, I'd go to Nergal, or
+Xochitl. There are always a couple of thousand Space Vikings on
+either, spending their loot and taking it easy between raids. He
+could sign on a full crew on either. I suggest we go to Xochitl,
+first. We might pick up news of him, if nothing else."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+All right, they'd try Xochitl first. Harkaman knew the planet,
+and was friendly with the Haulteclere noble who ruled it.
+
+The work went on at the Gorram shipyard; it had taken a year
+to build the _Enterprise_, but the steel-mills and engine-works
+were over the preparatory work of tooling up, and material and
+equipment was flowing in a steady stream. Lucas let them persuade
+him to take more rest, and day by day grew stronger. Soon he was
+spending most of his time at the shipyard, watching the engines
+go in--Abbot lift-and-drive for normal space, Dillingham hyperdrive,
+power-converters, pseudograv, all at the center of the globular ship.
+
+Living quarters and workshops went in next, all armored in
+collapsium-plated steel. Then the ship lifted out to an orbit a
+thousand miles off-planet, followed by swarms of armored work-craft
+and cargo-lighters; the rest of the work was more easily done in
+space. At the same time, the four two-hundred-foot pinnaces that
+would be carried aboard were being finished. Each of them had its
+own hyperdrive engines, and could travel as far and as fast as
+the ship herself.
+
+Otto Harkaman was beginning to be distressed because the ship still
+lacked a name. He didn't like having to speak of her as "her," or
+"the ship," and there were many things soon to go on that should be
+name-marked. _Elaine_, Trask thought, at once, and almost at once
+rejected it. He didn't want her name associated with the things
+that ship would do in the Old Federation. _Revenge_, _Avenger_,
+_Retribution_, _Vendetta_; none appealed to him. A news-commentator,
+turgidly eloquent about the nemesis which the criminal Dunnan had
+invoked against himself, supplied it, _Nemesis_ it was.
+
+Now he was studying his new profession of interstellar robbery and
+murder against which he had once inveighed. Otto Harkaman's handful
+of followers became his teachers. Vann Larch, guns-and-missiles,
+who was also a painter; Guatt Kirbey, sour and pessimistic, the
+hyperspatial astrogator who tried to express his science in music;
+Sharll Renner, the normal-space astrogator. Alvyn Karffard, the
+exec, who had been with Harkaman longest of all. And Sir Paytrik
+Morland, a local recruit, formerly guard-captain to Count Lionel
+of Newhaven, who commanded the ground-fighters and the combat
+contragravity. They were using the farms and villages of Traskon
+for drill and practice, and he noticed that while the _Nemesis_
+would carry only five hundred ground and air fighters, over a
+thousand were being trained.
+
+He commented to Rovard Grauffis.
+
+"Yes. Don't mention it outside," the Duke's henchman said. "You and
+Sir Paytrik and Captain Harkaman will pick the five hundred best.
+The Duke will take the rest into his service. Some of these days,
+Omfray of Glaspyth will find out what a Space Viking raid is really
+like."
+
+And Duke Angus would tax his new subjects of Glaspyth to redeem
+the pledges on his new barony of Traskon. Some old Pre-Atomic writer
+Harkaman was fond of quoting had said, "Gold will not always get
+you good soldiers, but good soldiers can get you gold."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The _Nemesis_ came back to the Gorram yards and settled onto her
+curved landing legs like a monstrous spider. The _Enterprise_ had
+borne the Ward sword and atom-symbol; the _Nemesis_ should bear his
+own badge, but the bisonoid head, tawny on green, of Traskon, was no
+longer his. He chose a skull impaled on an upright sword, and it was
+blazoned on the ship when he and Harkaman took her out for her
+shakedown cruise.
+
+When they landed again at the Gorram yards, two hundred hours later,
+they learned that a tramp freighter from Morglay had come into
+Bigglersport in their absence with news of Andray Dunnan. Her
+captain had come to Wardshaven at Duke Angus' urgent invitation
+and was waiting for them at the Ducal Palace.
+
+They sat, a dozen of them, around a table in the Duke's private
+apartments. The freighter captain, a small, precise man with a
+graying beard, alternately puffed at a cigarette and sipped from
+a beaker of brandy.
+
+"I spaced out from Morglay two hundred hours ago," he was saying. "I'd
+been there twelve local days, three hundred Galactic Standard hours,
+and the run from Curtana was three hundred and twenty. This ship,
+the _Enterprise_, spaced out from there several days before I did.
+I'd say she's twelve hundred hours out of Windsor, on Curtana, now."
+
+The room was still. The breeze fluttered curtains at the open
+windows; from the garden below, winged night-things twittered.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"I never expected it," Harkaman said. "I thought he'd take the ship
+out to the Old Federation at once." He poured wine for himself. "Of
+course, Dunnan's crazy. A crazy man has an advantage, sometimes,
+like a left-handed knife-fighter. He does unexpected things."
+
+"That wasn't such a crazy move," Rovard Grauffis said. "We have very
+little direct trade with Curtana. It's only an accident we heard
+about this when we did."
+
+The freighter captain's beaker was half empty. He filled it to the
+brim from the decanter.
+
+"She was the first Gram ship there for years," he agreed. "That
+attracted notice, of course. And his having the blazonry changed,
+from the sword and atom-symbol to the blue crescent. And the
+ill-feeling on the part of other captains and planet-side employers
+about the men he'd lured away from them."
+
+"How many men and what kind?"
+
+The man with the gray beard shrugged. "I was too busy getting a
+cargo together for Morglay, to pay much attention. Almost a full
+spaceship complement, officers and spacemen of every kind. And a
+lot of industrial engineers and technicians."
+
+"Then he is going to use that equipment that was aboard, and put in
+a base somewhere," somebody said.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"If he left Curtana twelve hundred hours ago, he's still in
+hyperspace," Guatt Kirbey said. "It's over two thousand from Curtana
+to the nearest Old Federation planet."
+
+"How far to Tanith?" Duke Angus asked. "I'm sure that's where he's
+gone. He'd expect me to finish the other ship and equip her like the
+_Enterprise_ and send her out; he'd want to get there first."
+
+"I'd thought that Tanith would be the last place he'd go," Harkaman
+said, "but this changes the whole outlook. He could have gone to Tanith."
+
+"He's crazy, and you're trying to apply sane logic to him," Guatt
+Kirbey said. "You're figuring what you'd do, and you aren't crazy.
+Of course, I've had my doubts, at times, but--"
+
+"Yes, he's crazy, and Captain Harkaman's allowing for that," Rovard
+Grauffis said. "Dunnan hates all of us. He hates his Grace, here.
+He hates Lord Lucas, and Sesar Karvall; of course, he may think
+he killed both of them. He hates Captain Harkaman. So how could
+he score all of us off at once? By taking Tanith."
+
+"You say he was buying supplies and ammunition?"
+
+"That's right. Gun ammunition, ship's missiles, and a lot of
+ground-defense missiles."
+
+"What was he buying them with? Trading machinery?"
+
+"No. Gold."
+
+"Yes. Lothar Ffayle found out that a lot of gold was transferred to
+Dunnan from banks in Glaspyth and Didreksburg," Grauffis said. "He
+got that aboard when he took the ship, evidently."
+
+"All right," Trask said. "We can't be sure of anything, but we have
+some reasons for thinking he went to Tanith, and that's more than
+we have for any other planet in the Old Federation. I won't try to
+estimate the odds against our finding him there, but they're a good
+deal bigger anywhere else. We'll go there, first."
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+The outside viewscreen, which had been vacantly gray for over
+three thousand hours, was now a vertiginous swirl of color, the
+indescribable color of a collapsing hyperspatial field. No two
+observers ever saw it alike, and no imagination could vision the
+actuality. Trask found that he was holding his breath. So, he
+noticed, was Otto Harkaman, beside him. It was something, evidently,
+that nobody got used to. Even Guatt Kirbey, the astrogator, was
+sitting with his pipe clenched in his mouth, staring at the screen.
+
+Then, in an instant, the stars, which had literally not been there
+before, filled the screen with a blaze of splendor against the black
+velvet backdrop of normal space. Dead in the center, brighter than
+all the rest, Ertado's Star, the sun of Tanith, burned yellowly.
+The light from it was ten hours old.
+
+"Pretty good, Guatt," Harkaman said, picking up his cup.
+
+"Good, Gehenna; it was perfect," somebody else said.
+
+Kirbey was relighting his pipe. "Oh, I suppose it'll have to do," he
+grudged, around the stem. He had gray hair and an untidy mustache,
+and nothing was ever quite good enough to satisfy him. "I could have
+made it a little closer. Need three microjumps, now, and I'll have
+to cut the last one pretty fine. Now don't bother me." He began
+punching buttons for data and fiddling with setscrews and verniers.
+
+For a moment, in the screen, Trask could see the face of Andray
+Dunnan. He blinked it away and reached for his cigarettes, and put
+one in his mouth wrong-end-to. When he reversed it and snapped his
+lighter, he saw that his hand was trembling. Otto Harkaman must have
+seen that, too.
+
+"Take it easy, Lucas," he whispered. "Keep your optimism under
+control. We only think he might be here."
+
+"I'm sure he is. He has to be."
+
+No; that was the way Dunnan, himself, thought. Let's be sane about this.
+
+"We have to assume he is. If we do, and he isn't it's a
+disappointment. If we don't, and he is, it's a disaster."
+
+Others, it seemed, thought the same way. The battle-stations board
+was a solid blaze of red light for full combat readiness.
+
+"All right," Kirbey said. "Jumping."
+
+Then he twisted the red handle to the right and shoved it in
+viciously. Again the screen boiled with colored turbulence; again
+dark and mighty forces stalked through the ship like demons in a
+sorcerer's tower. The screen turned featureless gray as the pickups
+stared blindly into some dimensionless noplace. Then it convulsed
+with color again, and this time Ertado's Star, still in the center,
+was a coin-sized disk, with the little sparks of its seven planets
+scattered around it. Tanith was the third--the inhabitable planet of
+a G-class system usually was. It had a single moon, barely visible
+in the telescopic screen, five hundred miles in diameter and fifty
+thousand off-planet.
+
+"You know," Kirbey said, as though he was afraid to admit it, "that
+wasn't too bad. I think we can make it in one more microjump."
+
+Some time, Trask supposed, he'd be able to use the expression
+"micro-" about a distance of fifty-five million miles, too.
+
+"What do you think about it?" Harkaman asked him, as deferentially
+as though seeking expert guidance instead of examining his
+apprentice. "Where should Guatt put us?"
+
+"As close as possible, of course." That would be a light-second at
+the least; if the _Nemesis_ came out of hyperspace any closer to
+anything the size of Tanith, the collapsing field itself would
+kick her back. "We have to assume Dunnan's been there at least
+nine hundred hours. By that time, he could have put in a
+detection-station, and maybe missile-launchers, on the moon. The
+_Enterprise_ carries four pinnaces, the same as the _Nemesis_; in
+his place, I'd have at least two of them on off-planet patrol. So
+let's accept it that we'll be detected as soon as we come out of
+the last jump, and come out with the moon directly between us and
+the planet. If it's occupied, we can knock it off on the way in."
+
+"A lot of captains would try to come out with the moon masked off
+by the planet," Harkaman said.
+
+"Would you?"
+
+The big man shook his tousled head. "No. If they have launchers on
+the moon, they could launch at us in a curve around the planet, by
+data relayed from the other side, and we'd be at a disadvantage
+replying. Just go straight in. You hearing this, Guatt?"
+
+"Yeah. It makes sense. Sort of. Now, stop pestering me. Sharll,
+look here a minute."
+
+The normal-space astrogator conferred with him; Alvyn Karffard, the
+executive officer, joined them. Finally Kirbey pulled out the big
+red handle, twisted it, and said, "All right, jumping." He shoved
+it in. "I suppose I cut it too fine; now we'll get kicked back half
+a million miles."
+
+The screen convulsed again; when it cleared the third planet was
+directly in the center; its small moon, looking almost as large, was
+a little above and to the right, sunlit on one side and planetlit on
+the other. Kirbey locked the red handle, gathered up his tobacco and
+lighter and things from the ledge, and pulled down the cover of the
+instrument-console, locking it.
+
+"All yours, Sharll," he told Renner.
+
+"Eight hours to atmosphere," Renner said. "That's if we don't have
+to waste a lot of time shooting up Junior, there."
+
+Vann Larch was looking at the moon in the six hundred power screen.
+
+"I don't see anything to shoot. Five hundred miles; one
+planetbuster, or four or five thermonuclears," he said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It wasn't right, Trask thought indignantly. Minutes ago, Tanith had
+been six and a half billion miles away. Seconds ago, fifty-odd million.
+And now, a quarter of a million, and looking close enough to touch
+in the screen, it would take them eight hours to reach it. Why, on
+hyperdrive you could go forty-eight trillion miles in that time.
+
+Well, it took a man just as long to walk across a room today as it
+had taken Pharaoh the First, or Homo Sap.
+
+In the telescopic screen Tanith looked like any picture of any
+Terra-type planet from space, with cloud-blurred contours of seas
+and continents and a vague mottling of gray and brown and green,
+topped at the pole by an icecap. None of the surface features, not
+even the major mountain ranges or rivers, were yet distinguishable,
+but Harkaman and Sharll Renner and Alvyn Karffard and the other old
+hands seemed to recognize it. Karffard was talking by phone to Paul
+Koreff, the signals-and-detection officer, who could detect nothing
+from the moon and nothing that was getting through the Van Allen
+belt from the planet.
+
+Maybe they'd guessed wrong, at that. Maybe Dunnan hadn't gone to
+Tanith at all.
+
+Harkaman, who had the knack of putting himself to sleep at will,
+with some sixth or _n_-th sense posted as a sentry, leaned back in
+his chair and closed his eyes. Trask wished he could, too. It would
+be hours before anything happened, and until then he needed all the
+rest he could get. He drank more coffee, chain-smoked cigarettes;
+he rose and prowled about the command room, looking at screens.
+Signals-and-detection was getting a lot of routine stuff--Van Allen
+count, micrometeor count, surface temperature, gravitation-field
+strength, radar and scanner echoes. He went back to his chair and
+sat down, staring at the screen-image. The planet didn't seem to be
+getting any closer at all, and it ought to; they were approaching
+it at better than escape velocity. He sat and stared at it.
+
+He woke with a start. The screen-image was much larger, now. River
+courses and the shadow lines of mountains were clearly visible. It
+must be early autumn in the northern hemisphere; there was snow down
+to the sixtieth parallel and a belt of brown was pushing south
+against the green. Harkaman was sitting up, eating lunch. By the
+clock, it was four hours later.
+
+"Have a good nap?" he asked. "We're picking up some stuff, now.
+Radio and screen signals. Not much, but some. The locals wouldn't
+have learned enough for that in the five years since I was here.
+We didn't stay long enough, for one thing."
+
+On decivilized planets that were visited by Space Vikings, the
+locals picked up bits and scraps of technology very quickly. In the
+four months of idleness and long conversations while they were in
+hyperspace he had heard many stories confirming that. But from the
+level to which Tanith had sunk, radio and screen communication in
+five years was a little too much of a jump.
+
+"You didn't lose any men, did you?"
+
+That happened frequently--men who took up with local women, men who
+had made themselves unpopular with their shipmates, men who just
+liked the planet and wanted to stay. They were always welcomed by
+the locals for what they could do and teach.
+
+"No, we weren't there long enough for that. Only three hundred and
+fifty hours. This we're getting is outside stuff; somebody's there
+beside the locals."
+
+Dunnan. He looked again at the battle-stations board; it was still
+uniformly red-lighted. Everything was on full combat ready. He
+summoned a mess-robot, selected a couple of dishes, and began
+to eat. After the first mouthful, he called to Alvyn Karffard:
+
+"Is Paul getting anything new?" he asked.
+
+Karffard checked. A little contragravity-field distortion effect.
+It was still too far to be sure. He went back to his lunch. He had
+finished it and was lighting a cigarette over his coffee when a red
+light flashed and a voice from one of the speakers shouted.
+
+"Detection! Detection from planet! Radar, and microray!"
+
+Karffard began talking rapidly into a hand-phone; Harkaman unhooked
+one beside him and listened.
+
+"Coming from a definite point, about twenty-fifth north parallel,"
+he said, aside. "Could be from a ship hiding against the planet.
+There's nothing at all on the moon."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They seemed to be approaching the planet more and more rapidly.
+Actually, they weren't, the ship was decelerating to get into
+an orbit, but the decreasing distance created the illusion of
+increasing speed. The red lights flashed once more.
+
+"_Ship detected!_ Just outside atmosphere, coming around the planet
+from the west."
+
+"Is she the _Enterprise_?"
+
+"Can't tell, yet," Karffard said, and then cried: "There she is,
+in the screen! That spark, about thirty degrees north, just off
+the west side."
+
+Aboard her, too, voices from speakers would be shouting, "Ship
+detected!" and the battle station board would be blazing red.
+And Andray Dunnan, at the command-desk--
+
+"She's calling us." That was Paul Koreff's voice, out of the
+squawk-box on the desk. "Standard Sword-World impulse-code.
+Interrogative: What ship are you? Informative: her screen
+combination. Request: Please communicate."
+
+"All right," Harkaman said. "Let's be polite and communicate.
+What's her screen-combination?"
+
+Koreff's voice gave it, and Harkaman punched it out. The
+communication screen in front of them lit at once; Trask shoved over
+his chair beside Harkaman's, his hands tightening on the arms. Would
+it be Dunnan himself, and what would his face show when he saw who
+confronted him out of his own screen?
+
+It took him an instant to realize that the other ship was not the
+_Enterprise_ at all. The _Enterprise_ was the _Nemesis'_ twin; her
+command room was identical with his own. This one was different in
+arrangements and fittings. The _Enterprise_ was a new ship; this one
+was old, and had suffered for years at the hands of a slack captain
+and a slovenly crew.
+
+And the man who sat facing him in the screen was not Andray Dunnan,
+or any man he had ever seen before. A dark-faced man, with an old
+scar that ran down one cheek from a little below the eye; he had
+curly black hair, on his head and on a V of chest exposed by an open
+shirt. There was an ashtray in front of him, and a thin curl of
+smoke rose from a cigar in it, and coffee steamed in an ornate but
+battered silver cup beside it. He was grinning gleefully.
+
+"Well! Captain Harkaman, of the _Enterprise_, I believe! Welcome
+to Tanith. Who's the gentleman with you? He isn't the Duke of
+Wardshaven, is he?"
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+He glanced quickly at the showback over the screen, to assure
+himself that his face was not betraying him. Beside him, Otto
+Harkaman was laughing.
+
+"Why, Captain Valkanhayn; this is an unexpected pleasure. That's
+the _Space Scourge_ you're in, I take it? What are you doing here
+on Tanith?"
+
+A voice from one of the speakers shouted that a second ship had
+been detected coming over the north pole. The dark-faced man in
+the screen smirked quite complacently.
+
+"That's Garvan Spasso, in the _Lamia_," he said. "And what we're
+doing here, we've taken this planet over. We intend keeping it, too."
+
+"Well! So you and Garvan have teamed up. You two were just made for
+one another. And you have a little planet, all your very own. I'm so
+happy for both of you. What are you getting out of it--beside poultry?"
+
+The other's self-assurance started to slip. He slapped it back into place.
+
+"Don't kid me; we know why you're here. Well, we got here first.
+Tanith is our planet. You think you can take it away from us?"
+
+"I know we could, and so do you," Harkaman told him. "We outgun you
+and Spasso together; why, a couple of our pinnaces could knock the
+_Lamia_ apart. The only question is, do we want to bother?"
+
+By now, he had recovered from his surprise, but not from his
+disappointment. If this fellow thought the _Nemesis_ was the
+_Enterprise_--Before he could check himself, he had finished
+the thought aloud.
+
+"Then the _Enterprise_ didn't come here at all!"
+
+The man in the screen started. "Isn't that the _Enterprise_ you're in?"
+
+"Oh, no. Pardon my remissness, Captain Valkanhayn," Harkaman
+apologized. "This is the _Nemesis_. The gentleman with me, Lord
+Lucas Trask, is owner-aboard, for whom I am commanding. Lord Trask,
+Captain Boake Valkanhayn, of the _Space Scourge_. Captain Valkanhayn
+is a Space Viking." He said that as though expecting it to be
+disputed. "So, I am told, is his associate, Captain Spasso, whose
+ship is approaching. You mean to tell me that the _Enterprise_
+hasn't been here?"
+
+Valkanhayn was puzzled, slightly apprehensive.
+
+"You mean the Duke of Wardshaven has two ships?"
+
+"As far as I know, the Duke of Wardshaven hasn't any ships,"
+Harkaman replied. "This ship is the property and private adventure
+of Lord Trask. The _Enterprise_, for which we are looking, is owned
+and commanded by one Andray Dunnan."
+
+The man with the scarred face and hairy chest had picked up his cigar
+and was puffing on it mechanically. Now he took it out of his mouth
+as though he wondered how it had gotten there in the first place.
+
+"But isn't the Duke of Wardshaven sending a ship here to establish
+a base? That was what we'd heard. We heard you'd gone from Flamberge
+to Gram to command for him."
+
+"Where did you hear this? And when?"
+
+"On Hoth. That'd be about two thousand hours ago; a Gilgamesher
+brought the news from Xochitl."
+
+"Well, considering it was fifth or sixth hand, your information was
+good enough, when it was fresh. It was a year and a half old when
+you got it, though. How long have you been here on Tanith?"
+
+"About a thousand hours." Harkaman clucked sadly at that.
+
+"Pity you wasted all that time. Well, it was nice talking to you,
+Boake. Say hello to Garvan for me when he comes up."
+
+"You mean you're not staying?" Valkanhayn was horrified, an odd
+reaction for a man who had just been expecting a bitter battle
+to drive them away. "You're just spacing right out again?"
+
+Harkaman shrugged. "Do we want to waste time here, Lord Trask? The
+_Enterprise_ has obviously gone somewhere else. She was still in
+hyperspace when Captain Valkanhayn and his accomplice arrived here."
+
+"Is there anything worth staying for?" That seemed to be the reply
+Harkaman was expecting. "Beside poultry, that is?"
+
+Harkaman shook his head. "This is Captain Valkanhayn's planet; his
+and Captain Spasso's. Let them be stuck with it."
+
+"But, look; this is a good planet. There's a big local city, maybe
+ten or twenty thousand people; temples and palaces and everything.
+Then, there are a couple of old Federation cities. The one we're at
+is in good shape, and there's a big spaceport. We've been doing
+a lot of work on it. And the locals won't give you any trouble.
+All they have is spears and a few crossbows and matchlocks--"
+
+"I know. I've been here."
+
+"Well, couldn't we make some kind of a deal?" Valkanhayn asked.
+A mendicant whine was beginning to creep into his voice. "I can
+get Garvan on screen and switch him over to your ship--"
+
+"Well, we have a lot of Sword-World merchandise aboard," Harkaman
+said. "We could make you good prices on some of it. How are you
+fixed for robotic equipment?"
+
+"But aren't you going to stay here?" Valkanhayn was almost in a
+panic. "Listen, suppose I talk to Garvan, and we all get together
+on this. Just excuse me for a minute--"
+
+As soon as he had blanked out, Harkaman threw back his head and
+guffawed as though he had just heard the funniest and bawdiest joke
+in the galaxy. Trask, himself, didn't feel like laughing.
+
+"The humor escapes me," he admitted. "We came here on a fools' errand."
+
+"I'm sorry, Lucas." Harkaman was still shaking with mirth. "I know
+it's a letdown, but that pair of chiseling chicken thieves! I could
+almost pity them, if it weren't so funny." He laughed again. "You
+know what their idea was?"
+
+Trask shook his head. "Who are they?"
+
+"What I called them, a couple of chicken thieves. They raid planets
+like Set and Hertha and Melkarth, where the locals haven't anything
+to fight with--or anything worth fighting for. I didn't know they'd
+teamed up, but that figures. Nobody else would team up with either
+of them. What must have happened, this story of Duke Angus' Tanith
+adventure must have filtered out to them, and they thought that if
+they got here first, I'd think it was cheaper to take them in than
+run them out. I probably would have, too. They do have ships, of a
+sort, and they do raid, after a fashion. But now, there isn't going
+to be any Tanith base, and they have a no-good planet and they're
+stuck with it."
+
+"Can't they make anything out of it themselves?"
+
+"Like what?" Harkaman hooted. "They have no equipment, and they have
+no men. Not for a job like that. The only thing they can do is space
+out and forget it."
+
+"We could sell them equipment."
+
+"We could if they had anything to use for money. They haven't. One
+thing, we do want to let down and give the men a chance to walk on
+ground and look at a sky for a while. The girls here aren't too bad,
+either," Harkaman said. "As I remember, some of them even take a
+bath, now and then."
+
+"That's the kind of news of Dunnan we're going to get. By the time
+we'd get to where he's been reported, he'd be a couple of thousand
+light-years away," he said disgustedly. "I agree; we ought to give
+the men a chance to get off the ship, here. We can stall this pair
+along for a while and we won't have any trouble with them."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The three ships were slowly converging toward a point fifteen
+thousand miles off-planet and over the sunset line. The _Space
+Scourge_ bore the device of a mailed fist clutching a comet by the
+head; it looked more like a whisk broom than a scourge. The _Lamia_
+bore a coiled snake with the head, arms and bust of a woman.
+Valkanhayn and Spasso were taking their time about screening back,
+and he began to wonder if they weren't maneuvering the _Nemesis_
+into a cross-fire position. He mentioned this to Harkaman and Alvyn
+Karffard; they both laughed.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Just holding ship's meetings," Karffard said. "They'll be yakking
+back and forth for a couple of hours, yet."
+
+"Yes; Valkanhayn and Spasso don't own their ships," Harkaman
+explained. "They've gone in debt to their crews for supplies and
+maintenance till everybody owns everything in common. The ships
+look like it, too. They don't even command, really; they just
+preside over elected command-councils."
+
+Finally, they had both of the more or less commanders on screen.
+Valkanhayn had zipped up his shirt and put on a jacket. Garvan
+Spasso was a small man, partly bald. His eyes were a shade too close
+together, and his thin mouth had a bitterly crafty twist. He began
+speaking at once:
+
+"Captain, Boake tells me you say you're not here in the service of
+the Duke of Wardshaven at all." He said it aggrievedly.
+
+"That's correct," Harkaman said. "We came here because Lord Trask
+thought another Gram ship, the _Enterprise_, would be here. Since
+she isn't, there's no point in our being here. We do hope, though,
+that you won't make any difficulty about our letting down and giving
+our men a couple of hundred hours' liberty. They've been in
+hyperspace for three thousand hours."
+
+"See!" Spasso clamored. "He wants to trick us into letting him land--"
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Captain Spasso," Trask cut in. "Will you please stop insulting
+everybody's intelligence, your own included." Spasso glared at him,
+belligerently but hopefully. "I understand what you thought you were
+going to do here. You expected Captain Harkaman here to establish a
+base for the Duke of Wardshaven, and you thought, if you were here
+ahead of him and in a posture of defense, that he'd take you into
+the Duke's service rather than waste ammunition and risk damage and
+casualties wiping you out. Well, I'm very sorry, gentlemen. Captain
+Harkaman is in my service, and I'm not in the least interested in
+establishing a base on Tanith."
+
+Valkanhayn and Spasso looked at each other. At least, in the two
+side-by-side screens, their eyes shifted, each to the other's screen
+on his own ship.
+
+"I get it!" Spasso cried suddenly. "There's two ships, the
+_Enterprise_ and this one. The Duke of Wardshaven fitted out the
+_Enterprise_, and somebody else fitted out this one. They both want
+to put in a base here!"
+
+That opened a glorious vista. Instead of merely capitalizing on
+their nuisance-value, they might find themselves holding the balance
+of power in a struggle for the planet. All sorts of profitable
+perfidies were possible.
+
+"Why, sure you can land, Otto," Valkanhayn said. "I know what it's
+like to be three thousand hours in hyper, myself."
+
+"You're at this old city with the two tall tower-buildings, aren't
+you?" Harkaman asked. He looked up at the viewscreen. "Ought to be
+about midnight there now. How's the spaceport? When I was here, it
+was pretty bad."
+
+"Oh, we've been fixing it up. We got a big gang of locals working for us--"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The city was familiar, from Otto Harkaman's descriptions and from
+the pictures Vann Larch had painted during the long jump from Gram.
+As they came in, it looked impressive, spreading for miles around
+the twin buildings that spired almost three thousand feet above it,
+with a great spaceport like an eight-pointed star at one side.
+Whoever had built it, in the sunset splendor of the old Terran
+Federation, must have done so confident that it would become the
+metropolis of a populous and prospering world. Then the sun of the
+Federation had gone down. Nobody knew what had happened on Tanith
+after that, but evidently none of it had been good.
+
+At first, the two towers seemed as sound as when they had been
+built; gradually it became apparent that one was broken at the top.
+For the most part, the smaller buildings scattered widely around
+them were standing, though here and there mounds of brush-grown
+rubble showed where some had fallen in. The spaceport looked good--a
+central octagon mass of buildings, the landing-berths, and, beyond,
+the triangular areas of airship docks and warehouses. The central
+building was outwardly intact, and the ship-berths seemed clear of
+wreckage and rubble.
+
+By the time the _Nemesis_ was following the _Space Scourge_ and the
+_Lamia_ down, towed by her own pinnaces, the illusion that they were
+approaching a living city had vanished. The interspaces between the
+buildings were choked with forest-growth, broken by a few small
+fields and garden-plots. At one time, there had been three of the
+high buildings, literally vertical cities in themselves. Where the
+third had stood was a glazed crater, with a ridge of fallen rubble
+lying away from it. Somebody must have landed a medium missile,
+about twenty kilotons, against its base. Something of the same sort
+had scored on the far edge of the spaceport, and one of the eight
+arrowheads of docks and warehouses was an indistinguishable slag-pile.
+
+The rest of the city seemed to have died of neglect rather than
+violence. It certainly hadn't been bombed out. Harkaman thought most
+of the fighting had been done with subneutron bombs or Omega-ray
+bombs, that killed the people without damaging the real estate. Or
+bio-weapons; a man-made plague that had gotten out of control and
+all but depopulated the planet.
+
+"It takes an awful lot of people, working together at an awful lot
+of jobs, to keep a civilization running. Smash the installations and
+kill the top technicians and scientists, and the masses don't know
+how to rebuild and go back to stone hatchets. Kill off enough of the
+masses and even if the planet and the know-how is left, there's
+nobody to do the work. I've seen planets that decivilized both ways.
+Tanith, I think, is one of the latter."
+
+That had been during one of the long after-dinner bull sessions on the
+way out from Gram. Somebody, one of the noble gentlemen-adventurers who
+had joined the company after the piracy of the _Enterprise_ and the
+murder, had asked:
+
+"But some of them survived. Don't they know what happened?"
+
+"_'In the old times, there were sorcerers. They built the old
+buildings by wizard arts. Then the sorcerers fought among themselves
+and went away,'_" Harkaman said. "That's all they know about it."
+
+You could make any kind of an explanation out of that.
+
+As the pinnaces pulled and nudged the _Nemesis_ down to her berth,
+he could see people, far down on the spaceport floor, at work.
+Either Valkanhayn and Spasso had more men than the size of their
+ships indicated, or they had gotten a lot of locals to work for
+them. More than the population of the moribund city, at least as
+Harkaman remembered it.
+
+There had been about five hundred in all; they lived by mining the
+old buildings for metal, and trading metalwork for food and textiles
+and powder and other things made elsewhere. It was accessible only
+by oxcarts traveling a hundred miles across the plains; it had been
+built by a contragravity-using people with utter disregard for
+natural travel and transportation routes.
+
+"I don't envy the poor buggers," Harkaman said, looking down at the
+antlike figures on the spaceport floor. "Boake Valkanhayn and Garvan
+Spasso have probably made slaves of the lot of them. If I was really
+going to put in a base here, I wouldn't thank that pair for the
+kind of public-relations work they've been doing among the locals."
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+That was just about the situation. Spasso and Valkanhayn and some of
+their officers met them on the landing stage of the big building in
+the middle of the spaceport, where they had established quarters.
+Entering and going down a long hallway, they passed a dozen men and
+women gathering up rubbish from the floor with shovels and with
+their hands and putting it into a lifter-skid. Both sexes wore
+shapeless garments of coarse cloth, like ponchos, and flat-soled
+sandals. Watching them was another local in a kilt, buskins and a
+leather jerkin; he wore a short sword on his belt and carried a
+wickedly thonged whip. He also wore a Space Viking combat helmet,
+painted with the device of Spasso's _Lamia_. He bowed as they
+approached, putting a hand to his forehead. After they had passed,
+they could hear him shouting at the others, and the sound of whip-blows.
+
+You make slaves out of people, and some will always be slave-drivers;
+they will bow to you, and then take it out on the others. Harkaman's
+nose was twitching as though he had a bit of rotten fish caught in
+his mustache.
+
+"We have about eight hundred of them. There were only three hundred
+that were any good for work here; we gathered the rest up at villages
+along the big river," Spasso was saying.
+
+"How do you get food for them?" Harkaman asked. "Or don't you bother?"
+
+"Oh, we gather that up all over," Valkanhayn told him. "We send
+parties out with landing craft. They'll let down on a village, run
+the locals out, gather up what's around and bring it here. Once in
+a while they put up a fight, but the best they have is a few crossbows
+and some muzzle-loading muskets. When they do, we burn the village
+and machine-gun everybody we see."
+
+"That's the stuff," Harkaman approved. "If the cow doesn't want to
+be milked, just shoot her. Of course, you don't get much milk out of
+her again, but--"
+
+The room to which their hosts guided them was at the far end of the
+hall. It had probably been a conference room or something of the
+sort, and originally it had been paneled, but the paneling had long
+ago vanished. Holes had been dug here and there in the walls, and he
+remembered having noticed that the door was gone and the metal
+groove in which it had slid had been pried out.
+
+There was a big table in the middle, and chairs and couches covered
+with colored spreads. All the furniture was handmade, cunningly
+pegged together and highly polished. On the walls hung trophies of
+weapons--thrusting-spears and throwing-spears, crossbows and quarrels,
+and a number of heavy guns, crude things, but carefully made.
+
+"Pick all this stuff up off the locals?" Harkaman asked.
+
+"Yes, we got most of it at a big town down at the forks of the
+river," Valkanhayn said. "We shook it down a couple of times. That's
+where we recruited the fellows we're using to boss the workers."
+
+Then he picked up a stick with a leather-covered knob and beat on a
+gong, bawling for wine. A voice, somewhere, replied, "Yes, master; I
+come!" and in a few moments a woman entered carrying a jug in either
+hand. She was wearing a blue bathrobe several sizes too large for
+her, instead of the poncho things the slaves in the hallway wore.
+She had dark brown hair and gray eyes; if she had not been so
+obviously frightened she would have been beautiful. She set the jugs
+on the table and brought silver cups from a chest against the wall:
+when Spasso dismissed her, she went out hastily.
+
+"I suppose it's silly to ask if you're paying these people anything
+for the work they do or for the things you take from them," Harkaman
+said. From the way the _Space Scourge_ and _Lamia_ people laughed,
+it evidently was. Harkaman shrugged. "Well, it's your planet. Make
+any kind of a mess out of it you want to."
+
+"You think we _ought_ to pay them?" Spasso was incredulous. "Damn
+bunch of savages!"
+
+"They aren't as savage as the Xochitl locals were when Haulteclere
+took it over. You've been there; you've seen what Prince Viktor does
+with them now."
+
+"We haven't got the men or equipment they have on Xochitl,"
+Valkanhayn said. "We can't afford to coddle the locals."
+
+"You can't afford not to," Harkaman told him. "You have two ships,
+here. You can only use one for raiding; the other will have to stay
+here to hold the planet. If you take them both away, the locals,
+whom you have been studiously antagonizing, will swamp whoever you
+leave behind. And if you don't leave anybody behind, what's the use
+of having a planetary base?"
+
+"Well, why don't you join us," Spasso finally came out with it.
+"With our three ships we could have a real thing, here."
+
+Harkaman looked at him inquiringly. "The gentlemen," Trask said,
+"are putting this wrongly. They mean, why don't we let them join
+us?"
+
+"Well, if you want to put it like that," Valkanhayn conceded. "We'll
+admit, your _Nemesis_ would be the big end of it. But why not? Three
+ships, we could have a real base here. Nikky Gratham's father only
+had two when he started on Jagannath, and look what the Grathams got
+there now."
+
+"Are we interested?" Harkaman asked.
+
+"Not very, I'm afraid. Of course, we've just landed; Tanith may
+have great possibilities. Suppose we reserve decision for a while
+and look around a little."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were stars in the sky, and, for good measure, a sliver of moon
+on the western horizon. It was only a small moon, but it was close.
+He walked to the edge of the landing stage, and Elaine was walking
+with him. The noise from inside, where the _Nemesis_ crew were
+feasting with those of the _Lamia_ and _Space Scourge_, grew fainter.
+To the south, a star moved; one of the pinnaces they had left on
+off-planet watch. There was firelight far below, and he could hear
+singing. Suddenly he realized that it was the poor devils of locals
+whom Valkanhayn and Spasso had enslaved. Elaine went away quickly.
+
+"Have your fill of Space Viking glamour, Lucas?"
+
+He turned. It was Baron Rathmore, who had come along to serve for a
+year or so and then hitch a ride home from some base planet and cash
+in politically on having been with Lucas Trask.
+
+"For the moment. I'm told that this lot aren't typical."
+
+"I hope not. They're a pack of sadistic brutes, and piggish along
+with it."
+
+"Well, brutality and bad manners I can condone, but Spasso and
+Valkanhayn are a pair of ignominious little crooks, and stupid along
+with it. If Andray Dunnan had gotten here ahead of us, he might have
+done one good thing in his wretched life. I can't understand why he
+didn't come here."
+
+"I think he still will," Rathmore said. "I knew him and I knew
+Nevil Ormm. Ormm's ambitious, and Dunnan is insanely vindictive--"
+He broke off with a sour laugh. "I'm telling _you_ that!"
+
+"Why didn't he come here directly, then?"
+
+"Maybe he doesn't want a base on Tanith. That would be something
+constructive; Dunnan's a destroyer. I think he took that cargo of
+equipment somewhere and sold it. I think he'll wait till he's fairly
+sure the other ship is finished. Then he'll come in and shoot the
+place up, the way--" He bit that off abruptly.
+
+"The way he did my wedding; I think of it all the time."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next morning, he and Harkaman took an aircar and went to look
+at the city at the forks of the river. It was completely new, in
+the sense that it had been built since the collapse of Federation
+civilization and the loss of civilized technologies. It was huddled
+on a long, irregularly triangular mound, evidently to raise it above
+flood-level. Generations of labor must have gone into it. To the
+eyes of a civilization using contragravity and powered equipment it
+wasn't at all impressive. Fifty to a hundred men with adequate
+equipment could have gotten the thing up in a summer. It was only
+by forcing himself to think in terms of spadeful after spadeful of
+earth, cartload after cartload creaking behind straining beasts,
+timber after timber cut with axes and dressed with adzes, stone
+after stone and brick after brick, that he could appreciate it. They
+even had it walled, with a palisade of tree-trunks behind which
+earth and rocks had been banked, and along the river were docks,
+at which boats were moored. The locals simply called it Tradetown.
+
+As they approached, a big gong began booming, and a white puff of
+smoke was followed by the thud of a signal-gun. The boats, long
+canoe-like craft and round-bowed, many-oared barges, put out hastily
+into the river; through binoculars they could see people scattering
+from the surrounding fields, driving cattle ahead of them. By the
+time they were over the city, nobody was in sight. They seemed
+to have developed a pretty fair air-raid warning system in the
+nine-hundred-odd hours in which they had been exposed to the
+figurative mercies of Boake Valkanhayn and Garvan Spasso. It hadn't
+saved them entirely; a section of the city had been burned, and
+there were evidences of shelling. Light chemical-explosive stuff;
+this city was too good a cow for even those two to kill before the
+milking was over.
+
+They circled slowly over it at a thousand feet. When they turned
+away, black smoke began rising from what might have been pottery
+works or brick-kilns on the outskirts; something resinous had
+evidently been fed to the fires. Other columns of black smoke began
+rising across the countryside on both sides of the river.
+
+"You know, these people are civilized, if you don't limit the term
+to contragravity and nuclear energy," Harkaman said. "They have
+gunpowder, for one thing, and I can think of some rather impressive
+Old Terran civilizations that didn't have that much. They have an
+organized society, and anybody who has that is starting toward
+civilization."
+
+"I hate to think of what'll happen to this planet if Spasso and
+Valkanhayn stay here long."
+
+"Might be a good thing, in the long run. Good things in the long run
+are often tough while they're happening. I know what'll happen to
+Spasso and Valkanhayn, though. They'll start decivilizing, themselves.
+They'll stay here for a while, and when they need something they
+can't take from the locals they'll go chicken-stealing after it,
+but most of the time they'll stay here lording it over their slaves,
+and finally their ships will wear out and they won't be able to fix
+them. Then, some time, the locals'll jump them when they aren't
+watching and wipe them out. But in the meantime, the locals'll
+learn a lot from them."
+
+They turned the aircar west again along the river. They looked at a
+few villages. One or two dated from the Federation period; they had
+been plantations before whatever it was had happened. More had been
+built within the past five centuries. A couple had recently been
+destroyed, in punishment for the crime of self-defense.
+
+"You know," he said, at length, "I'm going to do everybody a favor.
+I'm going to let Spasso and Valkanhayn persuade me to take this
+planet away from them."
+
+Harkaman, who was piloting, turned sharply. "You crazy or something?"
+
+"'When somebody makes a statement you don't understand, don't tell
+him he's crazy. Ask him what he means.' Who said that?"
+
+"On target," Harkaman grinned. "'What _do_ you mean, Lord Trask?'"
+
+"I can't catch Dunnan by pursuit; I'll have to get him by
+interception. You know the source of that quotation, too. This looks
+to me like a good place to intercept him. When he learns I have a
+base here, he'll hit it, sooner or later. And even if he doesn't,
+we can pick up more information on him, when ships start coming in
+here, than we would batting around all over the Old Federation."
+
+Harkaman considered for a moment, then nodded. "Yes, if we could set
+up a base like Nergal or Xochitl," he agreed. "There'll be four or
+five ships, Space Vikings, traders, Gilgameshers and so on, on
+either of those planets all the time. If we had the cargo Dunnan
+took to space in the _Enterprise_, we could start a base like that.
+But we haven't anything near what we need, and you know what Spasso
+and Valkanhayn have."
+
+"We can get it from Gram. As it stands, the investors in the Tanith
+Adventure, from Duke Angus down, lost everything they put into it.
+If they're willing to throw some good money after bad, they can get
+it back, and a handsome profit to boot. And there ought to be
+planets above the rowboat and ox-cart level not too far away that
+could be raided for a lot of things we'd need."
+
+"That's right; I know of half a dozen within five hundred light-years.
+They won't be the kind Spasso and Valkanhayn are in the habit of
+raiding, though. And besides machinery, we can get gold, and valuable
+merchandise that could be sold on Gram. And if we could make a go of
+it, you'd go farther hunting Dunnan by sitting here on Tanith than by
+going looking for him. That was the way we used to hunt marsh pigs on
+Colada, when I was a kid; just find a good place and sit down and wait."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They had Valkanhayn and Spasso aboard the _Nemesis_ for dinner; it
+didn't take much guiding to keep the conversation on the subject of
+Tanith and its resources, advantages and possibilities. Finally,
+when they had reached brandy and coffee, Trask said idly:
+
+"I believe, together, we could really make something out of this planet."
+
+"That's what we've been telling you, all along," Spasso broke in
+eagerly. "This is a wonderful planet--"
+
+"It could be. All it has now is possibilities. We'd need a
+spaceport, for one thing."
+
+"Well, what's this, here?" Valkanhayn wanted to know.
+
+"It was a spaceport," Harkaman told him. "It could be one again. And
+we'd need a shipyard, capable of any kind of heavy repair work.
+Capable of building a complete ship, in fact. I never saw a ship
+come into a Viking base planet with any kind of a cargo worth
+dickering over that hadn't taken some damage getting it. Prince
+Viktor of Xochitl makes a good half of his money on ship repairs,
+and so do Nikky Gratham on Jagannath and the Everrards on Hoth."
+
+"And engine works, hyperdrive, normal space and pseudograv," Trask
+added. "And a steel mill, and a collapsed-matter plant. And
+robotic-equipment works, and--"
+
+"Oh, that's out of all reason!" Valkanhayn cried. "It would take
+twenty trips with a ship the size of this one to get all that stuff
+here, and how'd we ever be able to pay for it?"
+
+"That's the sort of base Duke Angus of Wardshaven planned. The
+_Enterprise_, practically a duplicate of the _Nemesis_, carried
+everything that would be needed to get it started, when she was
+pirated."
+
+"When she was--?"
+
+"Now you're going to have to tell the gentlemen the truth,"
+Harkaman chuckled.
+
+"I intend to." He laid his cigar down, sipped some of his brandy,
+and explained about Duke Angus' Tanith adventure. "It was part of a
+larger plan; Angus wanted to gain economic supremacy for Wardshaven
+to forward his political ambitions. It was, however, an entirely
+practical business proposition. I was opposed to it, because I
+thought it would be too good a proposition for Tanith and work to
+the disadvantage of the home planet in the end." He told them about
+the _Enterprise_, and the cargo of industrial and construction
+equipment she carried, and then told them how Andray Dunnan had
+pirated her.
+
+"That wouldn't have annoyed me at all; I had no money invested in
+the project. What did annoy me, to put it mildly, was that just
+before he took the ship out, Dunnan shot up my wedding, wounded me
+and my father-in-law, and killed the lady to whom I had been married
+for less than half an hour. I fitted out this ship at my own
+expense, took on Captain Harkaman, who had been left without a
+command when the _Enterprise_ was pirated, and came out here to
+hunt Dunnan down and kill him. I believe that I can do that best by
+establishing a base on Tanith myself. The base will have to be
+operated at a profit, or it can't be operated at all." He picked up
+the cigar again and puffed slowly. "I am inviting you gentlemen to
+join me as partners."
+
+"Well, you still haven't told us how we're going to get the money to
+finance it," Spasso insisted.
+
+"The Duke of Wardshaven, and the others who invested in the original
+Tanith adventure will put it up. It's the only way they can recover
+what they lost on the _Enterprise_."
+
+"But then, this Duke of Wardshaven will be running it, not us,"
+Valkanhayn objected.
+
+"The Duke of Wardshaven," Harkaman reminded him, "is on Gram. We are
+here on Tanith. There are three thousand light-years between."
+
+That seemed a satisfactory answer. Spasso, however, wanted to know
+who would run things here on Tanith.
+
+"We'll have to hold a meeting of all three crews," he began.
+
+"We will do nothing of the kind," Trask told him. "I will be running
+things here on Tanith. You people may allow your orders to be
+debated and voted on, but I don't. You will inform your respective
+crews to that effect. Any orders you give them in my name will be
+obeyed without argument."
+
+"I don't know how the men'll take that," Valkanhayn said.
+
+"I know how they'll take it if they're smart," Harkaman told him.
+"And I know what'll happen if they aren't. I know how you've been
+running your ships, or how your ships' crews have been running you.
+Well, we don't do it that way. Lucas Trask is owner, and I'm
+captain. I obey his orders on what's to be done, and everybody else
+obeys mine on how to do it."
+
+Spasso looked at Valkanhayn, then shrugged. "That's how the man
+wants it, Boake. You want to give him an argument? I don't."
+
+"The first order," Trask said, "is that these people you have
+working here are to be paid. They are not to be beaten by these
+plug-uglies you have guarding them. If any of them want to leave,
+they may do so; they will be given presents and furnished
+transportation home. Those who wish to stay will be issued rations,
+furnished with clothing and bedding and so on as they need it, and
+paid wages. We'll work out some kind of a pay-token system and set
+up a commissary where they can buy things."
+
+Disks of plastic or titanium or something, stamped and
+uncounterfeitable. Get Alvyn Karffard to see about that. Organize
+work-gangs, and promote the best and most intelligent to foremen.
+And those guards could be taken in hand by some ground-fighter
+sergeant and given Sword-World weapons and tactical training; use
+them to train others; they'd need a sepoy army of some sort. Even
+the best of good will is no substitute for armed force,
+conspicuously displayed and unhesitatingly used when necessary.
+
+"And there'll be no more of this raiding villages for food or
+anything else. We will pay for anything we get from any of the
+locals."
+
+"We'll have trouble about that," Valkanhayn predicted. "Our men
+think anything a local has belongs to anybody who can take it."
+
+"So do I," Harkaman said. "On a planet I'm raiding. This is our
+planet, and our locals. We don't raid our own planet or our own
+people. You'll just have to teach them that."
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+It took Valkanhayn and Spasso more time and argument to convince
+their crews than Trask thought necessary. Harkaman seemed satisfied,
+and so was Baron Rathmore, the Wardshaven politician.
+
+"It's like talking a lot of uncommitted small landholders into
+taking somebody's livery-and-maintenance," the latter said. "You
+can't use too much pressure; make them think it's their own idea."
+
+There were meetings of both crews, with heated arguments; Baron
+Rathmore made frequent speeches, while Lord Trask of Tanith and
+Admiral Harkaman--the titles were Rathmore's suggestion--remained
+loftily aloof. On both ships, everybody owned everything in common,
+which meant that nobody owned anything. They had taken over Tanith
+on the same basis of diffused ownership, and nobody in either crew
+was quite stupid enough to think that they could do anything with
+the planet by themselves. By joining the _Nemesis_, it appeared that
+they were getting something for nothing. In the end, they voted to
+place themselves under the authority of Lord Trask and Admiral
+Harkaman. After all, Tanith would be a feudal lordship, and the
+three ships together a fleet.
+
+Admiral Harkaman's first act of authority was to order a general
+inspection of fleet units. He wasn't shocked by the condition of the
+two ships, but that was only because he had expected much worse. They
+were spaceworthy; after all, they had gotten here from Hoth under
+their own power. They were only combat-worthy if the combat weren't
+too severe. His original estimate that the _Nemesis_ could have
+knocked both of them to pieces was, if anything, over-conservative.
+The engines were only in fair shape, and the armament was bad.
+
+"We aren't going to spend our time sitting here on Tanith," he told
+the two captains. "This planet is a raiding base, and 'raiding' is
+the operative word. And we are not going to raid easy planets. A
+planet that can be raided with impunity isn't worth the time it takes
+getting to it. We are going to have to fight on every planet we hit,
+and I am not going to jeopardize the lives of the men under me,
+which includes your crews as well as mine, because of under-powered
+and under-armed ships."
+
+Spasso tried to argue. "We've been getting along."
+
+Harkaman cursed. "Yes. I know how you've been getting along;
+chicken-stealing on planets like Set and Xipototec and Melkarth. Not
+making enough to cover maintenance expenses; that's why your ship's
+in the shape she is. Well, those days are over. Both ships ought to
+have a full overhaul, but we'll have to skip that till we have a
+shipyard of our own. But I will insist, at least, that your guns and
+launchers are in order. And your detection equipment; you didn't get
+a fix on the _Nemesis_ till we were less than twenty thousand miles
+off-planet."
+
+"We had better get the _Lamia_ in condition first," Trask said. "We
+can put her on off-planet watch, instead of that pair of pinnaces."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Work on the _Lamia_ started the next day, and considerable friction-heat
+was generated between her officers and the engineers sent over from
+the _Nemesis_. Baron Rathmore went aboard, and came back laughing.
+
+"You know how that ship's run?" he asked. "There's a sort of soviet
+of officers; chief engineer, exec, guns-and-missiles, astrogator and
+so on. Spasso's just an animated ventriloquist's dummy. I talked to
+all of them. None of them can pin me down to anything, but they
+think we're going to heave Spasso out of command and appoint one of
+them, and each one thinks he'll be it. I don't know how long that'll
+last, it's a string-and-tape job like the one we're having to do on
+the ship. It'll hold till we get something better."
+
+"We'll have to get rid of Spasso," Harkaman agreed. "I think we'll
+put one of our own people in his place. Valkanhayn can stay in
+command of the _Space Scourge_; he's a spaceman. But Spasso's no
+good for anything."
+
+The local problem was complicated, too. The locals spoke Lingua
+Terra of a sort, like every descendant of the race that had gone out
+from the Sol system in the Third Century, but it was a barely
+comprehensible sort. On civilized planets, the language had been
+frozen unalterably in microbooks and voice tapes. But microbooks can
+only be read and sound tapes heard with the aid of electricity, and
+Tanith had lost that long ago.
+
+Most of the people Spasso and Valkanhayn had kidnaped and enslaved
+came from villages within a radius of five hundred miles. About half
+of them wanted to be repatriated; they were given gifts of knives,
+tools, blankets, and bits of metal which seemed to be the chief
+standard of value and medium of exchange, and shipped home. Finding
+their proper villages was not easy. At each such village, the news
+was spread that the Space Vikings would hereafter pay for what they
+received.
+
+The _Lamia_ was overhauled as rapidly as possible. She was still
+far from being a good ship, but she was much closer to being one than
+before. She was fitted with the best detection equipment that could
+be assembled, and put on orbit; Alvyn Karffard took command of her,
+with some of Spasso's officers, some of Valkanhayn's, and a few from
+the _Nemesis_. Harkaman was intending to use her for retraining of
+all the _Lamia_ and _Space Scourge_ officers, and rotated them back
+and forth.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The labor guards, a score in number, were relieved of their duties,
+issued Sword-World firearms, and given intensive training. The trade
+tokens, stamps of colored plastic, were introduced, and a store was
+set up where they could be exchanged for Sword-World items. After a
+while, it dawned on the locals that the tokens could also be used
+for trading among themselves; money seemed to have been one of the
+adjuncts of civilization that had been lost along Tanith's downward
+path. A few of them were able to use contragravity hand-lifters and
+hand-towed lifter-skids; several were even learning to operate
+things like bulldozers, at least to the extent of knowing which
+lever or button did what. Give them a little time, Trask thought,
+watching a gang at work down on the spaceport floor. It won't be
+many years before half of them will be piloting aircars.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+As soon as the _Lamia_ was on orbital watch, the _Space Scourge_ was
+set down at the spaceport and work started on her. It was decided
+that Valkanhayn would take her to Gram; enough _Nemesis_ people
+would go along to insure good faith on his part, and to talk to Duke
+Angus and the Tanith investors. Baron Rathmore, and Paytrik Morland,
+and several other Wardshaven gentlemen-adventurers for the latter
+function; Alvyn Karffard to act as Valkanhayn's exec, with private
+orders to supersede him in command if necessary, and Guatt Kirbey
+to do the astrogating.
+
+"We'll have to take the _Nemesis_ and the _Space Scourge_ out,
+first, and make a big raid," Harkaman said. "We can't send the
+_Space Scourge_ back to Gram empty. When Baron Rathmore and Lord
+Valpry and the rest of them talk to Duke Angus and the Tanith
+investors, they'll have to have a lot more than some travel films
+of Tanith. They'll have to be able to show that Tanith is producing.
+We ought to have a little money of our own to invest, too."
+
+"But, Otto; both ships?" That worried Trask. "Suppose Dunnan comes
+and finds nobody here but Spasso and the _Lamia_?"
+
+"Chance we'll have to take. Personally, I think we have a year to a
+year and a half before Dunnan shows up here. I know, we were fooled
+trying to guess what he'd do before. But the sort of raid I have in
+mind, we'll need two ships, and in any case, I don't want to leave
+both those ships here while we're gone, even if you do."
+
+"When it comes to that, I don't think I do, either. But we can't
+trust Spasso here alone, can we?"
+
+"We'll leave enough of our people to make sure. We'll leave
+Alvyn--that'll mean a lot of work for me that he'd otherwise do,
+on the ship. And Baron Rathmore, and young Valpry, and the men
+who've been training our sepoys. We can shuffle things around and
+leave some of Valkanhayn's men in place of some of Spasso's. We might
+even talk Spasso into going along. That'll mean having to endure him
+at our table, but it would be wise."
+
+"Have you picked a place to raid?"
+
+"Three of them. First, Khepera. That's only thirty light-years from
+here. That won't amount to much; just chicken-stealing. It'll give
+our green hands some relatively safe combat-training, and it'll give
+us some idea of how Spasso's and Valkanhayn's people behave, and
+give them confidence for the next job."
+
+"And then?"
+
+"Amaterasu. My information about Amaterasu is about twenty years
+old. A lot of things can happen in twenty years. All I know of it--I
+was never there myself--is it's fairly civilized--about like Terra
+just before the beginning of the Atomic Era. No nuclear energy, they
+lost that, and of course nothing beyond it, but they have hydroelectric
+and solarelectric power, and nonnuclear jet aircraft, and some very good
+chemical-explosive weapons, which they use very freely on each other.
+It was last known to have been raided by a ship from Excalibur
+twenty years ago."
+
+"That sounds promising. And the third planet?"
+
+"Beowulf. We won't take enough damage on Amaterasu to make any
+difference there, but if we saved Amaterasu for last, we might
+be needing too many repairs."
+
+"It's like that?"
+
+"Yes. They have nuclear energy. I don't think it would be wise to
+mention Beowulf to Captains Spasso and Valkanhayn. Wait till we've
+hit Khepera and Amaterasu. They may be feeling like heroes, then."
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+Khepera left a bad taste in Trask's mouth. He was still tasting it
+when the colored turbulence died out of the screen and left the gray
+nothingness of hyperspace. Garvan Spasso--they had had no trouble in
+inducing him to come along--was staring avidly at the screen as
+though he could still see the ravished planet they had left.
+
+"That was a good one; that was a good one!" he was crowing. He'd
+said that a dozen times since they had lifted out. "Three cities in
+five days, and all the stuff we gathered up around them. We took
+over two million stellars."
+
+And did ten times as much damage getting it, and there was no scale
+of values by which to compute the death and suffering.
+
+"Knock it off, Spasso. You said that before."
+
+There was a time when he wouldn't have spoken to the fellow, or
+anybody else, like that. Gresham's law, extended: Bad manners drive
+out good manners. Spasso turned on him indignantly.
+
+"Who do you think you are--?"
+
+"He thinks he's Lord Trask of Tanith," Harkaman said. "He's right,
+too; he is." He looked searchingly at Trask for a moment, then
+turned back to Spasso. "I'm just as tired as he is of hearing you
+pop your mouth about a lousy two million stellars. Nearer a million
+and a half, but two million's nothing to pop about. Maybe it would
+be for the _Lamia_, but we have a three-ship fleet and a planetary
+base to meet expenses on. Out of this raid, a ground-fighter or an
+able spaceman will get a hundred and fifty stellars. We'll get about
+a thousand, ourselves. How long do you think we can stay in business
+doing this kind of chicken-stealing."
+
+"You call this chicken-stealing?"
+
+"I call it chicken-stealing, and so'll you before we get back to
+Tanith. If you live that long."
+
+For a moment, Spasso was still affronted. Then, temporarily, his
+vulpine face showed avaricious hope, and then apprehension.
+Evidently he knew Otto Harkaman's reputation, and some of the things
+Harkaman had done weren't his idea of an easy way to make money.
+
+Khepera had been easy; the locals hadn't had anything to fight with.
+Small arms, and light cannon which hadn't been able to fire more
+than a few rounds. Wherever they had attempted resistance, the
+combat cars had swooped in, dropping bombs and firing machine guns
+and auto-cannon. Yet they had fought, bitterly and hopelessly--just
+as he would have, defending Traskon.
+
+Trask busied himself getting coffee and a cigarette from one of the
+robots. When he looked up, Spasso had gone away, and Harkaman was
+sitting on the edge of the desk, loading his short pipe.
+
+"Well, you saw the elephant, Lucas," Harkaman said. "You don't seem
+to have liked it."
+
+"Elephant?"
+
+"Old Terran expression I read somewhere. All I know is that an
+elephant was an animal about the size of one of your Gram megatheres.
+The expression means, experiencing something for the first time
+which makes a great impression. Elephants must have been something
+to see. This was your first Viking raid. You've seen it, now."
+
+He'd been in combat before; he'd led the fighting-men of Traskon
+during the boundary dispute with Baron Manniwel, and there were
+always bandits and cattle rustlers. He'd thought it would be like
+that. He remembered, five days, or was it five ages, ago, his
+excited anticipation as the city grew and spread in the screen and
+the _Nemesis_ came dropping down toward it. The pinnaces, his four
+and the two from the _Space Scourge_, had gone spiraling out a
+hundred miles beyond the city; the _Space Scourge_ had gone into
+a tighter circle twenty miles from its center; the _Nemesis_ had
+continued her relentless descent until she was ten miles from the
+ground, before she began spewing out landing craft, and combat cars,
+and the little egg-shaped one-man air-cavalry mounts. It had been
+thrilling. Everything had gone perfectly; not even Valkanhayn's gang
+had goofed.
+
+Then the screenviews had begun coming in. The brief and hopeless
+fight in the city. He could still see that silly little field gun,
+it must have been around seventy or eighty millimeter, on a
+high-wheeled carriage, drawn by six shaggy, bandy-legged beasts.
+They had gotten it unlimbered and were trying to get it on a target
+when a rocket from an aircar landed directly under the muzzle. Gun,
+caisson, crew, even the draft team fifty yards behind, had simply
+vanished.
+
+Or the little company, some of them women, trying to defend the top
+of a tall and half-ruinous building with rifles and pistols. One
+air-cavalryman wiped them all out with his machine guns.
+
+"They don't have a chance," he'd said, half-sick. "But they keep on
+fighting."
+
+"Yes; stupid of them, isn't it?" Harkaman, beside him, had said.
+
+"What would you do in their place?"
+
+"Fight. Try to kill as many Space Vikings as I could before they got
+me. Terro-humans are all stupid like that. That's why we're human."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If the taking of the city had been a massacre, the sack that had
+followed had been a man-made Hell. He had gone down, along with
+Harkaman, while the fighting, if it could be so called, was still
+going on. Harkaman had suggested that the men ought to see him
+moving about among them; for his own part, he had felt a compulsion
+to share their guilt.
+
+He and Sir Paytrik Morland had been on foot together in one of the
+big hollow buildings that had stood since Khepera had been a Member
+Republic of the Terran Federation. The air was acrid with smoke,
+powder smoke and the smoke of burning. It was surprising, how much
+would burn, in this city of concrete and vitrified stone. It was
+surprising, too, how well-kept everything was, at least on the
+ground level. These people had taken pride in their city.
+
+They found themselves alone, in a great empty hallway; the noise and
+horror of the sack had moved away from them, or they from it, and
+then, when they entered a side hall, they saw a man, one of the
+locals, squatting on the floor with the body of a woman cradled on
+his lap. She was dead, half her head had been blown off, but he was
+clasping her tightly, her blood staining his shirt, and sobbing
+heartbrokenly. A carbine lay forgotten on the floor beside him.
+
+"Poor devil," Morland said, and started forward.
+
+"No."
+
+Trask stopped him with his left hand. With his right, he drew his
+pistol and shot the man dead. Morland was horrified.
+
+"Great Satan, Lucas! Why did you do that?"
+
+"I wish Andray Dunnan had done that for me." He thumbed the safety
+on and holstered the pistol. "None of this would be happening if
+he had. How many more happinesses do you think we've smashed here
+today? And we don't even have Dunnan's excuse of madness."
+
+The next morning, with everything of value collected and sent
+aboard, they had started cross-country for five hundred miles to
+another city, the first hundred over a countryside asmoke from
+burning villages Valkanhayn's men had pillaged the night before.
+There was no warning; Khepera had lost electricity and radio and
+telegraph, and the spread of news was at the speed of one of the
+beasts the locals insisted on calling horses. By midafternoon, they
+had finished with that city. It had been as bad as the first one.
+
+One thing, it was the center of a considerable cattle country. The
+cattle were native to the planet, heavy-bodied unicorns the size of
+a Gram bisonoid or one of the slightly mutated Terran carabaos on
+Tanith, with long hair like a Terran yak. He had detailed a dozen of
+the _Nemesis_ ground-fighters who had been vaqueros on his Traskon
+ranches to collect a score of cows and four likely bulls, with
+enough fodder to last them on the voyage. The odds were strongly
+against any of them living to acclimate themselves to Tanith, but
+if they did, they might prove to be one of the most valuable pieces
+of loot from Khepera.
+
+The third city was at the forks of a river, like Tradetown on
+Tanith. Unlike it, this was a real metropolis. They should have
+gone there first of all. They spent two days systematically pillaging
+it. The Kheperans carried on considerable river-traffic, with
+stern-wheel steamboats, and the waterfront was lined with warehouses
+crammed with every sort of merchandise. Even better, the Kheperans
+had money, and for the most part it was gold specie, and the bank
+vaults were full of it.
+
+Unfortunately, the city had been built since the fall of the
+Federation and the climb up from the barbarism that had followed,
+and a great deal of it was of wood. Fires started almost at once,
+and it was almost completely on fire by the end of the second day.
+It had been visible in the telescopic screen even after they were
+out of atmosphere, a black smear until the turning planet carried
+it into darkness and then a lurid glow.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"It was a filthy business."
+
+Harkaman nodded. "Robbery and murder always are. You don't have to
+ask me who said that Space Vikings are professional robbers and
+murderers, but who was it said that he didn't care how many planets
+were raided and how many innocents massacred in the Old Federation?"
+
+"A dead man. Lucas Trask of Traskon."
+
+"You wish, now, that you'd kept Traskon and stayed on Gram?"
+
+"No. If I had, I'd have spent every hour wishing I was doing what
+I'm doing now. I can get used to this, I suppose."
+
+"I think you will. At least, you kept your rations down. I didn't on
+my first raid, and had bad dreams about it for a year." He gave his
+coffee cup back to the robot and got to his feet. "Get a little
+rest, for a couple of hours. Then draw some alcodote-vitamin pills
+from the medic. As soon as things are secured, there'll be parties
+all over the ship, and we'll be expected to look in on every one of
+them, have a drink, and say 'Well done, boys.'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Elaine came to him, while he was resting. She looked at him in
+horror, and he tried to hide his face from her, and then realized
+that he was trying to hide it from himself.
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+They came straight down on Eglonsby, on Amaterasu, the _Nemesis_
+and the _Space Scourge_ side by side. The radar had picked them up
+at point-five light-seconds; by this time the whole planet knew
+they were coming, and nobody was wondering why. Paul Koreff was
+monitoring at least twenty radio stations, assigning somebody to
+each one as it was identified. What was coming in was uniformly
+excited, some panicky, and all in fairly standard Lingua Terra.
+
+Garvan Spasso was perturbed. So, in the communication screen from
+the _Space Scourge_, was Boake Valkanhayn.
+
+"They got radio, and they got radar," he clamored.
+
+"Well, so what?" Harkaman asked. "They had radio and radar twenty
+years ago, when Rock Morgan was here in the _Coalsack_. But they
+don't have nuclear energy, do they?"
+
+"Well, no. I'm picking up a lot of industrial electrical discharge,
+but nothing nuclear."
+
+"All right. A man with a club can lick a man with his fists. A man
+with a gun can lick half a dozen with clubs. And two ships with
+nuclear weapons can lick a whole planet without them. Think it's
+time, Lucas?"
+
+He nodded. "Paul, can you cut in on that Eglonsby station yet?"
+
+"What are you going to do?" Valkanhayn wanted to know, against it
+in advance.
+
+"Summon them to surrender. If they don't, we will drop a hellburner,
+and then we will pick out another city and summon it to surrender.
+I don't think the second one will refuse. If we are going to be
+murderers, we'll do it right, this time."
+
+Valkanhayn was aghast, probably at the idea of burning an unlooted
+city. Spasso was sputtering something about, "... Teach the dirty
+Neobarbs a lesson--" Koreff told him he was switched on. He picked
+up a hand-phone.
+
+"Space Vikings _Nemesis_ and _Space Scourge_, calling the city of
+Eglonsby. Space Vikings...."
+
+He repeated it for over a minute; there was no reply.
+
+"Vann," he called Guns-and-Missiles. "A subcrit display job, about
+four miles over the city."
+
+He laid the phone down and looked to the underside viewscreen. A
+little later, a silvery shape dropped away from the ship's south
+pole. The telescopic screen went off, and the unmagnified screen
+darkened as the filters went on. Valkanhayn, aboard the other ship,
+was shouting a warning about his own screens. The only unfiltered
+screen aboard the _Nemesis_ was the one tuned to the falling
+missile. The city of Eglonsby rushed upward in it, and then it went
+suddenly dark. There was an orange-yellow blaze in the other
+screens. After a while, the filters went off and the telescopic
+screen went on again. He picked up the phone.
+
+"Space Vikings calling Eglonsby; this is your last warning.
+Communicate at once."
+
+Less than a minute later, a voice came out of one of the speakers:
+
+"Eglonsby calling Space Vikings. Your bomb has done great damage.
+Will you hold your fire until somebody in authority can communicate
+with you? This is the chief operator at the central State telecast
+station; I have no authority to say anything to you, or discuss
+anything."
+
+"Oh, good, that sounds like a dictatorship," Harkaman was saying.
+"Grab the dictator and shove a pistol in his face and you have
+everything."
+
+"There is nothing to discuss. Get somebody who has authority to
+surrender the city to us. If this is not done within the hour,
+the city and everybody in it will be obliterated."
+
+Only minutes later, a new voice said:
+
+"This is Gunsalis Jan, secretary to Pedrosan Pedro, President of
+the Council of Syndics. We will switch President Pedrosan over as
+soon as he can speak directly to the personage in supreme command
+of your ships."
+
+"That is myself; switch him to me at once."
+
+After a delay of less than fifteen seconds they had President
+Pedrosan Pedro.
+
+"We are prepared to resist, but we realize what this would cost in
+lives and destruction of property," he began.
+
+"You don't begin to. Do you know anything about nuclear weapons?"
+
+"From history; we have no nuclear power of any sort. We can find no
+fissionables on this planet."
+
+"The cost, as you put it, would be everything and everybody in
+Eglonsby and for a radius of almost a hundred miles. Are you still
+prepared to resist?"
+
+The President of the Council of Syndics wasn't and said so. Trask
+asked him how much authority his position gave him.
+
+"I have all powers in any emergency. I think," the voice added
+tonelessly, "that this is an emergency. The council will
+automatically ratify any decision I make."
+
+Harkaman depressed a button in front of him. "What I said;
+dictatorship, with parliamentary false front."
+
+"If he isn't a false-front dictator for some oligarchy." He motioned
+to Harkaman to take his thumb off the button. "How large is this Council?"
+
+"Sixteen, elected by the Syndicates they represent. There is the
+Syndicate of Labor, the Syndicate of Manufacturers, the Syndicate
+of Small Businesses, the...."
+
+"Corporate State, First Century Pre-Atomic on Terra. Benny the Moose,"
+Harkaman said. "Let's all go down and talk to them."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+When they were sure that the public had been warned to make no
+resistance, the _Nemesis_ went down to two miles, bulking over
+the center of the city. The buildings were low by the standards of
+a contragravity-using people, the highest barely a thousand feet
+and few over five hundred, and they were more closely set than
+Sword-Worlders were accustomed to, with broad roadways between. In
+several places there were queer arrangements of crossed roadways,
+apparently leading nowhere. Harkaman laughed when he saw them.
+
+"Airstrips. I've seen them on other planets where they've lost
+contragravity. For winged aircraft powered by chemical fuel. I hope
+we have time for me to look around, here. I'll bet they even have
+railroads here."
+
+The "great damage" caused by the bomb was about equal to the effect
+of a medium hurricane; he had seen worse from high winds at Traskon.
+Mostly it had been moral, which had been the kind intended.
+
+They met President Pedrosan and the council of Syndics in a spacious
+and well-furnished chamber near the top of one of the medium-high
+buildings. Valkanhayn was surprised; in a loud aside he considered
+that these people must be almost civilized. They were introduced.
+Amaterasuan surnames preceded personal names, which hinted at a
+culture and a political organization making much use of registration
+by alphabetical list. They all wore garments which had the indefinable
+but unmistakable appearance of uniforms. When they had all seated
+themselves at a large oval table, Harkaman drew his pistol and used
+the butt for a gavel.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Lord Trask, will you deal with these people directly?" he asked,
+stiffly formal.
+
+"Certainly, Admiral." He spoke to the President, ignoring the
+others. "We want it understood that we control this city, and we
+expect complete submission. As long as you remain submissive to us,
+we will do no damage beyond removal of the things we wish to take
+from it, and there will be no violence to any of your people, or any
+indiscriminate vandalism. This visit we are paying you will cost you
+heavily, make no mistake about that, but whatever the cost, it will
+be a cheap price for avoiding what we might otherwise do."
+
+The President and the Syndics exchanged relieved glances. Let
+the taxpayers worry about the cost; they'd come out of it with
+whole skins.
+
+"You understand, we want maximum value and minimum bulk," he
+continued. "Jewels, objects of art, furs, the better grades of
+luxury goods of all kinds. Rare-element metals. And monetary metals,
+gold and platinum. You have a metallic-based currency, I suppose?"
+
+"Oh, no!" President Pedrosan was slightly scandalized. "Our currency
+is based on services to society. Our monetary unit is simply called
+a credit."
+
+Harkaman snorted impolitely. Evidently he'd seen economic systems like
+that before. Trask wanted to know if they used gold or platinum at all.
+
+"Gold, to some extent, for jewelry." Evidently they weren't complete
+economic puritans. "And platinum in industry, of course."
+
+"If they want gold, they should have raided Stolgoland," one of the
+Syndics said. "They have a gold-standard currency." From the way he
+said it, he might have been accusing them of eating with their
+fingers, and possibly of eating their own young.
+
+"I know, the maps we're using for this planet are a few centuries old;
+Stolgoland doesn't seem to appear on them."
+
+"I wish it didn't appear on ours, either." That was General Dagro
+Ector, Syndic for State Protection.
+
+"It would have been a good thing for this whole planet if you'd
+decided to raid them instead of us," somebody else said.
+
+"It isn't too late for these gentlemen to make that decision,"
+Pedrosan said. "I gather that gold is a monetary metal among your
+people?" When Trask nodded, he continued: "It is also the basis of
+the Stolgonian currency. The actual currency is paper, theoretically
+redeemable in gold. In actuality, the circulation of gold has been
+prohibited, and the entire gold wealth of the nation is concentrated
+in vaults at three depositories. We know exactly where they are."
+
+"You begin to interest me, President Pedrosan."
+
+"I do? Well, you have two large spaceships and six smaller craft.
+You have nuclear weapons, something nobody on this planet has. You
+have contragravity, something that is hardly more than a legend
+here. On the other hand, we have a million and a half ground-troops,
+jet aircraft, armored ground-vehicles, and chemical weapons. If you
+will undertake to attack Stolgoland, we will place this entire force
+at your disposal; General Dagro will command them as you direct. All
+that we ask is that, when you have loaded the gold hoards of
+Stolgoland aboard your ships, you will leave our troops in
+possession of the country."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That was all there was to that meeting. There was a second one; only
+Trask, Harkaman and Sir Paytrik Morland represented the Space Vikings,
+and the Eglonsby government was represented by President Pedrosan
+and General Dagro. They met more intimately, in a smaller and more
+luxurious room in the same building.
+
+"If you're going to declare war on Stolgoland, you'd better get
+along with it," Morland advised.
+
+"What?" Pedrosan seemed to have only the vaguest idea of what he was
+talking about. "You mean, warn them? Certainly not. We will attack
+them by surprise. It will be nothing but plain self-defense," he
+added righteously. "The oligarchic capitalists of Stolgoland have
+been plotting to attack us for years."
+
+"Yes. If you had carried out your original intention of looting
+Eglonsby, they would have invaded us the moment your ships lifted
+out. It's exactly what I'd do in their place."
+
+"But you maintain nominally friendly relations with them?"
+
+"Of course. We are civilized. The peace-loving government and people
+of Eglonsby...."
+
+"Yes, Mr. President; I understand. And they have an embassy here?"
+
+"They call it that!" cried Dagro. "It is a nest of vipers,
+a plague-spot of espionage and subversion...!"
+
+"We'll grab that ourselves, right away," Harkaman said. "You won't be
+able to round up all their agents outside it, and if we tried to, it
+would cause suspicion. We'll have to put up a front to deceive them."
+
+"Yes. You will go on the air at once, calling on the people to
+collaborate with us, and you will specifically order your troops
+mobilized to assist us in collecting the tribute we are levying on
+Eglonsby," Trask said. "In that way, if any Stolgonian spies see
+your troops concentrated around our landing craft, they'll think
+it's to help us load our loot."
+
+"And we'll announce that a large part of the tribute will consist of
+military equipment," Dagro added. "That will explain why our guns
+and tanks are being loaded on your contragravity vehicles."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When the Stolgonian embassy was seized by the Space Vikings, the
+ambassador asked to be taken at once to their leader. He had a
+proposition: If the Space Vikings would completely disable the army
+of Eglonsby and admit Stolgonian troops when they were ready to
+leave, the invaders would bring with them ten thousand kilos of
+gold. Trask affected to be very hospitable to the offer.
+
+Stolgoland lay across a narrow and shallow sea from the State of
+Eglonsby; it was dotted with islands, and every one of them was, in
+turn, dotted with oil wells. Petroleum was what kept the aircraft
+and ground-vehicles of Amaterasu in operation; oil, rather than
+ideology, was at the root of the enmity between the two nations.
+Apparently the Stolgonian espionage in Eglonsby was completely
+deceived, and the reports Trask allowed the captive ambassador to
+make confirmed the deception. Hourly the Eglonsby radio stations
+poured out exhortations to the people to co-operate with the Space
+Vikings, with an occasional lamentation about the masses of war
+materials being taken. Eglonsby espionage in Stolgoland was
+similarly active. The Stolgonian armies were being massed at four
+seaports on the coast facing Eglonsby, and there was a frantic
+gathering of every sort of ship available. By this time, any
+sympathy that Trask might have felt for either party had evaporated.
+
+The invasion of Stolgoland started the fifth morning after their
+arrival over Eglonsby. Before dawn, the six pinnaces went in, making
+a wide sweep around the curvature of the planet and coming in from
+the north, two to each of the three gold-troves. They were detected
+by radar, eventually but too late for any effective resistance to
+be organized. Two were even taken without a shot; by mid-morning all
+three had been blown open and the ingots and specie were being removed.
+
+The four seaports from whence the Stolgonian invasion of Eglonsby
+was to have been launched were neutralized by nuclear bombing.
+Neutralized was a nice word, Trask thought; there was no echo in it
+of the screams of the still-living, maimed and burned and blinded,
+around the fringes of ground-zero. The _Nemesis_ and the _Space
+Scourge_, from landing craft and from the ships themselves, landed
+Eglonsby troops on Stolgonopolis. While they were sacking the city,
+with all the usual atrocities, the Space Vikings were loading the
+gold, and anything else that was of more than ordinary value,
+aboard the ships.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They were still at it the next morning when President Pedrosan
+arrived at the newly conquered capital, announcing his intention of
+putting the Stolgonian chief of state and his cabinet on trial as
+war criminals. Before sunset, they were back over Eglonsby. The loot
+might run as high as a half-billion Excalibur stellars. Boake
+Valkanhayn and Garvan Spasso were simply beyond astonishment
+and beyond words.
+
+The looting of Eglonsby then began.
+
+They gathered up machinery, and stocks of steel and light-metal
+alloys. The city was full of warehouses, and the warehouses were
+crammed with valuables. In spite of the socialistic and egalitarian
+verbiage behind which the government operated, there seemed to be a
+numerous elite class and if gold were not a monetary metal it was
+not despised for purposes of ostentation. There were several large
+art museums. Vann Larch, their nearest approach to an art
+specialist, took charge of culling the best from them.
+
+And there was a vast public library. Into this Otto Harkaman
+vanished, with half a dozen men and a contragravity scow. Its
+historical section would be much poorer in the future.
+
+President Pedrosan Pedro was on the radio from Stolgonopolis that night.
+
+"Is this how you Space Vikings keep faith?" he demanded indignantly.
+"You've abandoned me and my army here in Stolgoland, and you're
+sacking Eglonsby. You promised to leave Eglonsby alone if I helped
+you get the gold of Stolgoland."
+
+"I promised nothing of the kind. I promised to help you take
+Stolgoland. You've taken it," Trask told him. "I promised to avoid
+unnecessary damage or violence. I've already hanged a dozen of my
+own men for rape, murder and wanton vandalism. Now, we expect to be
+out of here in twenty-four hours. You'd better be back here before
+then. Your own people are starting to loot. We did not promise to
+control them for you."
+
+That was true. What few troops had been left behind, and the police,
+were unable to cope with the mobs that were pillaging in the wake of
+the Space Vikings. Everybody seemed to be trying to grab what he
+could and let the Vikings be blamed for it. He had been able to keep
+his own people in order. There had been at least a dozen cases of
+rape and wanton murder, and the offenders had been promptly hanged.
+None of their shipmates, not even the _Space Scourge_ company, seemed
+resentful. They felt the culprits had deserved what they'd gotten;
+not for what they'd done to the locals, but for disobeying orders.
+
+A few troops had been flown in from Stolgoland by the time they had
+gotten their vehicles stowed and were lifting out. They didn't seem
+to be making much headway. Harkaman, who had gotten his load of
+microbooks stowed and was at the command desk, laughed heartily.
+
+"I don't know what Pedrosan'll do. Gehenna, I don't even know what
+I'd do, if I'd gotten myself into a mess like that. He'll probably
+bring half his army back, leave the other half in Stolgoland, and
+lose both. Suppose we drop in, in about three or four years, just
+out of curiosity. If we make twenty per cent of what we did this
+time, the trip would pay for itself."
+
+After they went into hyperspace and had the ship secured, the
+parties lasted three Galactic standard days, and nobody was at all
+sober. Harkaman was drooling over the mass of historical material he
+had found. Spasso was jubilant. Nobody could call this chicken-stealing.
+He kept repeating that as long as he was able to say anything. Khepera,
+he conceded, had been. Lousy two or three million stellars; poo!
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+Beowulf was bad.
+
+Valkanhayn and Spasso had both been opposed to the raid. Nobody
+raided Beowulf; Beowulf was too tough. Beowulf had nuclear energy
+and nuclear weapons and contragravity and normal-space craft, they
+even had colonies on a couple of other planets of their system. They
+had everything but hyperdrive. Beowulf was a civilized planet, and
+you didn't raid civilized planets, not and get away with it.
+
+And beside, hadn't they gotten enough loot on Amaterasu?
+
+"No, we did not," Trask told them. "If we're going to make anything
+out of Tanith, we're going to need power, and I don't mean windmills
+and waterwheels. As you've remarked, Beowulf has nuclear energy.
+That's where we get our plutonium and our power units."
+
+So they went to Beowulf. They came out of hyperspace eight light-hours
+from the F-7 star of which Beowulf was the fourth planet, and twenty
+light-minutes apart. Guatt Kirbey made a microjump that brought the
+ships within practical communicating distance, and they began making
+plans in an intership screen conference.
+
+"There are, or were, three chief sources of fissionable ores,"
+Harkaman said. "The last ship to raid here and get away was Stefan
+Kintour's _Princess of Lyonesse_, sixty years ago. He hit one on the
+Antarctic continent; according to his account, everything there was
+fairly new. He didn't mess things up too badly, and it ought to be
+still operating. We'll go in from the south pole, and we'll have to
+go in fast."
+
+They shifted personnel and equipment. They would go in bunched, the
+pinnaces ahead; they and the _Space Scourge_ would go down to the
+ground, while the better-armed _Nemesis_ would hover above to fight
+off local contragravity, shoot down missiles, and generally provide
+overhead cover. Trask transferred to the _Space Scourge_, taking
+with him Morland and two hundred of the _Nemesis_ ground-fighters.
+Most of the single-mounts, landing craft and manipulators and
+heavy-duty lifters went with him, jamming the decks around the
+vehicle ports of Valkanhayn's ship.
+
+They jumped in to six light-minutes, and while Valkanhayn's
+astrogator was still fiddling with his controls they began sensing
+radar and microray detection. When they came out again, they were
+two light-seconds off the south pole, and half a dozen ships were
+either in orbit or coming up from the planet. All normal-space
+craft, of course, but some were almost as big as the _Nemesis_.
+
+From there on, it was a nightmare.
+
+Ships pounded at them with guns, and they pounded back. Missiles
+went out, and counter-missiles stopped them in rapidly expanding and
+quickly vanishing globes of light. Red lights flashed on the damage
+board, and sirens howled and klaxons squawked. In the outside-view
+screens, they saw the _Nemesis_ vanish in a blaze of radiance, and
+then, while their hearts were still in their throats, come out of it
+again. Red lights went off on the board as damage-control crews and
+their robots sealed the breaches in the hull and pumped air back
+into evacuated areas, and then more red lights came on.
+
+Occasionally, he would glance toward Boake Valkanhayn, who sat
+motionless in his chair, chewing a cigar that had gone out long ago.
+He wasn't enjoying it, but he wasn't showing fear. Once a Beowulfer
+vanished in a supernova flash, and when the ball of incandescence
+widened to nothing the ship was gone. All Valkanhayn said was: "Hope
+one of our boys did that."
+
+They fought their way in and down, toward the atmosphere. Another
+Beowulf ship blew up, a craft about the size of Spasso's _Lamia_.
+A moment later, another; Valkanhayn was pounding the desk in front
+of him with his fist and yelling: "That was one of ours! Find out
+who launched it; get his name!"
+
+Missiles were coming up from the planet, now. Valkanhayn's detection
+officer was trying to locate the source. While he was trying, a big
+melon-shaped thing fell away from the _Nemesis_, and in the jiggling,
+radiation-distorted intership screen Harkaman's image was laughing.
+
+"Hellburner just went off; target about 50 deg. south, 25 deg. east of the
+sunrise line. That's where those missiles are coming from."
+
+Counter-missiles sped toward the big metal melon; defense missiles,
+robot-launched, met them. The hellburner's track was marked first
+by expanding red and orange globes in airless space and then by
+fire-puffs after it entered atmosphere. It vanished into the darkness
+beyond the sunset, and then made sunlight of its own. It _was_ sunlight;
+a Bethe solar-phoenix reaction, and it would sustain itself for hours.
+He hoped it hadn't landed within a thousand miles of their objective.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The ground operation was a nightmare of a different sort. He went down
+in a command car, with Paytrik Morland and a couple of others. There
+were missiles and gun batteries. There were darting patterns of flights
+of combat vehicles, blazing gunfire, and single vehicles that shot past
+or blew up in front of them. Robots on contragravity--military robots,
+with missiles to launch, and working robots with only their own mass to
+hurl, flung themselves mindlessly at them. Screens that went crazy from
+radiation; speakers that jabbered contradictory orders. Finally, the
+battle, which had raged in the air over two thousand square miles of
+mines and refineries and reaction plants, became two distinct and
+concentrated battles, one at the packing plant and storage vaults and
+one at the power-unit cartridge factory.
+
+Three pinnaces came down to form a triangle over each; the _Space
+Scourge_ hung midway between, poured out a swarm of vehicles and big
+claw-armed manipulators; armored lighters and landing craft shuttled
+back and forth. The command car looped and dodged from one target to the
+other; at one, keg-like canisters of plutonium, collapsium-plated and
+weighing tons apiece, were coming out of the vaults, and at the other
+lifters were bringing out loads of nuclear-electric power-unit
+cartridges, some as big as a ten liter jar, to power a spaceship engine,
+and some small as a round of pistol ammunition, for things like
+flashlights.
+
+Every hour or so, he looked at his watch, and it would be three or
+four minutes later.
+
+At last, when he was completely convinced that he had really been
+killed, and was damned and would spend all eternity in this
+fire-riven chaos, the _Nemesis_ began firing red flares and the
+speakers in all the vehicles were signaling recall. He got aboard
+the _Space Scourge_ somehow, after assuring himself that nobody who
+was alive was left behind.
+
+There were twenty-odd who weren't, and the sick bay was full of
+wounded who had gone up with cargo, and more were being helped off
+the vehicles as they were berthed. The car in which he had been
+riding had been hit several times, and one of the gunners was
+bleeding under his helmet and didn't seem aware of it. When he got
+to the command room, he found Boake Valkanhayn, his face drawn and
+weary, getting coffee from a robot and lacing it with brandy.
+
+"That's it," he said, blowing on the steaming cup. It was the
+battered silver one that had been in front of him when he had first
+appeared in the _Nemesis'_ screen. He nodded toward the damage
+screen; everything had been patched up, or the outer decks around
+breached portions of the hull sealed. "Ship secure." He set down
+the silver mug and lit a cigar. "To quote Garvan Spasso, 'Nobody
+can call that chicken-stealing.'"
+
+"No. Not even if you count Tizona giraffe-birds as chickens. That
+Gram gum-pear brandy you're putting in that coffee? I'll have the
+same. Just leave out the coffee."
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+The _Lamia_'s detection picked them up as soon as they were out of
+the last microjump; Trask's gnawing fear that Dunnan might attack in
+their absence had been groundless. Incredibly, he realized, they had
+been gone only thirty-odd Galactic Standard days, and in that time
+Alvyn Karffard had done an incredible amount of work.
+
+He had gotten the spaceport completely cleared of rubble and debris,
+and he had the woods cleared away from around it and the two tall
+buildings. The locals called the city Rivvin; a few inscriptions
+found here and there in it indicated that the original name had been
+Rivington. He had done considerable mapping, in some detail of the
+continent on which it was located and, in general, of the rest of
+the planet. And he had established friendly relations with the
+people of Tradetown and made friends with their king.
+
+Nobody, not even those who had collected it, quite believed their
+eyes when the loot was unloaded. The little herd of long haired
+unicorns--the Khepera locals had called them kreggs, probably a
+corruption of the name of some naturalist who had first studied
+them--had come through the voyage and even the Battle of Beowulf
+in good shape. Trask and a few of his former cattlemen from Traskon
+watched them anxiously, and the ship's doctor, acting veterinarian,
+made elaborate tests of vegetation they would be likely to eat.
+Three of the cows proved to be with calf; these were isolated and
+watched over with especial solicitude.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The locals were inclined to take a poor view of the kreggs, at
+first. Cattle ought to have two horns, one on either side, curved
+back. It wasn't right for cattle to have only one horn, in the
+middle, slanting forward.
+
+Both ships had taken heavy damage. The _Nemesis_ had one pinnace
+berth knocked open, and everybody was glad the Beowulfers hadn't
+noticed that and gotten a missile inside. The _Space Scourge_ had
+taken a hit directly on her south pole while lifting out from the
+planet, and a good deal of the southern part of the ship was sealed
+off when she came in. The _Nemesis_ was repaired as far as possible
+and put on off-planet patrol, then they went to work on the _Space
+Scourge_, transferring much of her armament to ground defense,
+clearing out all the available cargo space, and repairing her hull
+as far as possible. To repair her completely was a job for a regular
+shipyard, like Alex Gorram's on Gram. And that was where the work
+would be done.
+
+Boake Valkanhayn would command her on the voyage to and from Gram.
+Since Beowulf, Trask had not only ceased to dislike the man, but was
+beginning to admire him. He had been a good man once, before ill
+fortune which had been only partly of his own making had overtaken
+him. He'd just let himself go and stopped caring. Now he had taken
+hold of himself again. It had started showing after they had landed
+on Amaterasu. He had begun to dress more neatly and speak more
+grammatically; to look and act more like a spaceman and less like a
+barfly. His men had begun to jump to obey when he gave an order. He
+had opposed the raid on Beowulf, but that had been the dying
+struggle of the chicken-thief he had been. He had been scared, going
+in; well, who hadn't been, except a few greenhorns brave with the
+valor of ignorance. But he had gone in, and fought his ship well,
+and had held his station over the fissionables plant in a hell of
+bombs and missile, and he had made sure everybody who had gone down
+and who was still alive was aboard before he lifted out.
+
+He was a Space Viking again.
+
+Garvan Spasso wasn't, and never would be. He was outraged when he
+heard that Valkanhayn would take his ship, loaded with much of the
+loot of the three planets, to Gram. He came to Trask, fairly
+spluttering about it.
+
+"You know what'll happen?" he demanded. "He'll space out with that
+cargo, and that'll be the last any of us'll hear of him again. He'll
+probably take it to Joyeuse or Excalibur and buy himself a lordship
+with it."
+
+"Oh, I doubt that, Garvan. A number of our people are going
+along--Guatt Kirbey will be the astrogator; you'd trust him,
+wouldn't you? And Sir Paytrik Morland, and Baron Rathmore, and
+Lord Valpry, and Rolve Hemmerding...." He was silent for a moment,
+struck by an idea. "Would you be willing to make the trip in the
+_Space Scourge_, too?"
+
+Spasso would, very decidedly. Trask nodded.
+
+"Good. Then we'll be sure nothing crooked is pulled," he said
+seriously.
+
+After Spasso was gone, he got in touch with Baron Rathmore.
+
+"See to it that he gets as much money that's due him as possible,
+when you get to Gram. And ask Duke Angus, as a favor to give him
+some meaningless position with a suitably impressive title, Lord
+Chamberlain of the Ducal Washroom, or something. Then he can prime
+him with misinformation and give him an opportunity to sell it to
+Omfray of Glaspyth. Then, of course, he could be contacted to sell
+Omfray out to Angus. A couple of times around and somebody'll stick
+a knife in him, and then we'll be rid of him for good."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They loaded the _Space Scourge_ with gold from Stolgoland, and
+paintings and statues from the art museums and fabrics and furs and
+jewels and porcelains and plate from the markets of Eglonsby. They
+loaded sacks and kegs of specie from Khepera. Most of the Khepera
+loot wasn't worth hauling to Gram, but it was far enough in advance
+of their own technologies to be priceless to the Tanith locals.
+
+Some of these were learning simple machine operations, and a few
+were able to handle contragravity vehicles that had been fitted with
+adequate safety devices. The former slave guards had all become
+sergeants and lieutenants in an infantry regiment that had been
+formed, and the King of Tradetown borrowed some to train his own
+army. Some genius in the machine shop altered a matchlock musket
+to flintlock and showed the local gunsmiths how to do it.
+
+The kreggs continued to thrive, after the _Space Scourge_ departed.
+Several calves were born, and seemed to be doing well; the biochemistry
+of Tanith and Khepera were safely alike. Trask had hopes for them.
+Every Viking ship had its own carniculture vats, but men tired of
+carniculture meat, and fresh meat was always in demand. Some day,
+he hoped, kregg-beef would be an item of sale to ships putting in
+on Tanith, and the long-haired hides might even find a market in
+the Sword-Worlds. They had contragravity scows plying between
+Rivington and Tradetown regularly, now, and air-lorries were linking
+the villages. The boatmen of Tradetown rioted occasionally against
+this unfair competition. And in Rivington itself, bulldozers and
+power shovels and manipulators labored, and there was always a
+rising cloud of dust over the city.
+
+There was so much to do, and only a trifle under twenty-five
+Galactic Standard hours in a day to do it. There were whole days
+in which he never thought once of Andray Dunnan.
+
+A hundred and twenty-five days to Gram, and a hundred and
+twenty-five days back. They had long ago passed. Of course, there
+would be the work of repairing the _Space Scourge_, the conferences
+with the investors in the original Tanith Adventure, the business
+of gathering the needed equipment for the new base. Even so, he was
+beginning to worry a little. Worry about something as far out of his
+control as the _Space Scourge_ was useless, he knew. He couldn't
+help it, though. Even Harkaman, usually imperturbable, began to be
+fretful, after two hundred and seventy days had passed.
+
+They were relaxing in the living quarters they had fitted out at the
+top of the spaceport building before retiring, both sprawled wearily
+in chairs that had come from one of the better hotels of Eglonsby,
+their drinks between them on a low table, the top of which was
+inlaid with something that looked like ivory but wasn't. On the
+floor beside it lay the plans for a reaction-plant and mass-energy
+converter they would build as soon as the _Space Scourge_ returned
+with equipment for producing collapsium-plated shielding.
+
+"Of course, we could go ahead with it, now," Harkaman said.
+"We could tear enough armor off the _Lamia_ to shield any kind
+of a reaction plant."
+
+That was the first time either of them had gotten close to the
+possibility that the ship mightn't return. Trask laid his cigar in
+the ashtray--it had come from President Pedrosan Pedro's private
+office--and splashed a little more brandy into his glass.
+
+"She'll be coming before long. We have enough of our people aboard
+to make sure nobody else tries to take the ship. And I really
+believe, now, that Valkanhayn can be trusted."
+
+"I do, too. I'm not worried about what might happen on the ship.
+But we don't know what's been happening on Gram. Glaspyth and
+Didreksburg could have teamed up and jumped Wardshaven before
+Duke Angus was ready to invade Glaspyth. Boake might be landing
+the ship in a trap at Wardshaven."
+
+"Be a sorry looking trap after it closed on him. That would be the
+first time in history that a Sword-World was raided by Space Vikings."
+Harkaman looked at his half-empty glass, then filled it to the top.
+It was the same drink he had started with, just as a regiment that
+has been decimated and recruited up to strength a few times is still
+the same regiment.
+
+The buzz of the communication screen--one of the few things in the
+room that hadn't been looted somewhere--interrupted him. They both
+rose; Harkaman, still carrying his drink, went to put it on. It was
+a man on duty in the control room, overhead, reporting that two
+emergences had just been detected at twenty light-minutes due north
+of the planet. Harkaman gulped his drink and set down the empty glass.
+
+"All right. You put out a general alert? Switch anything that comes
+in over to this screen." He got out his pipe and was packing tobacco
+into it mechanically. "They'll be out of the last microjump and
+about two light-seconds away in a few minutes."
+
+Trask sat down again, saw that his cigarette had burned almost to
+the tip, and lit a fresh one from it, wishing he could be as calm
+about it as Harkaman. Three minutes later, the control tower picked
+up two emergences at a light-second and a half, a thousand or so
+miles apart. Then the screen flickered, and Boake Valkanhayn was
+looking out of it, from the desk in the newly refurbished command
+room of the _Space Scourge_.
+
+He was a newly refurbished Boake Valkanhayn, too. His heavily
+braided captain's jacket looked like the work of one of the better
+tailors on Gram, and on the breast was a large and ornate knight's
+star, of unfamiliar design, bearing, among other things, the sword
+and atom-symbol of the house of Ward.
+
+"Prince Trask; Count Harkaman," he greeted. "_Space Scourge_, Tanith;
+thirty-two hundred hours out of Wardshaven on Gram, Baron Valkanhayn
+commanding, accompanied by chartered freighter _Rozinante_, Durendal,
+Captain Morbes. Requesting permission and instructions to orbit in."
+
+"Baron Valkanhayn?" Harkaman asked.
+
+"That's right," Valkanhayn grinned. "And I have a vellum scroll the
+size of a blanket to prove it. I have a whole cargo of scrolls. One
+says you're Otto, Count Harkaman, and another says you're Admiral of
+the Royal Navy of Gram."
+
+"He did it!" Trask cried. "He made himself King of Gram!"
+
+"That's right. And you're his trusty and well-loved Lucas, Prince
+Trask, and Viceroy of his Majesty's Realm of Tanith."
+
+Harkaman bristled at that. "The Gehenna you say. This is _our_ Realm
+of Tanith."
+
+"Is his Majesty making it worth while to accept his sovereignty?"
+Trask asked. "That is, beside vellum scrolls?"
+
+Valkanhayn was still grinning. "Wait till we start sending cargo
+down. And wait till you see what's crammed into the other ship."
+
+"Did Spasso come back with you?" Harkaman asked.
+
+"Oh, no. Sir Garvan Spasso entered the service of his Majesty, King
+Angus. He is Chief of Police at Glaspyth, now, and nobody can call
+what he's doing there chicken-stealing, either. Any chickens he
+steals, he steals the whole farm to get them."
+
+That didn't sound good. Spasso could make King Angus' name stink all
+over Glaspyth. Or maybe he'd allow Spasso to crush the adherents of
+Omfray, and then hang him for his oppression of the people. He'd
+read about somebody who'd done something like that, in one of
+Harkaman's Old Terran history books.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Baron Rathmore had stayed on Gram; so had Rolve Hemmerding. The
+rest of the gentlemen-adventurers, all with shiny new titles of
+nobility, had returned. From them, as the two ships were getting
+into orbit, he learned what had happened on Gram since the _Nemesis_
+had spaced out.
+
+Duke Angus had announced his intention of carrying on with the
+Tanith Adventure, and had started construction of a new ship at
+the Gorram yards. This had served plausibly to explain all the
+activities of preparation for the invasion of Glaspyth, and had
+deceived Duke Omfray completely. Omfray had already started a ship
+of his own; the entire resources of his duchy were thrown into an
+effort to get her finished and to space ahead of the one Angus was
+building. Work was going on frantically on her when the Wardshaven
+invaders hit Glaspyth; she was now nearing completion as a unit of
+the Royal Navy. Duke Omfray had managed to escape to Didreksburg;
+when Angus' troops moved in on the latter duchy, he had escaped
+again, this time off-planet. He was now eating the bitter bread of
+exile at the court of his wife's uncle, the King of Haulteclere.
+
+The Count of Newhaven, the Duke of Bigglersport, and the Lord of
+Northport, all of whom had favored the establishment of a planetary
+monarchy, had immediately acknowledged Angus as their sovereign. So,
+with a knife at his throat, had the Duke of Didreksburg. Many other
+feudal magnates had refused to surrender their sovereignty. That
+might mean fighting, but Paytrik, now Baron, Morland, doubted it.
+
+"The _Space Scourge_ stopped that," he said. "When they heard about
+the base here, and saw what we'd shipped to Gram, they started
+changing their minds. Only subjects of King Angus will be allowed
+to invest in the Tanith Adventure."
+
+As for accepting King Angus' annexation of Tanith and accepting his
+sovereignty, that would also be advisable. They would need a Sword
+World outlet for the loot they took or obtained by barter from other
+Space Vikings, and until they had adequate industries of their own,
+they would be dependent on Gram for many things which could not be
+gotten by raiding.
+
+"I suppose the King knows I'm not out here for my health, or
+his profit?" he asked Lord Valpry, during one of the screen
+conversations as the _Space Scourge_ was getting into orbit.
+"My business out here is Andray Dunnan."
+
+"Oh, yes," the Wardshaven noble replied. "In fact, he told me, in so
+many words, that he would be most happy if you sent him his nephew's
+head in a block of lucite. What Dunnan did touched his honor, too.
+Sovereign princes never see any humor in things like that."
+
+"I suppose he knows that sooner or later Dunnan will try to attack
+Tanith?"
+
+"If he doesn't, it isn't because I didn't tell him often enough. When
+you see the defense armament we're bringing, you'll think he does."
+
+It was impressive, but nothing to the engineering and industrial
+equipment. Mining robots for use on the iron Moon of Tanith, and
+normal-space transports for the fifty thousand mile run between
+planet and satellite. A collapsed-matter producer; now they could
+collapsium-plate their own shielding. A small, fully robotic, steel
+mill that could be set up and operated on the satellite. Industrial
+robots, and machinery to make machinery. And, best of all, two
+hundred engineers and highly skilled technicians.
+
+Quite a few industrial baronies on Gram would realize, before long,
+what they had lost in those men. He wondered what Lord Trask of
+Traskon would have thought about that.
+
+The Prince of Tanith was no longer interested in what happened to
+Gram. Maybe, if things prospered for the next century or so, his
+successors would be ruling Gram by viceroy from Tanith.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+As soon as the _Space Scourge_ was unloaded, she was put on
+off-planet watch; Harkaman immediately spaced out in the _Nemesis_,
+while Trask remained behind. They began unloading the _Rozinante_,
+after setting her down at Rivington Spaceport. After that was done,
+her officers and crew took a holiday which lasted a month, until the
+_Nemesis_ returned. Harkaman must have made quick raids on half a
+dozen planets. None of the cargo he brought back was spectacularly
+valuable, and he dismissed the whole thing as chicken-stealing, but
+he had lost some men and the ship showed a few fresh scars. A good
+deal of what was transshipped to the _Rozinante_ was manufactured
+goods which would compete with merchandise produced on Gram.
+
+"That load will be a come-down, after what the _Space Scourge_ took
+back, but we didn't want to send the _Rozinante_ back empty," he
+said. "One thing, I had time to do a little reading, between stops."
+
+"The books from the Eglonsby library?"
+
+"Yes. I learned a curious thing about Amaterasu. Do you know why that
+planet was so extensively colonized by the Federation, when there
+don't seem to be any fissionable ores? The planet produced gadolinium."
+
+Gadolinium was essential to hyperdrive engines; the engines of a
+ship the size of the _Nemesis_ required fifty pounds of it. On the
+Sword-Worlds, it was worth several times its weight in gold. If they
+still mined it, Amaterasu would repay a second visit.
+
+When he mentioned it, Harkaman shrugged. "Why should they mine it?
+There's only one thing it's good for, and you can't run a spaceship
+on Diesel oil. I suppose the mines could be reopened, and new
+refineries built, but...."
+
+"We could trade plutonium for gadolinium. They have none of their
+own. We could charge our own prices for it, and we wouldn't need to
+tell them what gadolinium sells for on the Sword-Worlds."
+
+"We could, if we could do business with anybody there, after what
+we did to Eglonsby and Stolgoland. Where would we get plutonium?"
+
+"Why do you think the Beowulfers don't have hyperships, when they
+have everything else?"
+
+Harkaman snapped his fingers. "By Satan, that's it!" Then he looked
+at Trask in alarm. "Hey, you're not thinking of selling Amaterasu
+plutonium and Beowulf gadolinium, are you?"
+
+"Why not? We could make a big profit on both ends of the deal."
+
+"You know what would happen next, don't you? There'd be ships from
+both planets all over the place in a few years. We want that like
+we want a hole in the head."
+
+He couldn't see the objection. Tanith and Amaterasu and Beowulf
+could work up a very good triangular trade; all three would profit.
+It wouldn't cost men and ship-damage and ammunition, either. Maybe
+a mutual defense alliance, too. Think about it later; there was too
+much to do here on Tanith at present.
+
+There had been mines on the Moon of Tanith before the collapse of
+the Federation; they had been stripped of their equipment afterward,
+while Tanith was still fighting a rearguard battle against barbarism,
+but the underground chambers and man-made caverns could still be used,
+and in time the mines were reopened and the steel mill put in, and
+eventually ingots of finished steel were coming down by shuttle-craft.
+In the meantime, the shipyard had been laid out and was taking shape.
+
+The Gram ship _Queen Flavia_--she had been the one found unfinished
+at Glaspyth--came in three months after the _Rozinante_ started
+back; she must have been finished while Valkanhayn was still in
+hyperspace. She carried considerable cargo, some of it superfluous
+but all of it useful; everybody was investing in the Tanith Adventure
+now, and the money had to be spent for something. Better, she brought
+close to a thousand men and women; the leakage of brains and ability
+from the Sword-Worlds was turning into a flood. Among them was Basil
+Gorram. Trask remembered him as an insufferable young twerp, but he
+seemed to be a good shipyard man. He very frankly predicted that
+in a few years his father's yards at Wardshaven would be idle and
+all the Tanith ships would be Tanith-built. A junior partner of
+Lothar Ffayle's also came out, to establish a branch of the Bank of
+Wardshaven at Rivington.
+
+As soon as the _Queen Flavia_ had discharged her cargo and
+passengers, she took on five hundred ground-fighters from the
+_Lamia_, _Nemesis_ and _Space Scourge_ companies and spaced out on
+a raiding voyage. While she was gone, the second ship, the one Duke
+Angus had started at Wardshaven and King Angus had finished, the
+_Black Star_, came in.
+
+Trask was slightly incredulous at realizing that she had spaced out
+from Gram almost exactly two years after the _Nemesis_ had departed.
+He still hadn't any idea where Andray Dunnan was, or what he was
+doing, or how to find him.
+
+The news of the Gram base on Tanith spread slowly, first by the
+scheduled liners and tramp freighters that linked the Sword-Worlds,
+and then by trading ships and outbound Space Vikings to the Old
+Federation. Two years and six months after the _Nemesis_ had come
+out of hyperspace to find Boake Valkanhayn and Garvan Spasso on
+Tanith, the first independent Space Viking came in, to sell a cargo
+and get repairs. They bought his loot--he had been raiding some
+planet rather above the level of Khepera and below that of
+Amaterasu--and healed the wounds his ship had taken getting it. He
+had been dealing with the Everrard family on Hoth, and professed
+himself much more satisfied with the bargains he had gotten on
+Tanith and swore to return.
+
+He had never even heard of Andray Dunnan or the _Enterprise_.
+
+It was a Gilgamesher that brought the first news.
+
+He had first heard of Gilgameshers--the word was used
+indiscriminately for a native of or a ship from Gilgamesh--on Gram,
+from Harkaman and Karffard and Vann Larch and the others. Since
+coming to Tanith, he had heard about them from every Space Viking,
+never in complimentary and rarely in printable terms.
+
+Gilgamesh was rated, with reservations, as a civilized planet though
+not on a level with Odin or Isis or Baldur or Marduk or Aton or any
+of the other worlds which had maintained the culture of the Terran
+Federation uninterruptedly. Perhaps Gilgamesh deserved more credit;
+its people had undergone two centuries of darkness and pulled
+themselves out of it by their bootstraps. They had recovered all
+the old techniques, up to and including the hyperdrive.
+
+They didn't raid; they traded. They had religious objections to
+violence, though they kept these within sensible limits, and were
+able and willing to fight with fanatical ferocity in defense of
+their home planet. About a century before, there had been a
+five-ship Viking raid on Gilgamesh; one ship had returned and had
+been sold for scrap after reaching a friendly base. Their ships went
+everywhere to trade, and wherever they traded a few of them usually
+settled, and where they settled they made money, sending most of it
+home. Their society seemed to be a loose theo-socialism, and their
+religion an absurd potpourri of most of the major monotheisms of the
+Federation period, plus doctrinal and ritualistic innovations of
+their own. Aside from their propensity for sharp trading, their
+bigoted refusal to regard anybody not of their creed as more than
+half human, and the maze of dietary and other taboos in which they
+hid from social contact with others, made them generally disliked.
+
+After their ship had gotten into orbit, three of them came down to
+do business. The captain and his exec wore long coats, almost
+knee-length, buttoned to the throat, and small white caps like
+forage caps; the third, one of their priests, wore a robe with a
+cowl, and the symbol of their religion, a blue triangle in a white
+circle, on his breast. They all wore beards that hung down from
+their cheeks, with their chins and upper lips shaved. They all had
+the same righteous, disapproving faces, they all refused
+refreshments of any sort, and they sat uneasily as though fearing
+contamination from the heathens who had sat in their chairs before
+them. They had a mixed cargo of general merchandise picked up here
+and there on subcivilized planets, in which nobody on Tanith was
+interested. They also had some good stuff--vegetable-amber and
+flame-bird plumes from Irminsul; ivory or something very like it
+from somewhere else; diamonds and Uller organic opals and
+Zarathustra sunstones. They also had some platinum. They wanted
+machinery, especially contragravity engines and robots.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The trouble was, they wanted to haggle. Haggling, it seemed, was
+the Gilgamesh planetary sport.
+
+"Have you ever heard of a Space Viking ship named the _Enterprise_?"
+he asked them, at the seventh or eighth impasse in the bargaining.
+"She bears a crescent, light blue on black. Her captain's name is
+Andray Dunnan."
+
+"A ship so named, with such a device, raided Chermosh more than a
+year ago," the priest-supercargo said. "Some of our people tarry on
+Chermosh to trade. This ship sacked the city in which they were;
+some of them lost heavily in world's goods."
+
+"That's a pity."
+
+The Gilgamesh priest shrugged. "It is as Yah the Almighty wills,"
+he said, then brightened slightly. "The Chermoshers are heathens
+and worshipers of false gods. The Space Vikings looted their temple
+and destroyed it utterly; they carried away the graven images and
+abominations. Our people bore witness that there was much wailing
+and lamentation among the idolators."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So that was the first entry on the Big Board. It covered,
+optimistically, the whole of one wall in his office, and for some
+time that one chalked note about the raid on Chermosh, and the date,
+as nearly as it could be approximated, looked very lonely on it. The
+captain of the _Black Star_ brought back material for a couple more.
+He had put in on several planets known to be temporarily occupied by
+Space Vikings, to barter loot, give his men some time off-ship, and
+make inquiries, and he had names for a couple of planets raided by
+the blue crescent ship. One was only six months old.
+
+The way news filtered about in the Old Federation, that was
+practically hot off the stove.
+
+The owner-captain of the _Alborak_ had something to add, when he
+brought his ship in six months later. He sipped his drink slowly,
+as though he had limited himself to one and wanted to make it last
+as long as possible.
+
+"Almost two years ago, on Jagannath," he said. "The _Enterprise_ was
+on orbit there, getting some light repairs. I met the man a few
+times. Looks just like those pictures, but he's wearing a small
+pointed beard, now. He'd sold a lot of loot. General merchandise,
+precious and semiprecious stones, a lot of carved and inlaid
+furniture that looked as though it had come from some Neobarb king's
+palace, and some temple stuff. Buddhist; there were a couple of big
+gold Dai-Butsus. His crew were standing drinks for all comers. Some
+of them were pretty dark above the collar, as though they'd been on
+a hot-star planet not too long before. And he had a lot of Imhotep
+furs to sell, simply fabulous stuff."
+
+"What kind of repairs? Combat damage?"
+
+"That was my impression. He spaced out a little over a hundred hours
+after I came in, in company with another ship. The _Starhopper_,
+Captain Teodor Vaghn. The talk was that they were making a two-ship
+raid somewhere." The captain of the _Alborak_ thought for a moment.
+"One other thing. He was buying ammunition, everything from pistol
+cartridges to hellburners. And he was buying all the air-and-water
+recycling equipment, and all the carniculture and hydroponic
+equipment, he could get."
+
+That was something to know. He thanked the Space Viking, and then asked:
+
+"Did he know, at the time, that I'm out here hunting for him?"
+
+"If he did, nobody else on Jagannath did. I didn't hear about it,
+myself, till six months afterward."
+
+That evening, he played off the recording he had made of the
+conversation for Harkaman and Valkanhayn and Karffard and some
+of the others. Somebody instantly said:
+
+"That temple stuff came from Chermosh. They're Buddhists, there.
+That checks with the Gilgamesher's story."
+
+"He got the furs on Imhotep; he traded for them," Harkaman said.
+"Nobody gets anything off Imhotep by raiding. The planet's in the
+middle of a glaciation, the land surface down to the fiftieth
+parallel is iced over solid. There is one city, ten or fifteen
+thousand, and the rest of the population is scattered around in
+settlements of a couple of hundred all along the face of the
+glaciers. They're all hunters and trappers. They have some
+contragravity, and when a ship comes in, they spread the news by
+radio and everybody brings his furs to town. They use telescope
+sights, and everybody over ten years old can hit a man in the head
+at five hundred yards. And big weapons are no good; they're too well
+dispersed. So the only way to get anything out of them is to trade
+for it."
+
+"I think I know where he was," Alvyn Karffard said. "On Imhotep,
+silver is a monetary metal. On Agni, they use silver for sewer-pipe.
+Agni is a hot-star planet, class B-3 sun. And on Agni they are
+tough, and they have good weapons. That could be where the
+_Enterprise_ took that combat damage."
+
+That started an argument as to whether he'd gone to Chermosh first.
+It was sure that he had gone to Agni and then Imhotep. Guatt Kirbey
+tried to figure both courses.
+
+"It doesn't tell us anything, either way," he said at length. "Chermosh
+is away off to the side from Agni and Imhotep in either case."
+
+"Well, he does have a base, somewhere, and it's not on any
+Terra-type planet," Valkanhayn said. "Otherwise, what would he want
+with all that air-and-water and hydroponic and carniculture stuff?"
+
+The Old Federation area was full of non-Terra-type planets, and why
+should anybody bother going to any of them? Any planet that wasn't
+oxygen-atmosphere, six to eight thousand miles in diameter, and
+within a narrow surface-temperature range, wasn't worth wasting time
+on. But a planet like that, if one had the survival equipment, would
+make a wonderful hideout.
+
+"What sort of a captain is this Teodor Vaghn?" he asked. "A good
+one," Harkaman said promptly. "He has a nasty streak--sadistic--but
+he knows his business and he has a good ship and a well-trained
+crew. You think he and Dunnan have teamed up?"
+
+"Don't you? I think, now that he has a base, Dunnan is getting
+a fleet together."
+
+"He'll know we're after him by now," Vann Larch said. "And he knows
+where we are, and that puts him one up on us."
+
+
+
+
+XVI
+
+
+So Andray Dunnan was haunting him again. Tiny bits of information
+came in--Dunnan's ship had been on Hoth, on Nergal, selling loot.
+Now he sold for gold or platinum, and bought little, usually arms
+and ammunition. Apparently his base, wherever it was, was fully
+self-sufficient. It was certain, too, that Dunnan knew he was being
+hunted. One Space Viking who had talked with him quoted him as
+saying: "I don't want any trouble with Trask, and if he's smart he
+won't look for any with me." This made him all the more positive
+that somewhere Dunnan was building strength for an attack on Tanith.
+He made it a rule that there should always be at least two ships in
+orbit off Tanith in addition to the _Lamia_, which was on permanent
+patrol, and he installed more missile-launching stations both on the
+moon and on the planet.
+
+There were three ships bearing the Ward swords and atom-symbol, and
+a fourth building on Gram. Count Lionel of Newhaven was building
+one of his own, and three big freighters shuttled across the three
+thousand light-years between Tanith and Gram. Sesar Karvall, who had
+never recovered from his wounds, had died; Lady Lavina had turned
+the barony and the business over to her brother, Burt Sandrasan,
+and gone to live on Excalibur. The shipyard at Rivington was
+finished, and now they had built the landing-legs of Harkaman's
+_Corisande II_, and were putting up the skeleton.
+
+And they were trading with Amaterasu, now. Pedrosan Pedro had been
+overthrown and put to death by General Dagro Ector during the
+disorders following the looting of Eglonsby; the troops left behind
+in Stolgoland had mutinied and made common cause with their late
+enemies. The two nations were in an uneasy alliance, with several
+other nations combining against them, when the _Nemesis_ and the
+_Space Scourge_ returned and declared peace against the whole
+planet. There was no fighting; everybody knew what had happened to
+Stolgoland and Eglonsby. In the end, all the governments of Amaterasu
+joined in a loose agreement to get the mines reopened and resume
+production of gadolinium, and to share in the fissionables
+being imported in exchange.
+
+It had been harder, and had taken a year longer, to do business with
+Beowulf. The Beowulfers had a single planetary government, and they
+were inclined to shoot first and negotiate afterward, a natural
+enough attitude in view of experiences of the past. However, they
+had enough old Federation-period textbooks still in microprint to
+know what could be done with gadolinium. They decided to write off
+the past as fair fight and no bad blood, and start over again.
+
+It would be some years before either planet had hyperships of their
+own. In the meantime, both were good customers, and rapidly becoming
+good friends. A number of young Amaterasuans and Beowulfers had come
+to Tanith to study various technologies.
+
+The Tanith locals were studying, too. In the first year, Trask
+had gathered the more intelligent boys of ten to twelve from each
+community and begun teaching them. In the past year, he had sent
+the most intelligent of them off to Gram to school. In another
+five years, they'd be coming home to teach; in the meantime, he
+was bringing teachers to Tanith from Gram. There was a school
+at Tradetown, and others in some of the larger villages, and
+at Rivington there was something that could almost be called a
+college. In another ten years or so, Tanith would be able to
+pretend to the status of civilization.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+If only Andray Dunnan and his ships didn't come too soon. They would
+be beaten off, he was confident of that; but the damage Tanith would
+take, in the defense, would set back his work for years. He knew all
+too well what Space Viking ships could do to a planet. He'd have to
+find Dunnan's base, smash it, destroy his ships, kill the man
+himself, first. Not to avenge that murder six years ago on Gram;
+that was long ago and far away, and Elaine was vanished, and so was
+the Lucas Trask who had loved and lost her. What mattered now was
+planting and nurturing civilization on Tanith.
+
+But where would he find Dunnan, in two hundred billion cubic
+light-years? Dunnan had no such problem. He knew where his enemy was.
+
+And Dunnan was gathering strength. The _Yo-Yo_, Captain Vann
+Humfort; she had been reported twice, once in company with the
+_Starhopper_, and once with the _Enterprise_. She bore a blazon of
+a feminine hand dangling a planet by a string from one finger; a
+good ship, and an able, ruthless captain. The _Bolide_; she and the
+_Enterprise_ had made a raid on Ithunn. The Gilgameshers had settled
+there and one of their ships had brought that story in.
+
+And he recruited two ships at once on Melkarth, and there was a good
+deal of mirth about that among the Tanith Space Vikings.
+
+Melkarth was strictly a poultry planet. Its people had sunk to the
+village-peasant level; they had no wealth worth taking or carrying
+away. It was, however, a place where a ship could be set down, and
+there were women, and the locals had not lost the art of distillation,
+and made potent liquors. A crew could have fun there, much less
+expensively than on a regular Viking base planet, and for the last
+eight years a Captain Nial Burrik, of the _Fortuna_, had been occupying
+it, taking his ship out for occasional quick raids and spending most
+of the time living from day to day almost on the local level. Once
+in a while, a Gilgamesher would come in to see if he had anything to
+trade. It was a Gilgamesher who brought the story to Tanith, and it
+was almost two years old when he told it.
+
+"We heard it from the people of the planet, the ones who live where
+Burrik had his base. First, there was a trading ship came in. You
+may have heard of her; she is the one called the _Honest Horris_."
+
+Trask laughed at that. Her captain, Horris Sasstroff, called himself
+"Honest Horris," a misnomer which he had also bestowed on his ship.
+He was a trader of sorts. Even the Gilgameshers despised him, and
+not even a Gilgamesher would have taken a wretched craft like the
+_Honest Horris_ to space.
+
+"He had been to Melkarth before," the Gilgamesher said. "He and
+Burrik are friends." He pronounced that like a final and damning
+judgment of both of them. "The story the locals told our brethren
+of the _Fairdealer_ was that the _Honest Horris_ was landed beside
+Burrik's ship for ten days, when two other ships came in. They said
+one had the blue crescent badge, and the other bore a green monster
+leaping from one star to another."
+
+The _Enterprise_ and the _Starhopper_. He wondered why they'd gone
+to a planet like Melkarth. Maybe they knew in advance whom they'd
+find there.
+
+"The locals thought there would be fighting, but there was not.
+There was a great feast, of all four crews. Then everything of
+value was loaded aboard the _Fortuna_, and all four ships lifted
+and spaced out together. They said Burrik left nothing of any worth
+whatever behind; they were much disappointed at that."
+
+"Have any of them been back since?"
+
+All three Gilgameshers, captain, exec, and priest, shook their heads.
+
+"Captain Gurrash of the _Fairdealer_ said it had been over a year
+before his ship put in there. He could still see where the landing
+legs of the ships had pressed into the ground, but the locals said
+they had not been back."
+
+That made two more ships about which inquiries must be made. He
+wondered, for a moment, why in Gehenna Dunnan would want ships like
+that; they must make the _Space Scourge_ and the _Lamia_ as he had
+first seen them look like units of the Royal Navy of Excalibur. Then
+he became frightened, with an irrational retrospective fright at
+what might have happened. It could have, too, at any time in the
+last year and a half; either or both of those ships could have come
+in on Tanith completely unsuspected. It was only by the sheerest
+accident that he had found out, even now, about them.
+
+Everybody else thought it was a huge joke. They thought it would be
+a bigger joke if Dunnan sent those ships to Tanith now, when they
+were warned and ready for them.
+
+There were other things to worry about. One was the altering attitude of
+his Majesty Angus I. When the _Space Scourge_ returned, the newly-titled
+Baron Valkanhayn brought with him, along with the princely title and the
+commission as Viceroy of Tanith, a most cordial personal audiovisual
+greeting, warm and friendly. Angus had made it seated at his desk, bare
+headed and smoking a cigarette. The one which had come on the next ship
+out was just as cordial, but the King was not smoking and wore a small
+gold-circled cap-of-maintenance. By the time they had three ships in
+service on scheduled three-month arrivals, a year and a half later, he
+was speaking from his throne, wearing his crown and employing the first
+person plural for himself and finally the third person singular for
+Trask. By the end of the fourth year, there was no audiovisual message
+from him in person, and a stiff complaint from Rovard Grauffis to the
+effect that His Majesty felt it unseemly for a subject to address his
+sovereign while seated, even by audiovisual. This was accompanied by a
+rather apologetic personal message from Grauffis--now Prime Minister--to
+the effect that His Majesty felt compelled to stand on his royal dignity
+at all times, and that, after all, there was a difference between the
+position and dignity of the Duke of Wardshaven and that of the Planetary
+King of Gram.
+
+Prince Trask of Tanith couldn't quite see it. The King was simply
+the first nobleman of the planet. Even kings like Rodolf of Excalibur
+or Napolyon of Flamberge didn't try to be anything more. Thereafter,
+he addressed his greetings and reports to the Prime Minister, always
+with a personal message, to which Grauffis replied in kind.
+
+Not only the form but also the content of the messages from Gram
+underwent change. His Majesty was most dissatisfied. His Majesty was
+deeply disappointed. His Majesty felt that His Majesty's colonial
+realm of Tanith was not contributing sufficiently to the Royal
+Exchequer. And his Majesty felt that Prince Trask was placing
+entirely too much emphasis upon trade and not enough upon raiding;
+after all, why barter with barbarians when it was possible to take
+what you wanted from them by force?
+
+And there was the matter of the _Blue Comet_, Count Lionel of
+Newhaven's ship. His Majesty was most displeased that the Count of
+Newhaven was trading with Tanith from his own spaceport. All goods
+from Tanith should pass through the Wardshaven spaceport.
+
+"Look, Rovard," he told the audiovisual camera which was recording
+his reply to Grauffis. "You saw the _Space Scourge_ when she came
+in, didn't you? That's what happens to a ship that raids a planet
+where there's anything worth taking. Beowulf is lousy with
+fissionables; they'll give us all the plutonium we can load, in
+exchange for gadolinium, which we sell them at about twice
+Sword-World prices. We trade plutonium on Amaterasu for gadolinium,
+and get it for about half Sword-World prices." He pressed the
+stop-button, until he could remember the ancient formula. "You may
+quote me as saying that whoever has advised His Majesty that that
+isn't good business is no friend to His Majesty or to the Realm.
+
+"As for the complaint about the _Blue Comet_; as long as she is
+owned and operated by the Count of Newhaven, who is a stockholder
+in the Tanith Adventure, she has every right to trade here."
+
+He wondered why His Majesty didn't stop Lionel of Newhaven from
+sending the _Blue Comet_ out from Gram. He found out from her
+skipper, the next time she came in.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"He doesn't dare, that's why. He's King as long as the great lords
+like Count Lionel and Joris of Bigglersport and Alan of Northport
+want him to be. Count Lionel has more men and more guns and
+contragravity than he has, now, and that's without the help he'd get
+from everybody else. Everything's quiet on Gram now, even the war on
+Southmain Continent's stopped. Everybody wants to keep it that way.
+Even King Angus isn't crazy enough to do anything to start a war.
+Not yet, anyhow."
+
+"Not _yet_?"
+
+The captain of the _Blue Comet_, who was one of Count Lionel's
+vassal barons, was silent for a moment.
+
+"You ought to know, Prince Trask," he said. "Andray Dunnan's
+grandmother was the King's mother. Her father was old Baron Zarvas
+of Blackcliffe. He was what was called an invalid, the last twenty
+years of his life. He was always attended by two male nurses about
+the size of Otto Harkaman. He was also said to be slightly
+eccentric."
+
+The unfortunate grandfather of Duke Angus had always been a subject
+nice people avoided. The unfortunate grandfather of King Angus was
+probably a subject everybody who valued their necks avoided.
+
+Lothar Ffayle had also come out on the _Blue Comet_. He was just as
+outspoken.
+
+"I'm not going back. I'm transferring most of the funds of the Bank
+of Wardshaven out here; from now on, it'll be a branch of the Bank
+of Tanith. This is where the business is being done. It's getting
+impossible to do business at all in Wardshaven. What little business
+there is to do."
+
+"Just what's been happening?"
+
+"Well, taxation, first. It seems the more money came in from here,
+the higher taxes got on Gram. Discriminatory taxes, too; pinched the
+small landholding and industrial barons and favored a few big ones.
+Baron Spasso and his crowd."
+
+"Baron Spasso, now?"
+
+Ffayle nodded. "Of about half of Glaspyth. A lot of the Glaspyth
+barons lost their baronies--some of them their heads--after Duke
+Omfray was run out. It seems there was a plot against the life of
+His Majesty. It was exposed by the zeal and vigilance of Sir Garvan
+Spasso, who was elevated to the peerage and rewarded with the lands
+of the conspirators."
+
+"You said business was bad, as business?"
+
+Ffayle nodded again. "The big Tanith boom has busted. It got
+oversold; everybody wanted in on it. And they should never have
+built those two last ships, the _Speedwell_ and the _Goodhope_;
+the return on them didn't justify it. Then, you're creating your
+own industries and building your own equipment and armament here;
+that's caused a slump in industry on Gram. I'm glad Lavina Karvall
+has enough money invested to live on. And finally, the consumers'
+goods market is getting flooded with stuff that's coming in from
+here and competing with Gram industry."
+
+Well, that was understandable. One of the ships that made the
+shuttle-trip to Gram would carry enough in her strong rooms, in gold
+and jewels and the like, to pay a handsome profit on the voyage. The
+bulk-goods that went into the cargo holds was practically taking a
+free ride, so anything on hand, stuff that nobody would ordinarily
+think of shipping in interstellar trade, went aboard. A two thousand
+foot freighter had a great deal of cargo space.
+
+Baron Trask of Traskon hadn't even begun to realise what Tanith base
+was going to cost Gram.
+
+[Illustration][Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+XVII
+
+
+As might be expected, the Beowulfers finished their hypership first.
+They had started with everything but a little know-how which had
+been quickly learned. Amaterasu had had to begin by creating the
+industry they needed to create the industry they needed to build a
+ship. The Beowulf ship--she was named _Viking's Gift_--came in on
+Tanith five and a half years after the _Nemesis_ and the _Space
+Scourge_ had raided Beowulf; her skipper had fought a normal-drive
+ship in that battle. Beside plutonium and radioactive isotopes, she
+carried a general cargo of the sort of luxury-goods unique to
+Beowulf which could always find a market in interstellar trade.
+
+After selling the cargo and depositing the money in the Bank of
+Tanith, the skipper of the _Viking's Gift_ wanted to know where
+he could find a good planet to raid. They gave him a list, none
+too tough but all slightly above the chicken-stealing level, and
+another list of planets he was _not_ to raid; planets with which
+Tanith was trading.
+
+Six months later they learned that he had showed up on Khepera, with
+which they were now trading, and had flooded the market there with
+plundered textiles, hardware, ceramics and plastics. He had bought
+kregg-meat and hides.
+
+"You see what you did, now?" Harkaman clamored. "You thought you
+were making a customer; what you made was a competitor."
+
+"What I made was an ally. If we ever do find Dunnan's planet, we'll
+need a fleet to take it. A couple of Beowulf ships would help. You
+know them; you fought them, too."
+
+Harkaman had other worries. While cruising in _Corisande II_, he had
+come in on Vitharr, one of the planets where Tanith ships traded, to
+find it being raided by a Space Viking ship based on Xochitl. He had
+fought a short but furious ship-action, battering the invader until
+he was glad to hyper out. Then he had gone directly to Xochitl,
+arriving on the heels of the ship he had beaten, and had had it out
+both with the captain and Prince Viktor, serving them with an
+ultimatum to leave Tanith trade-planets alone in the future.
+
+"How did they take it?" Trask asked, when he returned to report.
+
+"Just about the way you would have. Viktor said his people were
+Space Vikings, not Gilgameshers. I told him we weren't Gilgameshers,
+either, as he'd find out on Xochitl the next time one of his ships
+raided one of our planets. Are you going to back me up? Of course,
+you can always send Prince Viktor my head, and an apology--"
+
+"If I have to send him anything, I'll send him a sky full of ships
+and a planet full of hellburners. You did perfectly right, Otto;
+exactly what I'd have done in your place."
+
+There the matter rested. There were no more raids by Xochitl ships
+on any of their trade-planets. No mention of the incident was made
+in any of the reports sent back to Gram. The Gram situation was
+deteriorating rapidly enough. Finally, there was an audiovisual
+message from Angus himself; he was seated on his throne, wearing
+his crown, and he began speaking from the screen abruptly:
+
+"We, Angus, King of Gram and Tanith, are highly displeased with our
+subject, Lucas, Prince and Viceroy of Tanith; we consider ourselves
+very badly served by Prince Trask. We therefore command him to return
+to Gram, and render to us account of his administration of our colony
+and realm of Tanith."
+
+After some hasty preparations, Trask recorded a reply. He was sitting
+on a throne, himself, and he wore a crown just as ornate as King Angus',
+and robes of white and black Imhotep furs.
+
+"We, Lucas, Prince of Tanith," he began, "are quite willing to
+acknowledge the suzerainty of the King of Gram, formerly Duke of
+Wardshaven. It is our earnest desire, if possible, to remain at
+peace and friendship with the King of Gram, and to carry on trade
+relations with him and with his subjects.
+
+"We must, however, reject absolutely any efforts on his part to
+dictate the internal policies of our realm of Tanith. It is our
+earnest hope,"--dammit, he'd said "earnest," he should have thought
+of some other word--"that no act on the part of his Majesty the King
+of Gram will create any breach in the friendship existing between
+his realm and ours."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three months later, the next ship, which had left Gram while King
+Angus' summons was still in hyperspace, brought Baron Rathmore.
+Shaking hands with him as he left the landing craft, Trask wanted to
+know if he'd been sent out as the new Viceroy. Rathmore started to
+laugh and ended by cursing vilely.
+
+"No. I've come out to offer my sword to the King of Tanith," he said.
+
+"Prince of Tanith, for the time being," Trask corrected. "The sword,
+however, is most acceptable. I take it you've had all of our blessed
+sovereign you can stomach?"
+
+"Lucas, you have enough ships and men here to take Gram," Rathmore
+said. "Proclaim yourself King of Tanith and then lay claim to the
+throne of Gram and the whole planet would rise for you."
+
+Rathmore had lowered his voice, but even so the open landing stage
+was no place for this sort of talk. He said so, ordered a couple
+of the locals to collect Rathmore's luggage, and got him into a
+hall-car, taking him down to his living quarters. After they were
+in private, Rathmore began again:
+
+"It's more than anybody can stand! There isn't one of the old great
+nobility he hasn't alienated, or one of the minor barons, the
+landholders and industrialists, the people who were always the
+backbone of Gram. And it goes from them down to the commonfolk.
+Assessments on the lords, taxes on the people, inflation to meet
+the taxes, high prices, debased coinage. Everybody's being beggared
+except this rabble of new lords he has around him, and that slut of
+a wife and her greedy kinfolk...."
+
+Trask stiffened. "You're not speaking of Queen Flavia, are you?"
+he asked softly.
+
+Rathmore's mouth opened slightly. "Great Satan, don't you know? No,
+of course not; the news would have come on the same ship I did. Why,
+Angus divorced Flavia. He claimed that she was incapable of giving
+him an heir to the throne. He remarried immediately."
+
+The girl's name meant nothing to Trask; he did know of her father, a
+Baron Valdiva. He was lord of a small estate south of the Ward lands
+and west of Newhaven. Most of his people were out-and-out bandits
+and cattle-rustlers, and he was as close to being one himself as
+he could get.
+
+"Nice family he's married into. A credit to the dignity of the
+throne."
+
+"Yes. You wouldn't know this Lady-Demoiselle Evita; she was only
+seventeen when you left Gram, and hadn't begun to acquire a
+reputation outside her father's lands. She's made up for lost time
+since, though. And she has enough uncles and aunts and cousins and
+ex-lovers and what-not to fill out an infantry regiment, and every
+one of them's at court with both hands out to grab everything they
+can."
+
+"How does Duke Joris like this?" The Duke of Bigglersport was Queen
+Flavia's brother. "I daresay he's less than delighted."
+
+"He's hiring mercenaries, is what he's doing, and buying combat
+contragravity. Lucas, why don't you come back? You have no idea what
+a reputation you have on Gram, now. Everybody would rally to you."
+
+He shook his head, "I have a throne, here on Tanith. On Gram I want
+nothing. I'm sorry for the way Angus turned out, I thought he'd make
+a good King. But since he's made an intolerable King, the lords and
+people of Gram will have to get rid of him for themselves. I have my
+own tasks, here."
+
+Rathmore shrugged. "I was afraid that would be it," he said. "Well,
+I offered my sword; I won't take it back. I can help you in what
+you're doing on Tanith."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The captain of the free Space Viking _Damnthing_ was named
+Roger-fan-Morvill Esthersan, which meant that he was some
+Sword-Worlder's acknowledged bastard by a woman of one of the Old
+Federation planets. His mother's people could have been Nergalers;
+he had coarse black hair, a mahogany-brown skin, and red-brown,
+almost maroon, eyes. He tasted the wine the robot poured for him
+and expressed appreciation, then began unwrapping the parcel he
+had brought in.
+
+"Something I found while raiding on Tetragrammaton," he said.
+"I thought you might like to have it. It was made on Gram."
+
+It was an automatic pistol, with a belt and holster. The leather was
+bisonoid-hide; the buckle of the belt was an oval enameled with a
+crescent, pale blue on black. The pistol was a plain 10-mm military
+model with grooved plastic grips; on the receiver it bore the stamp
+of the House of Hoylbar, the firearms manufacturers of Glaspyth.
+Evidently it was one of the arms Duke Omfray had provided for Andray
+Dunnan's original mercenary company.
+
+"Tetragrammaton?" He glanced over to the Big Board; there was no
+previous report from that planet. "How long ago?"
+
+"I'd say about three hundred hours. I came from there directly, less
+than two hundred and fifty hours. Dunnan's ships had left the planet
+three days before I got there."
+
+That was practically sizzling hot. Well, something like that had to
+happen, sooner or later. The Space Viking was asking him if he knew
+what sort of a place Tetragrammaton was.
+
+Neobarbarian, trying to recivilize in a crude way. Small population,
+concentrated on one continent; farming and fisheries. A little heavy
+industry, in a small way, at a couple of towns. They had some nuclear
+power, introduced a century or so ago by traders from Marduk, one of
+the really civilized planets. They still depended on Marduk for
+fissionables; their export product was an abominably-smelling
+vegetable oil which furnished the base for delicate perfumes, and
+which nobody was ever able to synthesize properly.
+
+"I heard they had steel mills in operation, now," the half-breed
+Space Viking said. "It seems that somebody on Rimmon has just
+re-invented the railroad, and they need more steel than they can
+produce for themselves. I thought I'd raid Tetragrammaton for steel
+and trade it on Rimmon for a load of heaven-tea. When I got there,
+though, the whole planet was in a mess; not raiding, but plain
+wanton destruction. The locals were just digging themselves out of
+it when I landed. Some of them, who didn't think they had anything
+at all left to lose, gave me a fight. I captured a few of them, to
+find out what had happened. One of them had that pistol; he said
+he'd taken it off a Space Viking he'd killed. The ships that raided
+them were the _Enterprise_ and the _Yo-Yo_. I knew you'd want to
+hear about it. I got some of the locals' stories on tape."
+
+"Well, thank you. I'll want to hear those tapes. Now, you say you
+want steel?"
+
+"Well, I haven't any money. That's why I was going to raid
+Tetragrammaton."
+
+"Nifflheim with the money; your cargo's paid for already. This,"
+he said, touching the pistol, "and whatever's on the tapes."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They played off the tapes that evening. They weren't particularly
+informative. The locals who had been interrogated hadn't been in
+actual contact with Dunnan's people except in combat. The man who
+had been carrying the 10-mm Hoylbar was the best witness of the lot,
+and he knew little. He had caught one of them alone, shot him from
+behind with a shotgun, taken his pistol, and then gotten away as
+quickly as he could. They had sent down landing craft, it seemed,
+and said they wanted to trade; then something must have happened,
+nobody knew what, and they had begun a massacre and sacked the town.
+After returning to their ships, they had opened fire with nuclear
+missiles.
+
+"Sounds like Dunnan," Hugh Rathmore said in disgust. "He just went
+kill-crazy. The bad blood of Blackcliffe."
+
+"There are funny things about this," Boake Valkanhayn said. "I'd say
+it was a terror-raid, but who in Gehenna was he trying to terrorize?"
+
+"I wondered about that, too." Harkaman frowned. "This town where he
+landed seems, such as it was, to have been the planetary capital.
+They just landed, pretending friendship, which I can't see why they
+needed to pretend, and then began looting and massacring. There
+wasn't anything of real value there; all they took was what the men
+could carry themselves or stuff into their landing craft, and they
+did that because they have what amounts to a religious taboo
+against landing anywhere and leaving without stealing something.
+The real loot was at these two other towns; a steel mill and big
+stocks of steel at one, and all that skunk-apple oil at the other.
+So what did they do? They dropped a five-megaton bomb on each one,
+and blew both of them to Em-See-Square. That was a terror-raid pure
+and simple, but as Boake inquires, just who were they terrorizing?
+If there were big cities somewhere else on the planet, it would
+figure. But there aren't. They blew out the two biggest cities,
+and all the loot in them."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Then they wanted to terrorize somebody off the planet."
+
+"But nobody'd hear about it off-planet," somebody protested.
+
+"The Mardukans would; they trade with Tetragrammaton," the
+acknowledged bastard of somebody named Morvill said. "They have
+a couple of ships a year there."
+
+"That's right," Trask agreed. "Marduk."
+
+"You mean, you think Dunnan's trying to terrorize _Marduk_?" Valkanhayn
+demanded. "Great Satan, even he isn't crazy enough for that!"
+
+Baron Rathmore started to say something about what Andray Dunnan
+was crazy enough to do, and what his uncle was crazy enough to do.
+It was just one of the cracks he had been making since he'd come
+to Tanith and didn't have to look over his shoulder while he was
+making them.
+
+"I think he is, too," Trask said. "I think that is exactly what he
+is doing. Don't ask me why; as Otto is fond of remarking, he's crazy
+and we aren't, and that gives him an advantage. But what have we
+gotten, since those Gilgameshers told us about his picking up
+Burrik's ship and the _Honest Horris_? Until today, we've heard
+nothing from any other Space Viking. What we have gotten was stories
+from Gilgameshers about raids on planets where they trade, and every
+one of them is also a planet where Marduk ships trade. And in every
+case, there has been little or nothing reported about valuable loot
+taken. The stories are all about wanton and murderous bombings. I
+think Andray Dunnan is making war on Marduk."
+
+"Then he's crazier than his grandfather and his uncle both!"
+Rathmore cried.
+
+"You mean, he's making a string of terror-raids on their trade
+planets, hoping to pull the Mardukan space-navy away from the home
+planet?" Harkaman had stopped being incredulous. "And when he gets
+them all lured away, he'll make a fast raid?"
+
+"That's what I think. Remember our fundamental postulate: Dunnan is
+crazy. Remember how he convinced himself that he was the rightful
+heir to the ducal crown of Wardshaven?" And remember his insane
+passion for Elaine; he pushed that thought hastily from him. "Now,
+he's convinced that he's the greatest Space Viking in history. He
+has to do something worthy of that distinction. When was the last
+time anybody attacked a civilized planet? I don't mean Gilgamesh,
+I mean a planet like Marduk."
+
+"A hundred and twenty years ago; Prince Havilgar of Haulteclere, six
+ships, against Aton. Two ships got back. He didn't. Nobody's tried
+it since," Harkaman said.
+
+"So Dunnan the Great will do it. I hope he tries," he surprised
+himself by adding. "That's provided I find out what happened. Then
+I could stop thinking about him."
+
+There was a time when he had dreaded the possibility that somebody
+else might kill Dunnan before he could.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII
+
+
+Seshat, Obidicut, Lugaluru, Audhumla.
+
+The young man elevated by his father's death in the Dunnan raid to
+the post of hereditary President of the democratic Republic of
+Tetragrammaton had been sure that the Marduk ships which came to
+his planet traded also on those. There had been some difficulty
+about making contact, and the first face-to-face meeting had begun
+in an atmosphere of bitter distrust on his part. They had met out
+of doors; around them, spread wrecked and burned buildings, and
+hastily constructed huts and shelters, and wide spaces of charred
+and slagged rubble.
+
+"They blew up the steel mill here, and the oil-refinery at Jannsboro.
+They bombed and strafed the little farm-towns and villages. They
+scattered radioactives that killed as many as the bombing. And after
+they had gone away, this other ship came."
+
+"The _Damnthing_? She bore the head of a beast with three very big horns?"
+
+"That's the one. They did a little damage, at first. When the
+captain found out what had happened to us, he left some food and
+medicines for us." Roger-fan-Morvill Esthersan hadn't mentioned that.
+
+"Well, we'd like to help you, if we can. Do you have nuclear power?
+We can give you a little equipment. Just remember it of us, when
+you're back on your feet; we'll be back to trade later. But don't
+think you owe us anything. The man who did this to you is my enemy.
+Now, I want to talk to every one of your people who can tell me
+anything at all...."
+
+Seshat was the closest; they went there first. They were too late.
+Seshat had had it already, and on the evidence of the radioactivity
+counters, not too long ago. Four hundred hours at most. There had
+been two hellburners; the cities on which they had fallen were
+still-smoking pits literally burned into the ground and the bedrock
+below, at the center of five hundred mile radii of slag and lava and
+scorched earth and burned forests. There had been a planetbuster; it
+had started a major earthquake. And half a dozen thermonuclears.
+There were probably quite a few survivors--a human planetary
+population is extremely hard to exterminate completely--but within
+a century they'd be back to the loincloth and the stone hatchet.
+
+"We don't even know Dunnan did it, personally," Paytrik Morland said.
+"For all we know, he's down in an air-tight cave city on some planet
+nobody ever heard of, sitting on a golden throne, surrounded by a harem."
+
+He had begun to suspect that Dunnan was doing something of just the
+sort. The Greatest Space Viking of History would naturally found a
+Space Viking empire.
+
+"An emperor goes out to look his empire over, now and then; I don't
+spend all my time on Tanith. Say we try Audhumla next. It's the
+farthest away. We might get there while he's still shooting up
+Obidicut and Lugaluru. Guatt, figure us a jump for it."
+
+When the colored turbulence washed away and the screen cleared,
+Audhumla looked like Tanith or Khepera or Amaterasu or any other
+Terra-type planet, a big disk brilliant with reflected sunlight and
+glowing with starlit and moonlit atmosphere on the other. There was
+a single rather large moon, and, in the telescopic screen, the usual
+markings of seas and continents and rivers and mountain-ranges. But
+there was nothing to show....
+
+Oh, yes; lights on the darkened side, and from the size they must be
+vast cities. All the available data for Audhumla was long out of
+date; a considerable civilization must have developed in the last
+half dozen centuries.
+
+Another light appeared, a hard blue-white spark that spread into a
+larger, less brilliant yellow light. At the same time, all the
+alarm-devices in the command-room went into a pandemonium of jangling
+and flashing and squawking and howling and shouting. Radiation.
+Energy-release. Contragravity distortion effects. Infra-red output. A
+welter of indecipherable radio and communication-screen signals. Radar
+and scanner-ray beams from the planet.
+
+Trask's fist began hurting; he found that he had been pounding
+the desk in front of him with it. He stopped it.
+
+"We caught him, we caught him!" he was yelling hoarsely. "Full speed
+in, continuous acceleration, as much as we can stand. We'll worry
+about decelerating when we're in shooting distance."
+
+The planet grew steadily larger; Karffard was taking him at his word
+about continuous acceleration. There'd be a Gehenna of a bill to pay
+when they started decelerating. On the planet, more bombs were going
+off just outside atmosphere beyond the sunset line.
+
+"Ship observed. Altitude about a hundred to five hundred
+miles--hundreds, not thousands--35 deg. North Latitude, 15 deg. west of
+the sunset line. Ship is under fire, bomb explosions near her,"
+a voice whooped.
+
+Somebody else was yelling that the city lights were really burning
+cities, or burning forests. The first voice, having stopped, broke
+in again:
+
+"Ship is visible in telescopic screen, just at the sunset line. And
+there's another ship detected but not visible, somewhere around the
+equator, and a third one somewhere out of sight, we can just get the
+fringe of her contragravity field around the planet."
+
+That meant there were two sides, and a fight. Unless Dunnan had
+picked up a third ship, somewhere. The telescopic view shifted;
+for a moment the planet was completely off-screen, and then its
+curvature came into the screen against a star-scattered background.
+They were almost in to two thousand miles now; Karffard was yelling
+to stop acceleration and trying to put the ship into a spiral orbit.
+Suddenly they caught a glimpse of one of the ships.
+
+"She's in trouble." That was Paul Koreff's voice. "She's leaking air
+and water vapor like crazy."
+
+"Well, is she a good guy or a bad guy?" Morland was yelling back, as
+though Koreff's spectroscopes could distinguish. Koreff ignored that.
+
+"Another ship making signal," he said. "She's the one coming up over
+the equator. Sword-World impulse code; her communication-screen
+combination, and an identify-yourself."
+
+Karffard punched out the combination as Koreff furnished it. While
+Trask was desperately willing his face into immobility, the screen
+lighted. It wasn't Andray Dunnan; that was a disappointment. It was
+almost as good, though. His henchman, Sir Nevil Ormm.
+
+"Well, Sir Nevil! A pleasant surprise," he heard himself saying.
+"We last met on the terrace at Karvall House, did we not?"
+
+For once, the paper-white face of Andray Dunnan's _ame damnee_
+showed expression, but whether it was fear, surprise, shock, hatred,
+anger, or what combination of them, Trask could no more than guess.
+
+"Trask! Satan curse you...!"
+
+Then the screen went blank. In the telescopic screen, the other ship
+came on unfalteringly. Paul Koreff, who had gotten more data on
+mass, engine energy-output and dimensions, was identifying her as
+the _Enterprise_.
+
+"Well, go for her! Give her everything!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They didn't need the order; Vann Larch was speaking rapidly into his
+hand-phone, and Alvyn Karffard was hurling his voice all over the
+_Nemesis_, warning of sudden deceleration and direction change, and
+while he was speaking, things in the command room began sliding. In
+the telescopic screen, the other ship was plainly visible; he could
+see the oval patch of black with the blue crescent, and in his
+screen Dunnan would be seeing the sword-impaled skull of the
+_Nemesis_.
+
+If only he could be sure Dunnan was there to see it. If it had only
+been Dunnan's face, instead of Ormm's, that he had seen in the
+screen. As it was, he couldn't be sure, and if one of the missiles
+that were already going out made a lucky hit, he might never be
+sure. He didn't care who killed Dunnan, or how. All he wanted was
+to know that Dunnan's death had set him free from a self-assumed
+obligation that was now meaningless to him.
+
+The _Enterprise_ launched counter-missiles; so did the _Nemesis_.
+There were momentarily unbearable flashes of pure energy and from
+them globes of incandescence spread and vanished. Something must
+have gotten through; red lights flashed on the damage board. It had
+been something heavy enough even to jolt the huge mass of the
+_Nemesis_. At the same time, the other ship took a hit from
+something that would have vaporized her had she not been armored in
+collapsium. Then, as they passed close together, guns hammered back
+and forth along with missiles, and then the _Enterprise_ was out of
+sight around the horizon.
+
+Another ship, the size of Otto Harkaman's _Corisande II_, was
+approaching; she bore a tapering, red-nailed feminine hand dangling
+a planet by a string. They rushed toward each other, planting a
+garden of evanescent fire-flowers between them; they pounded one
+another with guns, and then they sped apart. At the same time, Paul
+Koreff was picking up an impulse-code signal from the third,
+crippled, ship; a screen combination. Trask punched it out as
+he received it.
+
+A man in space armor was looking out of the screen. That was bad,
+if they had to suit up in the command room. They still had air;
+his helmet was off, but it was attached and hinged back. On his
+breastplate was a device of a dragonlike beast perched with its tail
+around a planet, and a crown above. He had a thin, high-cheeked
+face, with a vertical wrinkle between his eyes, and a clipped blond
+mustache.
+
+"Who are you, stranger. You're fighting my enemies; does that make
+you a friend."
+
+"I'm a friend of anybody who owns Andray Dunnan his enemy.
+Sword-World ship _Nemesis_; I'm Prince Lucas Trask of Tanith,
+commanding."
+
+"Royal Mardukan ship _Victrix_." The thin-faced man gave a wry
+laugh. "Not been living up to her name so well. I'm Prince Simon
+Bentrik, commanding."
+
+"Are you still battle-worthy?"
+
+"We can fire about half our guns; we still have a few missiles left.
+Seventy per cent of the ship's sealed off, and we've been holed in a
+dozen places. We have power enough for lift and some steering-way.
+We can't make lateral way except at the expense of lift."
+
+Which made the _Victrix_ practically a stationary target. He yelled
+over his shoulder at Karffard to cut speed all he could without
+tearing things apart.
+
+"When that cripple comes into view, start circling around her. Get
+into a tight circle above her." He turned back to the man in the
+screen. "If we can get ourselves slowed down enough, we'll do all we
+can to cover you."
+
+"All you can is all you can; thank you, Prince Trask."
+
+"Here comes the _Enterprise_!" Karffard shouted, with obscenely
+blasphemous embellishments. "She hairpinned on us."
+
+"Well, do something about her!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Vann Larch was already doing it. The _Enterprise_ had taken damage
+in the last exchange; Koreff's spectroscopes showed her halo-ed with
+air and water vapor. Her instruments would be getting the same
+story from the _Nemesis_; wedge-shaped segments extending six to
+eight decks in were sealed off in several places. Then the only
+thing that could be seen with certainty was the blaze of mutually
+destroying missiles between. The short-range gun duel began and
+ended as they passed.
+
+In the screen, he had seen a fat round-nosed thing come up from the
+_Victrix_, curving far out ahead of the passing _Enterprise_. She
+was almost out of sight around the planet when she ran head-on into
+it, and vanished in an awesome blaze. For a moment, he thought she
+had been destroyed, then she lurched into sight and went around the
+curvature of Audhumla.
+
+Trask and the Mardukan were shaking hands with themselves at each
+other in their screens; everybody in the _Nemesis_ command room was
+screaming: "Well shot, _Victrix_! Well shot!"
+
+Then the _Yo-Yo_ was coming around again, and Vann Larch was saying,
+"Gehenna with this fooling around! I'll fix the expurgated
+unprintability!"
+
+He yelled orders--a jumble of code letters and numbers--and things
+began going out. Most of them blew up in space. Then the _Yo-Yo_
+blew up, very quietly, as things do where there is no air to carry
+shock- and sound-waves, but very brilliantly. There was brief
+daylight all over the night side of the planet.
+
+"That was our planetbuster," Larch said. "I don't know what we'll
+use on Dunnan."
+
+"I didn't know we had one," Trask admitted.
+
+"Otto had a couple built on Beowulf. The Beowulfers are good nuclear
+weaponeers."
+
+The _Enterprise_ came back, hastily, to see what had blown up. Larch
+put off another entertainment of small stuff, with a fifty megaton
+thermonuclear, viewscreen-piloted, among them. It had its own
+arsenal of small missiles, and it got through. In the telescopic
+screen, a jagged hole was visible just below the equator of the
+_Enterprise_, the edges curling outward. Something, possibly a heavy
+missile in an open tube, ready for launching, had gone off inside
+her. What the inside of the ship was like, or how many of her
+company were still alive, was hard to guess.
+
+There were some, and her launchers were still spewing out missiles.
+They were intercepted and blew up. The hull of the _Enterprise_
+bulked huge in the guidance-screen of the missile and filled it; the
+jagged crater that had obliterated the bottom of Dunnan's blue
+crescent blazon spread to fill the whole screen. The screen went
+milky white as the pickup went off.
+
+All the other screens blazed briefly, until their filters went on.
+Even afterward, they glared like the cloud-veiled sun of Gram at
+high noon. Finally, when the light-intensity had dropped and the
+filters went off, there was nothing left of the _Enterprise_ but an
+orange haze.
+
+Somebody--Paytrik, Baron Morland, he saw--was pounding him on the
+back and screaming inarticulately in his ear. A dozen space-armored
+officers with planet-perched dragons on their breasts were crowding
+beside Prince Bentrik in the screen from the _Victrix_, whooping
+like drunken bisonoid-herders on payday night.
+
+"I wonder," he said, almost inaudibly, "if I'll ever know if Andray
+Dunnan was on that ship."
+
+
+
+
+XIX
+
+
+Prince Trask of Tanith and Prince Simon Bentrik were dining together
+on an upper terrace of what had originally been the mansion house of
+a Federation period plantation. It had been a number of other things
+since; now it was the municipal building of a town that had grown
+around it, which had, somehow, escaped undamaged from the Dunnan
+blitz. Normally about five or ten thousand, the place was now jammed
+with almost fifty thousand homeless refugees from half a dozen other
+towns that had been destroyed, overflowing the buildings and
+crowding into a sprawling camp of hastily built huts and shelters,
+and already permanent buildings were going up to accommodate them.
+Everybody, locals, Mardukans and Space Vikings, had been busy with
+the work of relief and reconstruction; this was the first meal the
+two commanders had been able to share in any leisure at all. Prince
+Bentrik's enjoyment of it was somewhat impaired by the fact that
+from where he sat he could see, in the distance, the sphere of his
+disabled ship.
+
+"I doubt we can get her off-planet again, let alone into hyperspace."
+
+"Well, we'll get you and your crew to Marduk in the _Nemesis_,
+then." They were both speaking loudly, above the clank and clatter
+of machinery below. "I hope you didn't think I'd leave you stranded
+here."
+
+"I don't know how either of us will be received. Space Vikings
+haven't been exactly popular on Marduk, lately. They may thank you
+for bringing me back to stand trial," Bentrik said bitterly. "Why,
+I'd have anybody shot who let his ship get caught as I did mine.
+Those two were down in atmosphere before I knew they'd come out of
+hyperspace."
+
+"I think they were down on the planet before your ship arrived."
+
+"Oh, that's ridiculous, Prince Trask!" the Mardukan cried. "You
+can't hide a ship on a planet. Not from the kind of instruments we
+have in the Royal Navy."
+
+"We have pretty fair detection ourselves," Trask reminded him.
+"There's one place where you can do it. At the bottom of an ocean,
+with a thousand or so feet of water over her. That's where I was
+going to hide the _Nemesis_, if I got here ahead of Dunnan."
+
+Prince Bentrik's fork stopped half way to his mouth. He lowered it
+slowly to his plate. That was a theory he'd like to accept, if he
+could.
+
+"But the locals. They didn't know about it."
+
+"They wouldn't. They have no off-planet detection of their own. Come
+in directly over the ocean, out of the sun, and nobody'd see the ship."
+
+"Is that a regular Space Viking trick?"
+
+"No. I invented it myself, on the way from Seshat. But if Dunnan
+wanted to ambush your ship, he'd have thought of it, too. It's the
+only practical way to do it."
+
+Dunnan, or Nevil Ormm; he wished he knew, and was afraid he would go
+on wishing all his life.
+
+Bentrik started to pick up his fork again, changed his mind, and
+sipped from his wineglass instead.
+
+"You may find you're quite welcome on Marduk, at that," he said.
+"These raids have only been a serious problem in the last four
+years. I believe, as you do, that this enemy of yours is responsible
+for all of them. We have half the Royal Navy out now, patrolling our
+trade-planets. Even if he wasn't aboard the _Enterprise_ when you
+blew her up, you've put a name on him and can tell us a good deal
+about him." He set down the wineglass. "Why, if it weren't so utterly
+ridiculous, one might even think he was making war on Marduk."
+
+From Trask's viewpoint, it wasn't ridiculous at all. He merely
+mentioned that Andray Dunnan was psychotic and let it go at that.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The _Victrix_ was not completely unrepairable, although quite beyond
+the resources at hand. A fully equipped engineer-ship from Marduk
+could patch her hull and replace her Dillinghams and her Abbot
+lift-and-drive engines and make her temporarily spaceworthy, until
+she could be gotten to a shipyard. They concentrated on repairing
+the _Nemesis_, and in another two weeks she was ready for the voyage.
+
+The six hundred hour trip to Marduk passed pleasantly enough. The
+Mardukan officers were good company, and found their Space Viking
+opposite numbers equally so. The two crews had become used to
+working together on Audhumla, and mingled amicably off watch,
+interesting themselves in each other's hobbies and listening avidly
+to tales of each other's home planets. The Space Vikings were
+surprised and disappointed at the somewhat lower intellectual level
+of the Mardukans. They couldn't understand that; Marduk was supposed
+to be a civilized planet, wasn't it? The Mardukans were just as
+surprised, and inclined to be resentful, that the Space Vikings all
+acted and talked like officers. Hearing of it, Prince Bentrik was
+also puzzled. Fo'c'sle hands on a Mardukan ship belonged definitely
+to the lower orders.
+
+"There's still too much free land and free opportunity on the
+Sword-Worlds," Trask explained. "Nobody does much bowing and
+scraping to the class above him; he's too busy trying to shove
+himself up into it. And the men who ship out as Space Vikings are
+the least class-conscious of the lot. Think my men may have trouble
+on Marduk about that? They'll all insist on doing their drinking in
+the swankiest places in town."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"No. I don't think so. Everybody will be so amazed that Space Vikings
+aren't twelve feet tall, with three horns like a Zarathustra damnthing
+and a spiked tail like a Fafnir mantichore that they won't even notice
+anything less. Might do some good, in the long run. Crown Prince Edvard
+will like your Space Vikings. He's much opposed to class distinctions
+and caste prejudices. Says they have to be eliminated before we can
+make democracy really work."
+
+The Mardukans talked a lot about democracy. They thought well of it;
+their government was a representative democracy. It was also a
+hereditary monarchy, if that made any kind of sense. Trask's efforts
+to explain the political and social structure of the Sword-Worlds
+met the same incomprehension from Bentrik.
+
+"Why, it sounds like feudalism to me!"
+
+"That's right; that's what it is. A king owes his position to the
+support of his great nobles; they owe theirs to their barons and
+landholding knights; they owe theirs to their people. There are
+limits beyond which none of them can go; after that, their vassals
+turn on them."
+
+"Well, suppose the people of some barony rebel? Won't the king send
+troops to support the baron?"
+
+"What troops? Outside a personal guard and enough men to police the
+royal city and hold the crown lands, the king has no troops. If he
+wants troops, he has to get them from his great nobles; they have to
+get them from their vassal barons, who raise them by calling out
+their people." That was another source of dissatisfaction with King
+Angus of Gram; he had been augmenting his forces by hiring
+off-planet mercenaries. "And the people won't help some other baron
+oppress his people; it might be their turn next."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"You mean, the people are armed?" Prince Bentrik was incredulous.
+
+"Great Satan, aren't yours?" Prince Trask was equally surprised.
+"Then your democracy's a farce, and the people are only free on
+sufferance. If their ballots aren't secured by arms, they're
+worthless. Who has the arms on your planet?"
+
+"Why, the Government."
+
+"You mean the King?"
+
+Prince Bentrik was shocked. Certainly not; horrid idea. That would
+be ... why, it would be _despotism_! Besides, the King wasn't the
+Government, at all; the Government ruled in the King's name. There
+was the Assembly; the Chamber of Representatives, and the Chamber of
+Delegates. The people elected the Representatives, and the
+Representatives elected the Delegates, and the Delegates elected the
+Chancellor. Then, there was the Prime Minister; he was appointed by
+the King, but the King had to appoint him from the party holding the
+most seats in the Chamber of Representatives, and he appointed the
+Ministers, who handled the executive work of the Government, only
+their subordinates in the different Ministries were career-officials
+who were selected by competitive examination for the bottom jobs and
+promoted up the bureaucratic ladder from there.
+
+This left Trask wondering if the Mardukan constitution hadn't been
+devised by Goldberg, the legendary Old Terran inventor who always
+did everything the hard way. It also left him wondering just how in
+Gehenna the Government of Marduk ever got anything done.
+
+Maybe it didn't. Maybe that was what saved Marduk from having a real
+despotism.
+
+"Well, what prevents the Government from enslaving the people?
+The people can't; you just told me that they aren't armed, and
+the Government is."
+
+He continued, pausing now and then for breath, to catalogue every
+tyranny he had ever heard of, from those practiced by the Terran
+Federation before the Big War to those practiced at Eglonsby on
+Amaterasu by Pedrosan Pedro. A few of the very mildest were pushing
+the nobles and people of Gram to revolt against Angus I.
+
+"And in the end," he finished, "the Government would be the only
+property owner and the only employer on the planet, and everybody
+else would be slaves, working at assigned tasks, wearing
+Government-issued clothing and eating Government food, their
+children educated as the Government prescribes and trained for jobs
+selected for them by the Government, never reading a book or seeing
+a play or thinking a thought that the Government had not
+approved...."
+
+Most of the Mardukans were laughing, now. Some of them were accusing
+him of being just too utterly ridiculous.
+
+"Why, the people _are_ the Government. The people would not
+legislate themselves into slavery."
+
+He wished Otto Harkaman were there. All he knew of history was the
+little he had gotten from reading some of Harkaman's books, and the
+long, rambling conversations aboard ship in hyperspace or in the
+evenings at Rivington. But Harkaman, he was sure, could have
+furnished hundreds of instances, on scores of planets and over ten
+centuries of time, in which people had done exactly that and hadn't
+known what they were doing, even after it was too late.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"They have something about like that on Aton," one of the Mardukan
+officers said.
+
+"Oh, Aton; that's a dictatorship, pure and simple. That Planetary
+Nationalist gang got into control fifty years ago, during the crisis
+after the war with Baldur...."
+
+"They were voted into power by the people, weren't they?"
+
+"Yes; they were," Prince Bentrik said gravely. "It was an emergency
+measure, and they were given emergency powers. Once they were in,
+they made the emergency permanent."
+
+"That couldn't happen on Marduk!" a young nobleman declared.
+
+"It could if Zaspar Makann's party wins control of the Assembly at
+the next election," somebody else said.
+
+"Oh, then Marduk's safe! The sun'll go nova first," one of the
+junior Royal Navy officers said.
+
+After that, they began talking about women, a subject any spaceman
+will drop any other subject to discuss.
+
+Trask made a mental note of the name of Zaspar Makann, and took
+occasion to bring it up in conversation with his shipboard guests.
+Every time he talked about Makann to two or more Mardukans, he heard
+at least three or more opinions about the man. He was a political
+demagogue; on that everybody agreed. After that, opinions diverged.
+
+Makann was a raving lunatic, and all the followers he had were a
+handful of lunatics like him. He might be a lunatic, but he had a
+dangerously large following. Well, not so large; maybe they'd pick
+up a seat or so in the Assembly, but that was doubtful--not enough
+of them in any representative district to elect an Assemblyman. He
+was just a smart crook, milking a lot of half-witted plebeians for
+all he could get out of them. Not just plebes, either; a lot of
+industrialists were secretly financing him, in hope that he would
+help them break up the labor unions. You're nuts; everybody knew the
+labor unions were backing him, hoping he'd scare the employers into
+granting concessions. You're both nuts; he was backed by the
+mercantile interests; they were hoping he'd run the Gilgameshers
+off the planet.
+
+Well, that was one thing you had to give him credit for. He wanted
+to run out the Gilgameshers. Everybody was in favor of that.
+
+Now, Trask could remember something he'd gotten from Harkaman.
+There had been Hitler, back at the end of the First Century
+Pre-Atomic; hadn't he gotten into power because everybody was
+in favor of running out the Christians, or the Moslems, or the
+Albigensians, or somebody?
+
+
+
+
+XX
+
+
+Marduk had three moons; a big one, fifteen hundred miles in
+diameter, and two insignificant twenty-mile chunks of rock. The big
+one was fortified, and a couple of ships were in orbit around it.
+The _Nemesis_ was challenged as she emerged from her last hyperjump;
+both ships broke orbit and came out to meet her, and several more
+were detected lifting away from the planet.
+
+Prince Bentrik took the communication screen, and immediately
+encountered difficulties. The commandant, even after the situation
+had been explained twice to him, couldn't understand. A Royal Navy
+fleet unit knocked out in a battle with Space Vikings was bad
+enough, but being rescued and brought to Marduk by another Space
+Viking simply didn't make sense. He then screened the Royal Palace
+at Malverton, on the planet; first he was icily polite to somebody
+several echelons below him in the peerage, and then respectfully
+polite to somebody he addressed as Prince Vandarvant. Finally, after
+some minutes' wait, a frail, white-haired man in a little black
+cap-of-maintenance appeared in the screen. Prince Bentrik instantly
+sprang to his feet. So did all the other Mardukans in the command
+room.
+
+"Your Majesty! I am most deeply honored!"
+
+"Are you all right, Simon?" the old gentleman asked solicitously.
+"They haven't done anything to you, have they?"
+
+"Saved my life, and my men's, and treated me like a friend and
+a comrade, Your Majesty. Have I your permission to present,
+informally, their commander, Prince Trask of Tanith?"
+
+"Indeed you may, Simon. I owe the gentleman my deepest thanks."
+
+"His Majesty, Mikhyl the Eighth, Planetary King of Marduk," Prince
+Bentrik said. "His Highness, Lucas, Prince Trask, Planetary Viceroy
+of Tanith for his Majesty Angus the First of Gram."
+
+The elderly monarch bowed his head slightly; Trask bowed a little
+more deeply, from the waist.
+
+"I am very happy, Prince Trask, first, I confess, at the safe return
+of my kinsman Prince Bentrik, and then at the honor of meeting one
+in the confidence of my fellow sovereign King Angus of Gram. I will
+never be ungrateful for what you did for my cousin and for his
+officers and men. You must stay at the Palace while you are on this
+planet; I am giving orders for your reception, and I wish you to be
+formally presented to me this evening." He hesitated briefly. "Gram;
+that is one of the Sword-Worlds, is it not?" Another brief
+hesitation. "Are you really a Space Viking, Prince Trask?"
+
+Maybe he'd expected Space Vikings to have three horns and a spiked
+tail and stand twelve feet tall, himself.
+
+It took several hours for the _Nemesis_ to get into orbit. Bentrik
+spent most of them in a screen-booth, and emerged visibly relieved.
+
+"Nobody's going to be sticky about what happened on Audhumla," he
+told Trask. "There will be a Board of Inquiry. I'm afraid I had to
+mix you up in that. It's not only about the action on Audhumla;
+everybody from the Space Minister down wants to hear what you know
+about this fellow Dunnan. Like yourself, we all hope he went to
+Em-See-Square along with his flagship, but we can't take it for
+granted. We have over a dozen trade-planets to protect, and he's
+hit more than half of them already."
+
+The process of getting into orbit took them around the planet
+several times, and it was a more impressive spectacle at each
+circuit. Of course, Marduk had a population of almost two billion,
+and had been civilized, with no hiatus of Neobarbarism, since it
+had first been colonized in the Fourth Century. Even so, the Space
+Vikings were amazed--and stubbornly refusing to show it--at what
+they saw in the telescopic screens.
+
+"Look at that city!" Paytrik Morland whispered. "We talk about the
+civilized planets, but I never realized they were anything like
+this. Why, this makes Excalibur look like Tanith!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The city was Malverton, the capital; like any city of a
+contragravity-using people, it lay in a rough circle of buildings
+towering out of green interspaces, surrounded by the smaller circles
+of spaceports and industrial suburbs. The difference was that any of
+these were as large as Camelot on Excalibur or four Wardshavens on
+Gram, and Malverton itself was almost half the size of the whole
+barony of Traskon.
+
+"They aren't any more civilized that we are, Paytrik. There are just
+more of them. If there were two billion people on Gram--which I hope
+there never will be--Gram would have cities like this, too."
+
+One thing; the government of a planet like Marduk would have to
+be something more elaborate than the loose feudalism of the
+Sword-Worlds. Maybe this Goldberg-ocracy of theirs had been forced
+upon them by the sheer complexity of the population and its
+problems.
+
+Alvyn Karffard took a quick look around him to make sure none
+of the Mardukans were in earshot.
+
+"I don't care how many people they have," he said. "Marduk can be
+had. A wolf never cares how many sheep there are in a flock. With
+twenty ships, we could take this planet like we took Eglonsby.
+There'd be losses coming in, sure, but after we were in and down,
+we'd have it."
+
+"Where would we get twenty ships?"
+
+Tanith, at a pinch, could muster five or six, counting the free
+Space Vikings who used the base facilities; they would have to leave
+a couple to hold the planet. Beowulf had one, and another almost
+completed, and now there was an Amaterasu ship. But to assemble a
+Space Viking armada of twenty.... He shook his head. The real reason
+why Space Vikings had never raided a civilized planet successfully
+had always been their inability to combine under one command in
+sufficient strength.
+
+Besides, he didn't want to raid Marduk. A raid, if successful, would
+yield immense treasures, but cause a hundred, even a thousand, times
+as much destruction, and he didn't want to destroy anything
+civilized.
+
+The landing stages of the palace were crowded when he and Prince
+Bentrik landed, and, at a discreet distance, swarms of air-vehicles
+circled, creating a control problem for the police. Parting from
+Bentrik, he was escorted to the suite prepared for him; it was
+luxurious in the extreme but scarcely above Sword-World standards.
+There were a surprising number of human servants, groveling and
+fawning and getting underfoot and doing work robots could have been
+doing better. What robots there were were inefficient, and much work
+and ingenuity had been lavished on efforts to copy human form to the
+detriment of function.
+
+After getting rid of most of the superfluous servants, he put on a
+screen and began sampling the newscasts. There were telescopic views
+of the _Nemesis_ from some craft on orbit nearby, and he watched the
+officers and men of the _Victrix_ being disembarked; there were
+other views of their landing at some naval installation on the
+ground, and he could see reporters being chevied away by Navy
+ground-police. And there was a wide range of commentary opinion.
+
+The Government had already denied that, (1) Prince Bentrik had
+captured the _Nemesis_ and brought her in as a prize, and, (2) the
+Space Vikings had captured Prince Bentrik and were holding him for
+ransom. Beyond that, the Government was trying to sit on the whole
+story, and the Opposition was hinting darkly at corrupt deals and
+sinister plots. Prince Bentrik arrived in the midst of an
+impassioned tirade against pusillanimous traitors surrounding his
+Majesty who were betraying Marduk to the Space Vikings.
+
+"Why doesn't your Government publish the facts and put a stop to
+that nonsense?" Trask asked.
+
+"Oh, let them rave," Bentrik replied. "The longer the Government
+waits, the more they'll be ridiculed when the facts are published."
+
+Or, the more people will be convinced that the Government had
+something to hush up, and had to take time to construct a plausible
+story. He kept the thought to himself. It was their government; how
+they mismanaged it was their own business. He found that there was
+no bartending robot; he had to have a human servant bring drinks. He
+made up his mind to have a few of the _Nemesis_ robots sent down to him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The formal presentation would be in the evening; there would be a
+dinner first, and because Trask had not yet been formally presented,
+he couldn't dine with the King, but because he was, or claimed to
+be, Viceroy of Tanith, he ranked as a chief of state and would dine
+with the Crown Prince, to whom there would be an informal
+introduction first.
+
+This took place in a small ante-chamber off the banquet hall; the
+Crown Prince and Crown Princess and Princess Bentrik were there when
+they arrived. The Crown Prince was a man of middle age, graying at
+the temples, with the glassy stare that betrayed contact lenses. The
+resemblance between him and his father was apparent; both had the
+same studious and impractical expression, and might have been
+professors on the same university faculty. He shook hands with
+Trask, assuring him of the gratitude of the Court and Royal Family.
+
+"You know, Simon is next in succession, after myself and my little
+daughter," he said. "That's too close to take chances with him." He
+turned to Bentrik. "I'm afraid this is your last space adventure,
+Simon. You'll have to be a spaceport spaceman from now on."
+
+"I shan't be sorry," Princess Bentrik said. "And if anybody owes
+Prince Trask gratitude, I do." She pressed his hands warmly. "Prince
+Trask, my son wants to meet you, very badly. He's ten years old, and
+he thinks Space Vikings are romantic heroes."
+
+"He should be one, for a while."
+
+He should just see a planet Space Vikings had raided.
+
+Most of the people at the upper end of the table were
+diplomats--ambassadors from Odin and Baldur and Isis and Ishtar and
+Aton and the other civilized worlds. No doubt they hadn't actually
+expected horns and a spiked tail, or even tattooing and a nose ring,
+but after all, Space Vikings were just some sort of Neobarbarians,
+weren't they? On the other hand, they had all seen views and gotten
+descriptions of the _Nemesis_, and had heard about the ship-action
+on Audhumla, and this Prince Trask--a Space Viking prince; that
+sounded civilized enough--had saved a life with only three other
+lives, one almost at an end, between it and the throne. And they had
+heard about the screen conversation with King Mikhyl. So they were
+courteous through the meal, and tried to get as close as possible to
+him in the procession to the throne room.
+
+King Mikhyl wore a golden crown topped by the planetary emblem,
+which must have weighed twice as much as a combat helmet, and
+fur-edged robes that would weigh more than a suit of space armor.
+They weren't nearly as ornate, though, as the regalia of King Angus
+I of Gram. He rose to clasp Prince Bentrik's hand, calling him "dear
+cousin," and congratulating him on his gallant fight and fortunate
+escape. That knocks any court-martial talk on the head, Trask
+thought. He remained standing to shake hands with Trask, calling him
+"valued friend to me and my house." First person singular; that must
+be causing some lifted eyebrows.
+
+Then the King sat down, and the rest of the roomful filed up onto
+the dais to be received, and finally it was over and the king rose
+and proceeded, followed by his immediate suite between the bowing
+and curtsying court and out the wide doors. After a decent interval,
+Crown Prince Edvard escorted him and Prince Bentrik down the same
+route, the others falling in behind, and across the hall to the
+ballroom, where there was soft music and refreshments. It wasn't too
+unlike a court reception on Excalibur, except that the drinks and
+canapes were being dispensed by human servants.
+
+He was wondering what sort of court functions Angus the First of
+Gram was holding by now.
+
+After half an hour, a posse of court functionaries approached and
+informed him that it had pleased his Majesty to command Prince Trask
+to attend him in his private chambers. There was an audible gasp at
+this; both Prince Bentrik and the Crown Prince were trying not to
+grin too broadly. Evidently this didn't happen too often. He followed
+the functionaries from the ballroom, and the eyes of everybody else
+followed him.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Old King Mikhyl received him alone, in a small, comfortably shabby
+room behind vast ones of incredible splendor. He wore fur-lined
+slippers and a loose robe with a fur collar, and his little black
+cap-of-maintenance. He was standing when Trask entered; when the
+guards closed the door and left them alone, he beckoned Trask to
+a couple of chairs, with a low table, on which were decanters and
+glasses and cigars, between.
+
+"It's a presumption on royal authority to summon you from the
+ballroom," he began, after they had seated themselves and filled
+glasses. "You are quite the cynosure, you know."
+
+"I'm grateful to Your Majesty. It's both comfortable and quiet here,
+and I can sit down. Your Majesty was the center of attention in the
+throne room, yet I seemed to detect a look of relief as you left it."
+
+"I try to hide it, as much as possible." The old King took off the
+little gold-circled cap and hung it on the back of his chair.
+"Majesty can be rather wearying, you know."
+
+So he could come here and put it off. Trask felt that some gesture
+should be made on his own part. He unfastened the dress-dagger from
+his belt and laid it on the table. The King nodded.
+
+"Now, we can be a couple of honest tradesmen, our shops closed for
+the evening, relaxing over our wine and tobacco," he said. "Eh,
+Goodman Lucas?"
+
+It seemed like an initiation into a secret society whose ritual he
+must guess at step by step.
+
+"Right, Goodman Mikhyl."
+
+They lifted their glasses to each other and drank; Goodman Mikhyl
+offered cigars, and Goodman Lucas held a light for him.
+
+"I hear a few hard things about your trade, Goodman Lucas."
+
+"All true, and mostly understated. We're professional murderers and
+robbers, as one of my fellow tradesmen says. The worst of it is that
+robbery and murder become just that: a trade, like servicing robots
+or selling groceries."
+
+"Yet you fought two other Space Vikings to cover my cousin's
+crippled _Victrix_. Why?"
+
+So he must tell his tale, so worn and smooth, again. King Mikhyl's
+cigar went out while he listened.
+
+"And you have been hunting him ever since? And now, you can't be
+sure whether you killed him or not?"
+
+"I'm afraid I didn't. The man in the screen is the only man Dunnan
+can really trust. One or the other would stay wherever he has his
+base all the time."
+
+"And when you do kill him; what then?"
+
+"I'll go on trying to make a civilized planet of Tanith. Sooner or
+later, I'll have one quarrel too many with King Angus, and then we
+will be our Majesty Lucas the First of Tanith, and we will sit on a
+throne and receive our subjects. And I'll be glad when I can get my
+crown off and talk to a few men who call me 'shipmate,' instead of
+'Your Majesty.'"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Well, it would violate professional ethics for me to advise a
+subject to renounce his sovereign, of course, but that might be an
+excellent thing. You met the ambassador from Ithavoll at dinner, did
+you not? Three centuries ago, Ithavoll was a colony of Marduk--it
+seems we can't afford colonies, any more--and it seceded from us.
+Ithavoll was then a planet like your Tanith seems to be. Today, it
+is a civilized world, and one of Marduk's best friends. You know,
+sometimes I think a few lights are coming on again, here and there
+in the Old Federation. If so, you Space Vikings are helping to light
+them."
+
+"You mean the planets we use as bases, and the things we teach the
+locals?"
+
+"That, too, of course. Civilization needs civilized technologies.
+But they have to be used for civilized ends. Do you know anything
+about a Space Viking raid on Aton, over a century ago?"
+
+"Six ships from Haulteclere; four destroyed, the other two returned
+damaged and without booty."
+
+The King of Marduk nodded.
+
+"That raid saved civilization on Aton. There were four great
+nations; the two greatest were at the brink of war, and the others
+were waiting to pounce on the exhausted victor and then fight each
+other for the spoils. The Space Vikings forced them to unite. Out of
+that temporary alliance came the League for Common Defense, and from
+that the Planetary Republic. The Republic's a dictatorship, now, and
+just between Goodman Mikhyl and Goodman Lucas it's a nasty one and
+our Majesty's Government doesn't like it at all. It will be smashed
+sooner or later, but they'll never go back to divided sovereignty
+and nationalism again. The Space Vikings frightened them out of that
+when the dangers inherent in it couldn't. Maybe this man Dunnan will
+do the same for us on Marduk."
+
+"You have troubles?"
+
+"You've seen decivilized planets. How does it happen?"
+
+"I know how it's happened on a good many: War. Destruction of cities
+and industries. Survivors among ruins, too busy keeping their own
+bodies alive to try to keep civilization alive. Then they lose all
+knowledge of how to be civilized."
+
+"That's catastrophic decivilization. There is also decivilization by
+erosion, and while it's going on, nobody notices it. Everybody is
+proud of their civilization, their wealth and culture. But trade is
+falling off; fewer ships come in each year. So there is boastful
+talk about planetary self-sufficiency; who needs off-planet trade
+anyhow? Everybody seems to have money, but the government is always
+broke. Deficit spending--and always the vital social services for
+which the government has to spend money. The most vital one, of
+course, is buying votes to keep the government in power. And it gets
+harder for the government to get anything done.
+
+"The soldiers are sloppier at drill, and their uniforms and weapons
+aren't taken care of. The noncoms are insolent. And more and more
+parts of the city are dangerous at night, and then even in the
+daytime. And it's been years since a new building went up, and the
+old ones aren't being repaired any more."
+
+Trask closed his eyes. Again, he could feel the mellow sun of Gram
+on his back, and hear the laughing voices on the lower terrace, and
+he was talking to Lothar Ffayle and Rovard Grauffis and Alex Gorram
+and Cousin Nikkolay and Otto Harkaman. He said:
+
+"And finally, nobody bothers fixing anything up. And the
+power-reactors stop, and nobody seems to be able to get them started
+again. It hasn't quite gotten that far on the Sword-Worlds yet."
+
+"It hasn't here, either. Yet." Goodman Mikhyl slipped away; King
+Mikhyl VIII looked across the low table at his guest. "Prince Trask,
+have you heard of a man named Zaspar Makann?"
+
+"Occasionally. Nothing good about him."
+
+"He is the most dangerous man on this planet," the King said. "And I
+can make nobody believe it. Not even my son."
+
+
+
+
+XXI
+
+
+Prince Bentrik's ten-year-old son, Count Steven of Ravary, wore the
+uniform of an ensign of the Royal Navy; he was accompanied by his
+tutor, an elderly Navy captain. They both stopped in the doorway
+of Trask's suite, and the boy saluted smartly.
+
+"Permission to come aboard, sir?" he asked.
+
+"Welcome aboard, count; captain. Belay the ceremony and find seats;
+you're just in time for second breakfast."
+
+As they sat down, he aimed his ultraviolet light-pencil at a serving
+robot. Unlike Mardukan robots, which looked like surrealist
+conceptions of Pre-Atomic armored knights, it was a smooth ovoid
+floating a few inches from the floor on its own contragravity; as it
+approached, its top opened like a bursting beetle shell and hinged
+trays of food swung out. The boy looked at it in fascination.
+
+"Is that a Sword-World robot, sir, or did you capture it somewhere?"
+
+"It's one of our own." He was pardonably proud; it had been built on
+Tanith a year before. "Has an ultrasonic dishwasher underneath, and
+it does some cooking on top, at the back."
+
+The elderly captain was, if anything, even more impressed than his
+young charge. He knew what went into it, and he had some conception
+of the society that would develop things like that.
+
+"I take it you don't use many human servants, with robots like
+that," he said.
+
+"Not many. We're all low-population planets, and nobody wants to
+be a servant."
+
+"We have too many people on Marduk, and all of them want soft jobs
+as nobles' servants," the captain said. "Those that want any kind
+of jobs."
+
+"You need all your people for fighting men, don't you?" the boy
+count asked.
+
+"Well, we need a good many. The smallest of our ships will carry
+five hundred men; most of them around eight hundred."
+
+The captain lifted an eyebrow. The complement of the _Victrix_ had
+been three hundred, and she'd been a big ship. Then he nodded.
+
+"Of course. Most of them are ground-fighters."
+
+That started Count Steven off. Questions, about battles and raids
+and booty and the planets Trask had seen.
+
+"I wish I were a Space Viking!"
+
+"Well, you can't be, Count Ravary. You're an officer of the Royal
+Navy. You're supposed to fight Space Vikings."
+
+"I won't fight you."
+
+"You'd have to, if the King commanded," the old captain told him.
+
+"No. Prince Trask is my friend. He saved my father's life."
+
+"And I won't fight you, either, count. We'll make a lot of
+fireworks, and then we'll each go home and claim victory. How would
+that be?"
+
+"I've heard of things like that," the captain said. "We had a war
+with Odin, seventy years ago, that was mostly that sort of battles."
+
+"Besides, the King is Prince Trask's friend, too," the boy insisted.
+"Father and Mummy heard him say so, right on the Throne. Kings don't
+lie when they're on the Throne, do they?"
+
+"Good Kings don't," Trask told him.
+
+"Ours is a good King," the young Count of Ravary declared proudly.
+"I would do anything my King commanded. Except fight Prince Trask.
+My house owes Prince Trask a debt."
+
+Trask nodded approvingly. "That's the way a Sword-World noble would
+talk, Count Steven," he said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Board of Inquiry, that afternoon, was more like a small and very
+sedate cocktail party. An Admiral Shefter, who seemed to be very
+high high-brass, presided while carefully avoiding the appearance
+of doing so. Alvyn Karffard and Vann Larch and Paytrik Morland were
+there from the _Nemesis_, and Bentrik and several of the officers
+from the _Victrix_, and there were a couple of Naval Intelligence
+officers, and somebody from Operational Planning, and from Ship
+Construction and Research & Development. They chatted pleasantly
+and in a deceptively random manner for a while. Then Shefter said:
+
+"Well, there's no blame or censure of any sort for the way Commodore
+Prince Bentrik was surprised. That couldn't have been avoided, at
+the time." He looked at the Research & Development officer. "It
+shouldn't be allowed to happen many more times, though."
+
+"Not many more, sir. I'd say it'll take my people a month, and then
+the time it'll take to get all the ships equipped as they come in."
+
+Ship Construction didn't think that would take too long.
+
+"We'll see to it that you get full information on the new submarine
+detection system, Prince Trask," the admiral said.
+
+"You gentlemen understand you'll have to keep it under your helmets,
+though," one of the Intelligence men added. "If it got out that we
+were informing Space Vikings about our technical secrets...." He
+felt the back of his neck in a way that made Trask suspect that
+beheadment was the customary form of execution on Marduk.
+
+"We'll have to find out where the fellow has his base," Operational
+Planning said. "I take it, Prince Trask, that you're not going to
+assume that he was on his flagship when you blew it, and just put
+paid to him and forget him?"
+
+"Oh, no. I'm assuming that he wasn't. I don't believe he and Ormm
+went anywhere on the same ship, after he came out here and
+established a base. I think one of them would stay home all the
+time."
+
+"Well, we'll give you everything we have on them," Shefter promised.
+"Most of that is classified and you'll have to keep quiet about it,
+too. I just skimmed over the summary of what you gave us; I daresay
+we'll both get a lot of new information. Have you any idea at all
+where he might be based, Prince Trask?"
+
+"Only that we think it's a non-Terra-type planet." He told them
+about Dunnan's heavy purchases of air-and-water recycling equipment
+and carniculture and hydroponic material. "That, of course, helps a
+great deal."
+
+"Yes; there are only about five million planets in the former
+Federation space-volume that are inhabitable in artificial
+environment. Including a few completely covered by seas, where you
+could put in underwater dome cities if you had the time and
+material."
+
+One of the Intelligence officers had been nursing a glass with a
+tiny remnant of cocktail in it. He downed it suddenly, filled the
+glass again, and glowered at it in silence for a while. Then he
+drank it briskly and refilled it.
+
+"What I should like to know," he said, "is how this double obscenity
+of a Dunnan knew we'd have a ship on Audhumla just when we did," he
+said. "Your talking about underwater dome-cities reminded me of it.
+I don't think he just pulled that planet out of a hat and then went
+there prepared to sit on the bottom of the ocean for a year and a
+half waiting for something to turn up. I think he knew the
+_Victrix_ was coming to Audhumla, and just about when."
+
+"I don't like that, commodore," Shefter said.
+
+"You think I do, sir?" the Intelligence officer countered. "There it
+is, though. We all have to face it."
+
+"We do," Shefter agreed. "Get on it, commodore, and I don't need to
+caution you to screen everybody you put onto it very carefully." He
+looked at his own glass; it had a bare thimbleful in the bottom. He
+replenished it slowly and carefully. "It's been a long time since
+the Navy's had anything like this to worry about." He turned to
+Trask. "I suppose I can get in touch with you at the Palace whenever
+I must?"
+
+"Well, Prince Trask and I have been invited as house-guests at
+Prince Edvard's, I mean Baron Cragdale's, hunting lodge," Bentrik
+said. "We'll be going there directly from here."
+
+"Ah." Admiral Shefter smiled slightly. Beside not having three horns
+and a spiked tail, this Space Viking was definitely _persona grata_
+with the Royal Family. "Well, we'll keep in contact, Prince Trask."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The hunting lodge where Crown Prince Edvard was simple Baron
+Cragdale lay at the head of a sharply-sloping mountain valley down
+which a river tumbled. Mountains rose on either side in high scarps,
+some topped with perpetual snow, glaciers curling down from them.
+The lower ranges were forested, as was the valley between, and there
+was a red-mauve alpenglow on the great peak that rose from the head
+of the valley. For the first time in over a year, Elaine was with
+him, silently clinging to him to see the beauty of it through his
+eyes. He had thought that she had gone from him forever.
+
+The hunting lodge itself was not quite what a Sword-Worlder would
+expect a hunting lodge to be. At first sight, from the air, it
+looked like a sundial, a slender tower rising like a gnomen above a
+circle of low buildings and formal gardens. The boat landed at the
+foot of it, and he and Prince and Princess Bentrik and the young
+Count of Ravary and his tutor descended. Immediately, they were
+beset by a flurry of servants; the second boat, with the Bentrik
+servants and their luggage was circling in to land. Elaine, he
+discovered, wasn't with him any more, and then he was separated from
+the Bentriks and was being floated up an inside shaft in a
+lifter-car. More servants installed him in his rooms, unpacked his
+cases, drew his bath and even tried to help him take it, and fussed
+over him while he dressed.
+
+There were over a score for dinner. Bentrik had warned him that he'd
+find some odd types; maybe he meant that they wouldn't all be
+nobles. Among the commoners there were some professors, mostly
+social sciences, a labor leader, a couple of Representatives and a
+member of the Chamber of Delegates, and a couple of social workers,
+whatever that meant.
+
+His own table companion was a Lady Valerie Alvarath. She was
+beautiful--black hair, and almost startlingly blue eyes, a
+combination unusual in the Sword-Worlds--and she was intelligent,
+or at least cleverly articulate. She was introduced as the
+lady-companion of the Crown Prince's daughter. When he asked
+where the daughter was, she laughed.
+
+"She won't be helping entertain visiting Space Vikings for a long
+time, Prince Trask. She is precisely eight years old; I saw her
+getting ready for bed before I came down here. I'll look in on her
+after dinner."
+
+Then the Crown Princess Melanie, on his other hand, asked him some
+question about Sword-World court etiquette. He stuck to
+generalities, and what he could remember from a presentation at the
+court of Excalibur during his student days. These people had a
+monarchy since before Gram had been colonized; he wasn't going to
+admit that Gram's had been established since he went off-planet.
+The table was small enough for everybody to hear what he was saying
+and to feed questions to him. It lasted all through the meal, and
+continued when they adjourned for coffee in the library.
+
+"But what about your form of government, your social structure,
+that sort of thing?" somebody, impatient with the artificialities
+of the court, wanted to know.
+
+"Well, we don't use the word government very much," he replied. "We
+talk a lot about authority and sovereignty, and I'm afraid we burn
+entirely too much powder over it, but government always seems to us
+like sovereignty interfering in matters that don't concern it. As
+long as sovereignty maintains a reasonable semblance of good public
+order and makes the more serious forms of crime fairly hazardous for
+the criminals, we're satisfied."
+
+"But that's just negative. Doesn't the government do anything
+positive for the people?"
+
+He tried to explain the Sword-World feudal system to them. It was
+hard, he found, to explain something you have taken for granted all
+your life to somebody who is quite unfamiliar with it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"But the government--the sovereignty, since you don't like the other
+word--doesn't do anything for the people!" one of the professors
+objected. "It leaves all the social services to the whim of the
+individual lord or baron."
+
+"And the people have no voice at all; why, that's tyranny,"
+a professor Assemblyman added.
+
+He tried to explain that the people had a very distinct and
+commanding voice, and that barons and lords who wanted to stay
+alive listened attentively to it. The Assemblyman changed his mind;
+that wasn't tyranny, it was anarchy. And the professor was still
+insistent about who performed the social services.
+
+"If you mean schools and hospitals and keeping the city clean, the
+people do that for themselves. The government, if you want to think
+of it as that, just sees to it that nobody's shooting at them while
+they're doing it."
+
+"That isn't what Professor Pullwell means, Lucas. He means old-age
+pensions," Prince Bentrik said. "Like this thing Zaspar Makann's
+whooping for."
+
+He'd heard about that, on the voyage from Audhumla. Every person on
+Marduk would be retired on an adequate pension after thirty years
+regular employment or at the age of sixty. When he had wanted to
+know where the money would come from, he had been told that there
+would be a sales tax, and that the pensions must all be spent within
+thirty days, which would stimulate business, and the increased
+business would provide tax money to pay the pensions.
+
+"We have a joke about three Gilgameshers space-wrecked on an
+uninhabited planet," he said. "Ten years later, when they were
+rescued, all three were immensely wealthy, from trading hats with
+each other. That's about the way this thing will work."
+
+One of the lady social workers bristled; it wasn't right to make
+derogatory jokes about racial groups. One of the professors
+harrumphed; wasn't a parallel at all, the Self-Sustaining Rotary
+Pension Plan was perfectly feasible. With a shock, Trask recalled
+that he was a professor of economics.
+
+Alvyn Karffard wouldn't need any twenty ships to loot Marduk. Just
+infiltrate it with about a hundred smart confidence men and inside
+a year they'd own everything on it.
+
+That started them all off on Zaspar Makann, though. Some of them
+thought he had a few good ideas, but was damaging his own case by
+extremism. One of the wealthier nobles said that he was a reproach
+to the ruling class; it was their fault that people like Makann
+could gain a following. One old gentleman said that maybe the
+Gilgameshers were to blame, themselves, for some of the animosity
+toward them. He was immediately set upon by all the others and
+verbally torn to pieces on the spot.
+
+Trask didn't feel it proper to quote Goodman Mikhyl to this crowd.
+He took the responsibility upon himself for saying:
+
+"From what I've heard of him, I think he's the most serious threat
+to civilized society on Marduk."
+
+They didn't call him crazy, after all he was a guest, but they
+didn't ask him what he meant, either. They merely told him that
+Makann was a crackpot with a contemptible following of half-wits,
+and just wait till the election and see what happened.
+
+"I'm inclined to agree with Prince Trask," Bentrik said soberly.
+"And I'm afraid the election results will be a shock to us, not to
+Makann."
+
+He hadn't talked that way on the ship. Maybe he'd been looking
+around and doing some thinking, since he got back. He might have
+been talking to Goodman Mikhyl, too. There was a screen in the room.
+He nodded toward it.
+
+"He's speaking at a rally of the People's Welfare Party at Drepplin,
+now," he said. "May I put it on, to show you what I mean?"
+
+When the Crown Prince assented, he snapped on the screen and
+twiddled at the selector.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A face looked out of it. The features weren't Andray Dunnan's--the
+mouth was wider, the cheekbones broader, the chin more rounded. But
+his eyes were Dunnan's, as Trask had seen them on the terrace of
+Karvall House. Mad eyes. His high-pitched voice screamed:
+
+"Our beloved sovereign is a prisoner! He is surrounded by traitors!
+The Ministries are full of them! They are all traitors! The
+bloodthirsty reactionaries of the falsely so-called Crown Loyalist
+Party! The grasping conspiracy of the interstellar bankers! The
+dirty Gilgameshers! They are all leagued together in an unholy
+conspiracy! And now this Space Viking, this bloody-handed monster
+from the Sword-Worlds...."
+
+"Shut the horrible man off," somebody was yelling, in competition
+with the hypnotic scream of the speaker.
+
+The trouble was, they couldn't. They could turn off the screen, but
+Zaspar Makann would go on screaming, and millions all over the
+planet would still hear him. Bentrik twiddled the selector. The
+voice stuttered briefly, and then came echoing out of the speaker,
+but this time the pickup was somewhere several hundred feet above
+a great open park. It was densely packed with people, most of them
+wearing clothes a farm tramp on Gram wouldn't be found dead in,
+but here and there among them were blocks of men in what was
+almost but not quite military uniform, each with a short and thick
+swagger-stick with a knobbed head. Across the park, in the distance,
+the head and shoulders of Zaspar Makann loomed a hundred feet high
+in a huge screen. Whenever he stopped for breath, a shout would go
+up, beginning with the blocks of uniformed men:
+
+"_Makann! Makann! Makann the Leader! Makann to Power!_"
+
+"You even let him have a private army?" he asked the Crown Prince.
+
+"Oh, those silly buffoons and their musical-comedy uniforms,"
+the Crown Prince shrugged. "They aren't armed."
+
+"Not visibly," he granted. "Not yet."
+
+"I don't know where they'd get arms."
+
+"No, Your Highness," Prince Bentrik said. "Neither do I.
+That's what I'm worried about."
+
+
+
+
+XXII
+
+
+He succeeded, the next morning, in convincing everybody that he
+wanted to be alone for a while, and was sitting in a garden,
+watching the rainbows in the midst of a big waterfall across the
+valley. Elaine would have liked that, but she wasn't with him, now.
+
+Then he realized that somebody was speaking to him, in a small,
+bashful voice. He turned, and saw a little girl in shorts and a
+sleeveless jacket, holding in her arms a long-haired blond puppy
+with big ears and appealing eyes.
+
+"Hello, both of you," he said.
+
+The puppy wriggled and tried to lick the girl's face.
+
+"Don't, Mopsy. We want to talk to this gentleman," she said.
+"Are you really and truly the Space Viking?"
+
+"Really and truly. And who are you two?"
+
+"I'm Myrna. And this is Mopsy."
+
+"Hello, Myrna. Hello, Mopsy."
+
+Hearing his name, the puppy wriggled again and dropped from the
+child's arms; after a brief hesitation, he came over and jumped onto
+Trask's lap, licking his face. While he petted the dog, the girl
+came over and sat on the bench beside him.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Mopsy likes you," she said. After a moment, she added: "I like you, too."
+
+"And I like you," he said. "Would you want to be my girl? You know,
+a Space Viking has to have a girl on every planet. How would you
+like to be my girl on Marduk?"
+
+Myrna thought that over carefully. "I'd like to, but I couldn't.
+You see, I'm going to have to be Queen, some day."
+
+"Oh?"
+
+"Yes. Grandpa is King now, and when he's through being King, Pappa
+will have to be King, and then when he's through being King, I can't
+be King because I'm a girl, so I'll have to be Queen. And I can't be
+anybody's girl, because I'm going to have to marry somebody I don't
+know, for reasons of state." She thought some more, and lowered her
+voice. "I'll tell you a secret. I am a Queen now."
+
+"Oh, you are?"
+
+She nodded. "We are Queen, in our own right, of our Royal Bedroom,
+our Royal Playroom, and our Royal Bathroom. And Mopsy is our
+faithful subject."
+
+"Is Your Majesty absolute ruler of these domains?"
+
+"No," she said disgustedly. "We must at all times defer to our Royal
+Ministers, just like Grandpa has to. That means, I have to do just
+what they tell me to. That's Lady Valerie, and Margot, and Dame Eunice,
+and Sir Thomas. But Grandpa says they are good and wise ministers.
+Are you really a Prince? I didn't know Space Vikings were Princes."
+
+"Well, my King says I am. And I am ruler of my planet, and I'll tell
+you a secret. I don't have to do what anybody tells me."
+
+"Gee! Are you a tyrant? You're awfully big and strong. I'll bet
+you've slain just hundreds of cruel and wicked enemies."
+
+"Thousands, Your Majesty."
+
+He wished that weren't literally true; he didn't know how many of
+them had been little girls like Myrna and little dogs like Mopsy. He
+found that he was holding both of them tightly. The girl was saying:
+"But you feel bad about it." These children must be telepaths!
+
+"A Space Viking who is also a Prince must do many things he doesn't
+want to do."
+
+"I know. So does a Queen. I hope Grandpa and Pappa don't get through
+being King for just years and years." She looked over his shoulder.
+"Oh! And now I suppose I've got to do something else I don't want to.
+Lessons, I bet."
+
+He followed her eyes. The girl who had been his dinner companion was
+approaching; she wore a wide sunshade hat, and a gown that trailed
+filmy gauze like sunset-colored mist. There was another woman, in
+the garb of an upper servant, with her.
+
+"Lady Valerie and who else?" he whispered.
+
+"Margot. She's my nurse. She's awful strict, but she's nice."
+
+"Prince Trask, has Her Highness been bothering you?" Lady Valerie asked.
+
+"Oh, far from it." He rose, still holding the funny little dog.
+"But you should say, Her Majesty. She has informed me that she
+is sovereign of three princely domains. And of one dear loving
+subject." He gave the subject back to the sovereign.
+
+"You should not have told Prince Trask that," Lady Valerie chided.
+"When Your Majesty is outside her domains, Your Majesty must remain
+incognito. Now, Your Majesty must go with the Minister of the
+Bedchamber; the Minister of Education awaits an audience."
+
+"Arithmetic, I bet. Well, good-by, Prince Trask. I hope I can see
+you again. Say good-by, Mopsy."
+
+She went away with her nurse, the little dog looking back over her
+shoulder.
+
+"I came out to enjoy the gardens alone," he said, "and now I find
+I'd rather enjoy them in company. If your Ministerial duties do not
+forbid, could you be the company?"
+
+"But gladly, Prince Trask. Her Majesty will be occupied with serious
+affairs of state. Square root. Have you seen the grottoes? They're
+down this way."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+That afternoon, one of the gentlemen-attendants caught up with him;
+Baron Cragdale would be gratified if Prince Trask could find time to
+talk with him privately. Before they had talked more than a few
+minutes, however, Baron Cragdale abruptly became Crown Prince Edvard.
+
+"Prince Trask, Admiral Shefter tells me that you and he are having
+informal discussions about co-operation against this mutual enemy
+of ours, Dunnan. This is fine; it has my approval, and the approval
+of Prince Vandarvant, the Prime Minister, and, I might add, that of
+Goodman Mikhyl. I think it ought to go further, though. A formal treaty
+between Tanith and Marduk would be greatly to the advantage of both."
+
+"I'd be inclined to think so, Prince Edvard. But aren't you
+proposing marriage on rather short acquaintance? It's only been
+fifty hours since the _Nemesis_ orbited in here."
+
+"Well, we know a bit about you and your planet beforehand. There's
+a large Gilgamesher colony here. You have a few on Tanith, haven't
+you? Well, anything one Gilgamesher knows, they all find out, and
+ours are co-operative with Naval intelligence."
+
+That would be why Andray Dunnan was having no dealings with
+Gilgameshers. It would also be what Zaspar Makann meant when
+he ranted about the Gilgamesh Interstellar Conspiracy.
+
+"I can see where an arrangement like that would be mutually
+advantageous. I'd be quite in favor of it. Co-operation against
+Dunnan, of course, and reciprocal trade-rights on each other's
+trade-planets, and direct trade between Marduk and Tanith. And
+Beowulf and Amaterasu would come into it, too. Does this also have
+the approval of the Prime Minister and the King?"
+
+"Goodman Mikhyl's in favor of it; there's a distinction between him
+and the King, as you'll have noticed. The King can't be in favor of
+anything till the Assembly or the Chancellor express an opinion.
+Prince Vandarvant favors it personally; as Prime Minister, he is
+reserving his opinion. We'll have to get the support of the Crown
+Loyalist Party before he can take an unequivocal position."
+
+"Well, Baron Cragdale; speaking as Baron Trask of Traskon, suppose
+we just work out a rough outline of what this treaty ought to be,
+and then consult, unofficially, with a few people whom you can
+trust, and see what can be done about presenting it to the proper
+government officials...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Prime Minister came to Cragdale that evening, heavily incognito
+and accompanied by several leaders of the Crown Loyalist Party. In
+principle, they all favored a treaty with Tanith. Politically, they
+had doubts. Not before the election; too controversial a subject.
+"Controversial," it appeared, was the dirtiest dirty-name anything
+could be called on Marduk. It would alienate the labor vote; they'd
+think increased imports would threaten employment in Mardukan
+industries. Some of the interstellar trading companies would like
+a chance at the Tanith planets; others would resent Tanith ships
+being given access to theirs. And Zaspar Makann's party were already
+shrieking protests about the _Nemesis_ being repaired by the
+Royal Navy.
+
+And a couple of professors who inclined toward Makann had introduced
+a resolution calling for the court-martial of Prince Bentrik and an
+investigation of the loyalty of Admiral Shefter. And somebody else,
+probably a stooge of Makann's, was claiming that Bentrik had sold
+the _Victrix_ to the Space Vikings and that the films of the battle of
+Audhumla were fakes, photographed in miniature at the Navy Moon Base.
+
+Admiral Shefter, when Trask flew in to see him the next day, was
+contemptuous about this last.
+
+"Ignore the whole bloody thing; we get something like that before
+every general election. On this planet, you can always kick the
+Gilgameshers and the Armed Forces with impunity, neither have votes
+and neither can kick back. The whole thing'll be forgotten the day
+after the election. It always is."
+
+"That's if Makann doesn't win the election," Trask qualified.
+
+"That's no matter who wins the election. They can't any of them
+get along without the Navy, and they bloody well know it."
+
+Trask wanted to know if Intelligence had been getting anything.
+
+"Not on how Dunnan found out the _Victrix_ had been ordered to
+Audhumla, no," Shefter said. "There wasn't any secrecy about it;
+at least a thousand people, from myself down to the shoeshine boys,
+could have known about it as soon as the order was taped.
+
+"As for the list of ships you gave me, yes. One of them puts in
+to this planet regularly; she spaced out from here only yesterday
+morning. The _Honest Horris_."
+
+"Well, great Satan, haven't you done anything?"
+
+"I don't know if there's anything we can do. Oh, we're investigating,
+but.... You see, this ship first showed up here four years ago,
+commanded by some kind of a Neobarb, not a Gilgamesher, named Horris
+Sasstroff. He claimed to be from Skathi; the locals there have a few
+ships, the Space Vikings had a base on Skathi about a hundred or so
+years ago. Naturally, the ship had no papers. Tramp trading among
+the Neobarbs, it might be years before you'd put in on a planet where
+they'd ever heard of ship's papers.
+
+"The ship seems to have been in bad shape, probably abandoned on
+Skathi as junk a century ago and tinkered up by the locals. She was
+in here twice, according to the commercial shipping records, and the
+second time she was in too bad shape to be moved out, and Sasstroff
+couldn't pay to have her rebuilt, so she was libeled for spaceport
+charges and sold. Some one-lung trading company bought her and fixed
+her up a little; they went bankrupt in a year or so, and she was
+bought by another small company, Startraders, Ltd., and they've been
+using her on a milk-run to and from Gimli. They seem to be a
+legitimate outfit, but we're looking into them. We're looking for
+Sasstroff, too, but we haven't been able to find him."
+
+"If you have a ship out Gimli way, you might find out if anybody
+there knows anything about her. You may discover that she hasn't
+been going there at all."
+
+"We might, at that," Shefter agreed. "We'll just find out."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Everybody at Cragdale knew about the projected treaty with Tanith
+by the morning after Trask's first conversation with Prince Edvard
+on the subject. The Queen of the Royal Bedroom, the Royal Playroom
+and the Royal Bathroom was insisting that her domains should have
+a treaty with Tanith, too.
+
+It was beginning to look to Trask as though that would be the only
+treaty he'd sign on Marduk, and he was having his doubts about that.
+
+"Do you think it would be wise?" he asked Lady Valerie Alvarath.
+The Queen of three rooms and one four-footed subject had already
+decreed that Lady Valerie should be the Space Viking Prince's girl
+on the planet of Marduk. "If it got out, these People's Welfare
+lunatics would pick it up and twist it into evidence of some kind
+of a sinister plot."
+
+"Oh, I believe Her Majesty could sign a treaty with Prince Trask,"
+Her Majesty's Prime Minister decided. "But it would have to be kept
+very secret."
+
+"Gee!" Myrna's eyes widened. "A real secret treaty; just like the
+wicked rulers of the old dictatorship!" She hugged her subject
+ecstatically. "I'll bet Grandpa doesn't even have any secret treaties!"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+In a few days, everybody on Marduk knew that a treaty with Tanith
+was being discussed. If they didn't, it was no fault of Zaspar
+Makann's party, who seemed to command a disconcertingly large number
+of telecast stations, and who drenched the ether with horror stories
+of Space Viking atrocities and denunciations of carefully unnamed
+traitors surrounding the King and the Crown Prince who were about to
+betray Marduk to rapine and plunder. The leak evidently did not come
+from Cragdale, for it was generally believed that Trask was still at
+the Royal Palace in Malverton. At least, that was where the
+Makannists were demonstrating against him.
+
+He watched such a demonstration by screen; the pickup was evidently
+on one of the landing stages of the palace, overlooking the wide
+parks surrounding it. They were packed almost solid with people,
+surging forward toward the thin cordon of police. The front of the
+mob looked like a checkerboard--a block in civilian dress, then a
+block in the curiously effeminate-looking uniforms of Zaspar
+Makann's People's Watchmen, then more in ordinary garb, and more
+People's Watchmen. Over the heads of the crowds, at intervals,
+floated small contragravity lifters on which were mounted the
+amplifiers that were bellowing:
+
+"SPACE VI-KING--GO HOME! SPACE VI-KING--GO HOME!"
+
+The police stood motionless, at parade rest; the mob surged closer.
+When they were fifty yards away, the blocks of People's Watchmen ran
+forward, then spread out until they formed a line six deep across
+the entire front; other blocks, from the rear, pushed the ordinary
+demonstrators aside and took their place. Hating them more every
+second, Trask grudged approval of a smart and disciplined maneuver.
+How long, he wondered, had they been drilling in that sort of
+tactics? Without stopping, they continued their advance on the
+police, who had now shifted their stance.
+
+"SPACE VI-KING--GO HOME! SPACE VI-KING--GO HOME!"
+
+"Fire!" he heard himself yelling. "Don't let them get any closer,
+fire now!"
+
+They had nothing to fire with; they had only truncheons, no better
+weapons than the knobbed swagger-sticks of the People's Watchmen.
+They simply disappeared, after a brief flurry of blows, and the
+Makann storm-troopers continued their advance.
+
+And that was that. The gates of the Palace were shut; the mob,
+behind a front of Makann People's Watchmen, surged up to them and
+stopped. The loud-speakers bellowed on, reiterating their four-word
+chant.
+
+"Those police were murdered," he said. "They were murdered by the
+man who ordered them out there unarmed."
+
+"That would be Count Naydnayr, the Minister of Security," somebody said.
+
+"Then he's the one you want to hang for it."
+
+"What else would you have done?" Crown Prince Edvard challenged.
+
+"Put up about fifty combat cars. Drawn a deadline, and opened
+machine-gun fire as soon as the mob crossed it, and kept on firing
+till the survivors turned tail and ran. Then sent out more cars, and
+shot everybody wearing a People's Watchmen uniform, all over town.
+Inside forty-eight hours, there'd be no People's Welfare party, and
+no Zaspar Makann either."
+
+The Crown Prince's face stiffened. "That may be the way you do
+things in the Sword-Worlds, Prince Trask. It's not the way we do
+things here on Marduk. Our government does not propose to be guilty
+of shedding the blood of its people."
+
+He had it on the tip of his tongue to retort that if they didn't,
+the people would end by shedding theirs. Instead, he said softly:
+
+"I'm sorry, Prince Edvard. You had a wonderful civilization here on
+Marduk. You could have made almost anything of it. But it's too late
+now. You've torn down the gates; the barbarians are in."
+
+[Illustration][Illustration]
+
+
+
+
+XXIII
+
+
+The colored turbulence faded into the gray of hyperspace;
+five hundred hours to Tanith. Guatt Kirbey was securing his
+control-panel, happy to return to his music. And Vann Larch would go
+back to his paints and brushes, and Alvyn Karffard to the working
+model of whatever it was he had left unfinished when the _Nemesis_
+had emerged at the end of the jump from Audhumla.
+
+Trask went to the index of the ship's library and punched for
+_History, Old Terran_. There was plenty of that, thanks to Otto
+Harkaman. Then he punched for _Hitler, Adolf_. Harkaman was right;
+anything that could happen in a human society had already happened,
+in one form or another, somewhere and at some time. Hitler could
+help him understand Zaspar Makann.
+
+By the time the ship came out, with the yellow sun of Tanith
+in the middle of the screen, he knew a great deal about Hitler,
+occasionally referred to as Schicklgruber, and he understood, with
+sorrow, how the lights of civilization on Marduk were going out.
+
+Beside the _Lamia_, stripped of her Dillinghams and crammed with
+heavy armament and detection instruments, the _Space Scourge_ and
+the _Queen Flavia_ were on off-planet watch. There were half a dozen
+other ships on orbit just above atmosphere; a Gilgamesher, one of
+the Gram-Tanith freighters, a couple of free-lance Space Vikings,
+and a new and unfamiliar ship. When he asked the moonbase who she
+was, he was told that she was the _Sun Goddess_, Amaterasu. That
+was, by almost a year, better than he had expected of them. Otto
+Harkaman was out in the _Corisande_, raiding and visiting the
+trade-planets.
+
+He found his cousin, Nikkolay Trask, at Rivington; when he inquired
+about Traskon, Nikkolay cursed.
+
+"I don't know anything about Traskon; I haven't anything to do with
+Traskon, any more. Traskon is now the personal property of our well
+loved--very well loved--Queen Evita. The Trasks don't own enough
+land on Gram now for a family cemetery. You see what you did?" he
+added bitterly.
+
+"You needn't rub it in, Nikkolay. If I'd stayed on Gram, I'd have
+helped put Angus on the throne, and it would have been about the
+same in the end."
+
+"It could be a lot different," Nikkolay said. "You could bring
+your ships and men back to Gram and put yourself on the throne."
+
+"No; I'll never go back to Gram. Tanith's my planet, now. But I will
+renounce my allegiance to Angus. I can trade on Morglay or Joyeuse
+or Flamberge just as easily."
+
+"You won't have to; you can trade with Newhaven and Bigglersport.
+Count Lionel and Duke Joris are both defying Angus; they've refused
+to furnish him men, they've driven out his tax collectors, those
+they haven't hanged, and they're building ships of their own. Angus
+is building ships, too. I don't know whether he's going to use them
+to fight Bigglersport and Newhaven, or attack you, but there's going
+to be a war before another year's out."
+
+The _Goodhope_ and the _Speedwell_, he found, had gone back to Gram.
+They were commanded by men who had come into favor at the court of
+King Angus recently. The _Black Star_ and the _Queen Flavia_--whose
+captain had contemptuously ignored an order from Gram to re-christen
+her _Queen Evita_--had remained. They were his ships, not King
+Angus'. The captain of the merchantman from Wardshaven now on orbit
+refused to take a cargo to Newhaven; he had been chartered by King
+Angus, and would take orders from no one else.
+
+"All right," Trask told him. "This is your last voyage here. You
+bring that ship back under Angus of Wardshaven's charter and we'll
+fire on her."
+
+Then he had the regalia he had worn in his last audiovisual to
+Angus dusted off. At first, he had decided to proclaim himself
+King of Tanith. Lord Valpry, Baron Rathmore and his cousin all
+advised against it.
+
+"Just call yourself Prince of Tanith," Valpry said. "The title won't
+make any difference in your authority here, and if you do lay claim
+to the throne of Gram, nobody can say you're a foreign king trying
+to annex the planet."
+
+He had no intention of doing anything of the kind, but Valpry was
+quite in earnest.
+
+So he sat on his throne, as sovereign Prince of Tanith, and
+renounced his allegiance to "Angus, Duke of Wardshaven, self-styled
+King of Gram." They sent it back on the otherwise empty freighter.
+Another copy went to the Count of Newhaven, along with a cargo in
+the _Sun Goddess_, the first non-Space-Viking ship into Gram from
+the Old Federation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Seven hundred and fifty hours after the return of the _Nemesis_,
+the _Corisande II_ emerged from her last microjump, and immediately
+Harkaman began hearing of the Battle of Audhumla and the destruction
+of the _Yo-Yo_ and the _Enterprise_. At first, he merely reported a
+successful raiding voyage, from which he was bringing rich booty.
+Oddly varigated booty, it was remarked, when he began itemizing it.
+
+"Why, yes," he replied. "Secondhand booty. I raided Dagon for it."
+
+Dagon was a Space Viking base planet, occupied by a character named
+Fedrig Barragon. A number of ships operated from it, including a
+couple commanded by Barragon's half-breed sons.
+
+"Barragon's ships were raiding one of our planets," Harkaman said.
+"Ganpat. They looted a couple of cities, destroyed one, killed a lot
+of the locals. I found out about it from Captain Ravallo of the
+_Black Star_, on Indra; he'd just been from Ganpat. Beowulf wasn't
+too far out of the way, so we put in there, and found the
+_Grendelsbane_ just ready to space out." The _Grendelsbane_ was the
+second of Beowulf's ships, sister to the _Viking's Gift_. "So she
+joined us, and the three of us went to Dagon. We blew up one of
+Barragon's ships, and put the other one down out of commission, and
+then we sacked his base. There was a Gilgamesher colony there; we
+didn't bother them. They'll tell what we did, and why."
+
+"That should furnish Prince Viktor of Xochitl something to ponder,"
+Trask said. "Where are the other ships, now?"
+
+"The _Grendelsbane_ went back to Beowulf; she'll stop at Amaterasu
+to do a little trading on the way. The _Black Star_ went to Xochitl.
+Just a friendly visit, to say hello to Prince Viktor for you.
+Ravallo has a lot of audiovisuals we made during the Dagon
+Operation. Then she's going to Jagannath to visit Nikky Gratham."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Harkaman approved his attitude and actions with regard to King Angus.
+
+"We don't need to do business with the Sword-Worlds at all. We have
+our own industries, we can produce what we need, and we can trade
+with Beowulf and Amaterasu, and with Xochitl and Jagannath and Hoth,
+if we can make any sort of agreement with them; everybody agrees to
+let everybody else's trade-planets alone. It's too bad you couldn't
+get some kind of an agreement with Marduk." Harkaman regretted that
+for a few seconds, and then shrugged. "Our grandchildren, if any,
+will probably be raiding Marduk."
+
+"You think it'll be like that?"
+
+"Don't you? You were there; you saw what's happening. The barbarians
+are rising; they have a leader, and they're uniting. Every society
+rests on a barbarian base. The people who don't understand
+civilization, and wouldn't like it if they did. The hitchhikers.
+The people who create nothing, and who don't appreciate what others
+have created for them, and who think civilization is something that
+just exists and that all they need to do is enjoy what they can
+understand of it--luxuries, a high living standard, and easy work
+for high pay. Responsibilities? Phooey! What do they have
+a government for?"
+
+Trask nodded. "And now, the hitchhikers think they know more about
+the car than the people who designed it, so they're going to grab
+the controls. Zaspar Makann says they can, and he's the Leader." He
+poured a drink from a decanter that had been looted on Pushan; there
+was a planet where a republic had been overthrown in favor of a
+dictatorship four centuries ago, and the planetary dictatorship had
+fissioned into a dozen regional dictatorships, and now they were
+down to the peasant-village and handcraft-industry level. "I don't
+understand it, though. I was reading about Hitler, on the way home.
+I wouldn't be surprised if Zaspar Makann had been reading about
+Hitler, too. He's using all Hitler's tricks. But Hitler came to
+power in a country which had been impoverished by a military defeat.
+Marduk hasn't fought a war in almost two generations, and that one
+was a farce."
+
+"It wasn't the war that put Hitler into power. It was the fact that
+the ruling class of his nation, the people who kept things running,
+were discredited. The masses, the homemade barbarians, didn't have
+anybody to take their responsibilities for them. What they have on
+Marduk is a ruling class that has been discrediting itself. A ruling
+class that's ashamed of its privileges and shirks its duties. A
+ruling class that has begun to believe that the masses are just as
+good as they are, which they manifestly are not. And a ruling class
+that won't use force to maintain its position. And they have a
+democracy, and they are letting the enemies of democracy shelter
+themselves behind democratic safeguards."
+
+"We don't have any of this democracy in the Sword-Worlds, if that's
+the word for it," he said. "And our ruling class aren't ashamed of
+their power, and our people aren't hitchhikers, and as long as they
+get decent treatment they don't try to run things. And we're not
+doing so well."
+
+The Morglay dynastic war of a couple of centuries ago, still
+sputtering and smoking. The Oskarsan-Elmersan War on Durendal, into
+which Flamberge and now Joyeuse had intruded. And the situation on
+Gram, fast approaching critical mass. Harkaman nodded agreement.
+
+"You know why? Our rulers are the barbarians among us. There isn't
+one of them--Napolyon of Flamberge, Rodolf of Excalibur, or Angus of
+about half of Gram--who is devoted to civilization or anything else
+outside himself, and that's the mark of the barbarian."
+
+"What are you devoted to, Otto?"
+
+"You. You are my chieftain. That's another mark of the barbarian."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Before he had left Marduk, Admiral Shefter had ordered a ship to
+Gimli to check on the _Honest Horris_; a few men and a pinnace would
+be left behind to contact any ship from Tanith. He sent Boake
+Valkanhayn off in the _Space Scourge_.
+
+Lionel of Newhaven's _Blue Comet_ came in from Gram with a cargo of
+general merchandise. Her captain wanted fissionables and gadolinium;
+Count Lionel was building more ships. There was a rumor that Omfray
+of Glaspyth was laying claim to the throne of Gram, in the right
+of his great-grandmother's sister, who had been married to the
+great-grandfather of Duke Angus. It was a completely trivial and
+irrelevant claim, but the story was that it would be supported
+by King Konrad of Haulteclere.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Immediately, Baron Rathmore, Lord Valpry, Lothar Ffayle and the other
+Gram people began clamoring that he should go back with a fleet and
+seize the throne for himself. Harkaman, Valkanhayn, Karffard and the
+other Space Vikings were as vehement against it. Harkaman had the
+loss of the other _Corisande_ on Durendal to remember, and the others
+wanted no part in Sword-World squabbles, and there was renewed
+agitation that he should start calling himself King of Tanith.
+
+He refused to do either, which left both parties dissatisfied. So
+partisan politics had finally come to Tanith. Maybe that was another
+milestone of progress.
+
+And there was the Treaty of Khepera, between the Princely State of
+Tanith, the Commonwealth of Beowulf, and the Planetary League of
+Amaterasu. The Kheperans agreed to allow bases on their planet, to
+furnish workers, and to send students to school on all three planets.
+Tanith, Beowulf and Amaterasu obligated themselves to joint defense
+of Khepera, to free trade among themselves, and to render one another
+armed assistance.
+
+That _was_ a milestone of progress, and no argument about it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The _Space Scourge_ returned from Gimli, and Valkanhayn reported
+that nobody on the planet had ever seen or heard of the _Honest
+Horris_. They had found a Mardukan Navy ship's pinnace there, manned
+entirely by officers, some of them Navy Intelligence. According to
+them, the investigation into the activities of that ship had come to
+an impasse. The ostensible owners claimed, and had papers to prove
+it, that they had chartered her to a private trader, and he claimed,
+and had papers to prove it, that he was a citizen of the Planetary
+Republic of Aton, and as soon as they began questioning him, he was
+rescued by the Atonian ambassador, who lodged a vehement protest
+with the Mardukan Foreign Ministry. Immediately, the People's
+Welfare Party had leaped into the incident and branded the
+investigation as an unwarranted persecution of a national of a
+friendly power at the instigation of corrupt tools of the Gilgamesh
+Interstellar Conspiracy.
+
+"So that's it," Valkanhayn finished. "It seems they're having an
+election and they're afraid to antagonize anybody who might have a
+vote. So the Navy had to drop the investigation. Everybody on
+Marduk's scared of this Makann. You think there might be some tie-up
+between him and Dunnan?"
+
+"The idea's occurred to me. Have there been any more raids on Marduk
+trade-planets since the Battle of Audhumla?"
+
+"A couple. The _Bolide_ was on Audhumla a while ago. There were a
+couple of Mardukan ships there, and they had the _Victrix_ fixed up
+enough to do some fighting. They ran the _Bolide_ out."
+
+A study of the time between the destruction of the _Enterprise_
+and _Yo-Yo_ and the appearance of the _Bolide_ could give them a
+limiting radius around Audhumla. It did; seven hundred light-years,
+which also included Tanith.
+
+So he sent Harkaman in the _Corisande_ and Ravallo in the _Black
+Star_ to visit the planets Marduk traded with, looking for Dunnan
+ships and exchanging information and assistance with the Royal
+Mardukan Navy. Almost at once, he regretted it; the next Gilgamesher
+into orbit on Tanith brought a story that Prince Viktor was
+collecting a fleet on Xochitl. He sent warnings off to Amaterasu
+and Beowulf and Khepera.
+
+A ship came in from Bigglersport, a heavily armed chartered
+freighter. There was sporadic fighting in a dozen places on Gram,
+now--resistance to efforts on the part of King Angus to collect
+taxes, and raids by unidentified persons on estates confiscated
+from alleged traitors and given to Garvan Spasso, who had now
+been promoted from Baron to Count. And Rovard Grauffis was dead;
+poisoned, everybody said, either by Spasso or Queen Evita or both.
+Even with the threat from Xochitl, some of the former Wardshaven
+nobles began talking about sending ships to Gram.
+
+Less than a thousand hours after he had left, Ravallo was back
+in the _Black Star_.
+
+"I went to Gimli, and I wasn't there fifty hours before a
+Mardukan Navy ship came in. They were glad to see me; it saved
+them sending off a pinnace for Tanith. They had news for you, and
+a couple of passengers."
+
+"Passengers?"
+
+"Yes. You'll see who they are when they come down. And don't let
+anybody with side-whiskers and buttoned-up coats see them," Ravallo
+said. "What those people know gets all over the place before long."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The visitors were Lucile, Princess Bentrik, and her son, the young
+Count of Ravary. They dined with Trask; only Captain Ravallo was
+also present.
+
+"I didn't want to leave my husband, and I didn't want to come here
+and impose myself and Steven on you, Prince Trask," she began, "but
+he insisted. We spent the whole voyage to Gimli concealed in the
+captain's quarters; only a few of the officers knew we were aboard."
+
+"Makann won the election. Is that it?" he asked. "And Prince Bentrik
+doesn't want to risk you and Steven being used as hostages?"
+
+"That's it," she said. "He didn't really win the election, but he
+might as well have. Nobody has a majority of seats in the Chamber of
+Representatives but he's formed a coalition with several of the
+splinter parties, and I'm ashamed to say that a number of Crown
+Loyalist members--Crowd of Disloyalists, I call them--are voting
+with him, now. They've coined some ridiculous phrase about the 'wave
+of the future,' whatever that means."
+
+"If you can't lick them, join them," Trask said.
+
+"If you can't lick them, lick their boots," the Count of Ravary put in.
+
+"My son is a trifle bitter," Princess Bentrik said. "I must confess
+to a trace of bitterness, too."
+
+"Well, that's the Representatives," Trask said. "What about the rest
+of the government?"
+
+"With the splinter-party and Disloyalist support, they got a
+majority of seats in the Delegates. Most of them would have
+indignantly denied, a month before, having any connection with
+Makann, but a hundred out of a hundred and twenty are his
+supporters. Makann, of course, is Chancellor."
+
+"And who is Prime Minister?" he asked. "Andray Dunnan?"
+
+She looked slightly baffled for an instant then said, "Oh. No.
+The Prime Minister is Crown Prince Edvard. No; Baron Cragdale.
+That isn't a royal title, so by some kind of a fiction I can't
+pretend to understand he is not Prime Minister as a member of
+the Royal Family."
+
+"If you can't ..." the boy started.
+
+"Steven! I forbid you to say that about ... Baron Cragdale. He
+believes, very sincerely, that the election was an expression of
+the will of the people, and that it is his duty to bow to it."
+
+He wished Otto Harkaman were there. He could probably name, without
+stopping for breath, a hundred great nations that went down into
+rubble because their rulers believed that they should bow instead
+of rule, and couldn't bring themselves to shed the blood of their
+people. Edvard would have been a fine and admirable man, as a little
+country baron. Where he was, he was a disaster.
+
+He asked if the People's Watchman had dragged their guns out from
+under the bed and started carrying them in public yet.
+
+"Oh, yes. You were quite right; they were armed, all the time. Not
+just small arms; combat vehicles and heavy weapons. As soon as the
+new government was formed, they were given status as a part of the
+Planetary Armed Forces. They have taken over every police station
+on the planet."
+
+"And the King?"
+
+"Oh, he carries on, and shrugs and says, 'I just reign here.' What
+else can he do? We've been whittling down and filching away the
+powers of the Throne for the last three centuries."
+
+"What is Prince Bentrik doing, and why did he think there was danger
+that you two would be used as hostages?"
+
+"He's going to fight," she said. "Don't ask me how, or what with.
+Maybe as a guerrilla in the mountains, I don't know. But if he can't
+lick them, he won't join them. I wanted to stay with him and help
+him; he told me I could help him best by placing myself and Steven
+where he wouldn't worry about us."
+
+"I wanted to stay," the boy said. "I could have fought with him.
+But he said that I must take care of Mother. And if he were killed,
+I must be able to avenge him."
+
+"You talk like a Sword-Worlder; I told you that once before." He
+hesitated, then turned again to Princess Bentrik. "How is little
+Princess Myrna?" he asked, and then, trying to be casual, added,
+"and Lady Valerie?"
+
+She seemed so clearly real and present to him, blue eyes and
+space-black hair, more real than Elaine had been to him for years.
+
+"They're at Cragdale; they'll be safe there. I hope."
+
+
+
+
+XXIV
+
+
+Attempting to conceal the presence on Tanith of Prince Bentrik's
+wife and son was pushing caution beyond necessity. Admitted that
+the news would leak back to Marduk via Gilgamesh, it was over seven
+hundred light-years to the latter and almost a thousand from there
+to the former. Better that Princess Lucile should enjoy Rivington
+society, such as it was, and escape, for a moment now and then, from
+anxiety about her husband. At ten--no, almost twelve; it had been a
+year and a half since Trask had left Marduk--the boy Count of Ravary
+was more easily diverted. At last, he was among real Space Vikings,
+on a Space Viking planet, and he was trying to be everywhere and see
+everything at once. No doubt he would be imagining himself a Space
+Viking, returning to Marduk with a vast armada to rescue his father
+and the King from Zaspar Makann.
+
+Trask was satisfied with that; as a host he left much to be desired.
+He had his worries, too, and all of them bore the same name: Prince
+Viktor of Xochitl. He went over with Manfred Ravallo everything the
+captain of the _Black Star_ could tell him. He had talked once with
+Viktor; the lord of Xochitl had been coldly polite and noncommittal.
+His subordinates had been frankly hostile. There had been five ships
+on orbit or landed at Viktor's spaceport beside the usual
+Gilgameshers and itinerant traders, two of them Viktor's own, and a
+big armed freighter had come in from Haulteclere as the _Black Star_
+was leaving. There was considerable activity at the shipyards and
+around the spaceport, as though in preparation for something on a
+large scale.
+
+Xochitl was a thousand light-years from Tanith. He rejected
+immediately the idea of launching a preventative attack; his ships
+might reach Xochitl to find it undefended, and then return to find
+Tanith devastated. Things like that had happened in space-war. The
+only thing to do was sit tight, defend Tanith when Viktor attacked,
+and then counterattack if he had any ships left by that time.
+Prince Viktor was probably reasoning in the same way.
+
+He had no time to think about Andray Dunnan, except, now and then,
+to wish that Otto Harkaman would stop thinking about him and bring
+the _Corisande_ home. He needed that ship on Tanith, and the wits
+and courage of her commander.
+
+More news--Gilgamesh sources--came in from Xochitl. There were only
+two ships, both armed merchantmen, on the planet. Prince Viktor had
+spaced out with the rest an estimated two thousand hours before the
+story reached him. That was twice as long as it would take the
+Xochitl armada to reach Tanith. He hadn't gone to Beowulf; that was
+only sixty-five hours from Tanith and they would have heard about
+it long ago. Or Amaterasu, or Khepera. How many ships he had was
+a question; not fewer than five, and possibly more. He could have
+slipped into the Tanith system and hidden his ships on one of the
+outer uninhabitable planets. He sent Valkanhayn and Ravallo
+microjumping their ships from one to another to check. They returned
+to report in the negative. At least, Viktor of Xochitl wasn't camped
+inside their own system, waiting for them to leave Tanith open
+to attack.
+
+But he was somewhere, and up to nothing even resembling good, and
+there was no possible way of guessing when his ships would be
+emerging on Tanith. The only thing to do was wait for him. When he
+did, Trask was confident that he would emerge from hyperspace into
+serious trouble. He had the _Nemesis_, the _Space Scourge_, the
+_Black Star_ and _Queen Flavia_, the strongly rebuilt _Lamia_, and
+several independent Space Viking ships, among them the _Damnthing_
+of his friend Roger-fan-Morvill Esthersan, who had volunteered to
+stay and help in the defense. This, of course, was not pure
+altruism. If Viktor attacked and had his fleet blown to
+Em-See-Square, Xochitl would lie open and unprotected, and there
+was enough loot on Xochitl to cram everybody's ships. Everybody's
+ships who had ships when the Battle of Tanith was over, of course.
+
+He was apologetic to Princess Bentrik:
+
+"I'm very sorry you jumped out of Zaspar Makann's frying pan into
+Prince Viktor's fire," he began.
+
+She laughed at that. "I'll take my chances on the fire. I seem to
+see a lot of good firemen around. If there is a battle you will see
+that Steven's in a safe place, won't you?"
+
+"In a space attack, there are no safe places. I'll keep him with me."
+
+The young Count of Ravary wanted to know which ship he would serve
+on when the attack came.
+
+"Well, you won't be on any ship, Count. You'll be on my staff."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Two days later, the _Corisande_ came out of hyperspace. Harkaman was
+guardedly noncommittal by screen. Trask took a landing craft and
+went out to meet the ship.
+
+"Marduk doesn't like us, any more," Harkaman told him. "They have
+ships on all their trade-planets, and they all have orders to fire
+on any, repeat any, Space Vikings, including the ships of the
+self-styled Prince of Tanith. I got this from Captain Garravay of
+the _Vindex_. After we were through talking, we fought a nice little
+ship-to-ship action for him to make films of. I don't think anybody
+could see anything wrong with it."
+
+"This order came from Makann?"
+
+"From the Admiral commanding. He isn't your friend Shefter; Shefter
+retired on account of quote ill-health unquote. He is now in a quote
+hospital unquote."
+
+"Where's Prince Bentrik?"
+
+"Nobody knows. Charges of high treason were brought against him,
+and he just vanished. Gone underground, or secretly arrested and
+executed; take your choice."
+
+He wondered just what he'd tell Princess Lucile and Count Steven.
+
+"They have ships on all the planets they trade with. Fourteen
+of them. That isn't to catch Dunnan. That's to disperse the Navy
+away from Marduk. They don't trust the Navy. Is Prince Edvard
+still Prime Minister?"
+
+"Yes, as of Garravay's last information. It seems Makann is behaving
+in a scrupulously legal manner, outside of making his People's
+Watchmen part of the armed forces. Protesting his devotion to
+the King every time he opens his mouth."
+
+"When will the fire be, I wonder?"
+
+"Huh? Oh yes, you were reading up on Hitler. That I don't know.
+Probably happened by now."
+
+He just told Princess Lucile that her husband had gone into hiding;
+he couldn't be sure whether she was relieved or more worried. The
+boy was sure that he was doing something highly romantic and heroic.
+
+Some of the volunteers tired of waiting, after another thousand
+hours, and spaced out. The _Viking's Gift_ of Beowulf came in with
+a cargo, and went on orbit after discharging it to join the watch.
+A Gilgamesher came in from Amaterasu and reported everything quiet
+there; as soon as her captain had sold his cargo, with a minimum of
+haggling, he spaced out again. His behavior convinced everybody that
+the attack would come in a matter of hours.
+
+It didn't.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Three thousand hours had passed since the first warning had reached
+Tanith, that made five thousand since Viktor's ships were supposed
+to have left Xochitl. There were those, Boake Valkanhayn among them,
+who doubted, now, if he ever had.
+
+"The whole thing's just a big Gilgamesher lie," he was declaring.
+"Somebody--Nikky Gratham, or the Everrards, or maybe Viktor
+himself--paid them to tell us that, to pin our ships down here.
+Or they made it up themselves, so they could make hay on our
+trade-planets."
+
+"Let's go down to the Ghetto and clean out the whole gang," somebody
+else took up. "Anything one of them's in, they're all in together."
+
+"Nifflheim with that; let's all space out for Xochitl," Manfred
+Ravallo proposed. "We have enough ships to lick them on Tanith,
+we have enough to lick them on their own planet."
+
+He managed to talk them out of both courses of action--what was he,
+anyhow; sovereign Prince of Tanith, or the non-ruling King of Marduk,
+or just the chieftain of a disciplineless gang of barbarians? One of
+the independents spaced out in disgust. The next day, two others
+came in, loaded with booty from a raid on Braggi, and decided to
+stay around for a while and see what happened.
+
+And four days after that, a five-hundred-foot hyperspace yacht,
+bearing the daggers and chevrons of Bigglersport, came in. As soon
+as she was out of the last microjump, she began calling by screen.
+
+Trask didn't know the man who was screening, but Hugh Rathmore did;
+Duke Joris' confidential secretary.
+
+"Prince Trask; I must speak to you as soon as possible," he began,
+almost stuttering. Whatever the urgency of his mission, one would
+have thought that a three-thousand-hour voyage would have taken some
+of the edge from it. "It is of the first importance."
+
+"You are speaking to me. This screen is reasonably secure. And if
+it's of the first importance, the sooner you tell me about it...."
+
+"Prince Trask, you must come to Gram, with every man and every ship
+you can command. Satan only knows what's happening there now, but
+three thousand hours ago, when the Duke sent me off, Omfray of Glaspyth
+was landing on Wardshaven. He has a fleet of eight ships, furnished
+to him by his wife's kinsman, the King of Haulteclere. They are commanded
+by King Konrad's Space Viking cousin, the Prince of Xochitl."
+
+Then a look of shocked surprise came into the face of the man in the
+screen, and Trask wondered why, until he realized that he had leaned
+back in his chair and was laughing uproariously. Before he could
+apologize, the man in the screen had found his voice.
+
+"I know, Prince Trask; you have no reason to think kindly of King
+Angus--the former King Angus, or maybe even the late King Angus,
+I suppose he is now--but a murderer like Omfray of Glaspyth...."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It took a little time to explain to the confidential secretary of
+the Duke of Bigglersport the humor of the situation.
+
+There were others at Rivington to whom it was not immediately
+evident. The professional Space Vikings, men like Valkanhayn and
+Ravallo and Alvyn Karffard, were disgusted. Here they'd been
+sitting, on combat alert, all these months, and, if they'd only
+known, they could have gone to Xochitl and looted it clean long ago.
+The Gram party were outraged. Angus of Wardshaven had been bad
+enough, with the hereditary taint of the Mad Baron of Blackcliffe,
+and Queen Evita and her rapacious family, but even he was preferable
+to a murderous villain--some even called him a fiend in human
+shape--like Omfray of Glaspyth.
+
+Both parties, of course, were positive as to where their Prince's
+duty lay. The former insisted that everything on Tanith that could
+be put into hyperspace should be dispatched at once to Xochitl, to
+haul back from it everything except a few absolutely immovable
+natural features of the planet. The latter clamored, just as loudly
+and passionately, that everybody on Tanith who could pull a trigger
+should be embarked at once on a crusade for the deliverance of Gram.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"You don't want to do either, do you?" Harkaman asked him, when they
+were alone after the second day of acrimony.
+
+"Nifflheim, no! This crowd that wants an attack on Xochitl; you know
+what would happen if we did that?" Harkaman was silent, waiting for
+him to continue. "Inside a year, four or five of these small
+planet-holders like Gratham and the Everrards would combine against
+us and make a slag-pile out of Tanith."
+
+Harkaman nodded agreement. "Since we warned him the first time,
+Viktor's kept his ships away from our planets. If we attacked
+Xochitl now, without provocation, nobody'd know what to expect from
+us. People like Nikky Gratham and Tobbin of Nergal and the Everrards
+of Hoth get nervous around unpredictable dangers, and when they get
+nervous they get trigger-happy." He puffed slowly on his pipe and
+then said: "Then you'll be going back to Gram."
+
+"That doesn't follow; just because Valkanhayn and Ravallo and that
+crowd are wrong doesn't make Valpry and Rathmore and Ffayle right.
+You heard what I was telling those very people at Karvall House, the
+day I met you. And you've seen what's been happening on Gram since
+we came out here. Otto, the Sword-Worlds are finished; they're half
+decivilized now. Civilization is alive and growing here on Tanith.
+I want to stay here and help it grow."
+
+"Look, Lucas," Harkaman said. "You're Prince of Tanith, and I'm only
+the Admiral. But I'm telling you; you'll have to do something, or
+this whole setup of yours will fall apart. As it stands, you can
+attack Xochitl and the Back-To-Gram party would go along, or you
+can decide on this crusade against Omfray of Glaspyth and the
+Raid-Xochitl-Now party would go along. But if you let this go on
+much longer, you won't have any influence over either party."
+
+"And then I will be finished. And in a few years, Tanith will be
+finished." He rose and paced across the room and back. "Well, I
+won't raid Xochitl; I told you why, and you agreed. And I won't
+spend the men and ships and wealth of Tanith in any Sword-World
+dynastic squabble. Great Satan, Otto; you were in the Durendal War.
+This is the same thing, and it'll go on for another half a century."
+
+"Then what will you do?"
+
+"I came out here after Andray Dunnan, didn't I?" he asked.
+
+"I'm afraid Ravallo and Valpry, or even Valkanhayn and Morland,
+won't be as interested in Dunnan as you are."
+
+"Then I will interest them in him. Remember, I was reading up on
+Hitler, coming in from Marduk? I will tell them all a big lie.
+Such a big lie that nobody will dare to disbelieve it."
+
+
+
+
+XXV
+
+
+"Do you think I was afraid of Viktor of Xochitl?" he demanded. "Half
+a dozen ships; we could make a new Van Allen belt around Tanith of
+them, with what we have here. Our real enemy is on Marduk, not
+Xochitl; his name's Zaspar Makann. Zaspar Makann, and Andray Dunnan,
+the man I came out from Gram to hunt; they're in alliance, and
+I believe Dunnan is on Marduk, himself, now."
+
+The delegation who had come out from Gram in the yacht of the
+Duke of Bigglersport were unimpressed. Marduk was only a name to
+them, one of the fabulous civilized Old Federation planets no
+Sword-Worlder had ever seen. Zaspar Makann wasn't even that. And
+so much had happened on Gram since the murder of Elaine Karvall and
+the piracy of the _Enterprise_ that they had completely forgotten
+Andray Dunnan. That put them at a disadvantage. All the people whom
+they were trying to convince, the half-hundred members of the new
+nobility of Tanith, spoke a language they didn't understand. They
+didn't even understand the proposition, and couldn't argue against it.
+
+Paytrik Morland, who was Gram-born and had been speaking for
+a return in force to fight against Omfray of Glaspyth and his
+supporters, defected from them at once. He had been on Marduk and
+knew who Zaspar Makann was; he had made friends with the Royal Navy
+officers, and had been shocked to hear that they were now enemies.
+Manfred Ravallo and Boake Valkanhayn, among the more articulate of
+the Raid-Xochitl-Now party, snatched up the idea and seemed
+convinced that they'd thought of it themselves all along. Valkanhayn
+had been on Gimli and talked to Mardukan naval officers; Ravallo had
+brought Princess Bentrik to Tanith and heard her stories on the
+voyage. They began adducing arguments in support of Trask's thesis.
+Of course Dunnan and Makann were in collusion. Who tipped Dunnan off
+that the _Victrix_ would be on Audhumla? Makann; his spies in the
+Navy tipped him. What about the _Honest Horris_; wasn't Makann
+blocking any investigation about her? Why was Admiral Shefter
+retired as soon as Makann got into power?
+
+"Well, here; we don't know anything about this Zaspar Makann," the
+confidential secretary and spokesman of the Duke of Bigglersport began.
+
+"No, you don't," Otto Harkaman told him. "I suggest you keep quiet
+and listen, till you find out a little about him."
+
+"Why, I wouldn't be surprised if Dunnan was on Marduk all the time
+we were hunting for him," Valkanhayn said.
+
+Trask began to wonder. What would Hitler have done if he'd told one
+of his big lies, and then found it turning into the truth? Maybe
+Makann had been on Marduk.... No; he couldn't have hidden half a
+dozen ships on a civilized planet. Not even at the bottom of an
+ocean.
+
+"I wouldn't be surprised," Alvyn Karffard was shouting, "if Andray
+Dunnan _was_ Zaspar Makann. I know he doesn't look like Dunnan, we
+all saw him on screen, but there's such a thing as plastic surgery."
+
+That was making the big lie just a trifle too big. Zaspar Makann was
+six inches shorter than Dunnan; there are some things no plastic
+surgery could do. Paytrik Morland, who had known Dunnan and had seen
+Makann on screen, ought to have known that too, but he either didn't
+think of it or didn't want to weaken a case he had completely accepted.
+
+"As far as I can find out, nobody even heard of Makann till about
+five years ago. That would be about the time Dunnan would have
+arrived on Marduk," he said.
+
+By this time, the big room in which they were meeting had become a
+babel of voices, everybody trying to convince everybody else that
+they'd known it all along. Then the Back-To-Gram party received its
+_coup-de-grace_; Lothar Ffayle, to whom the emissaries of Duke Joris
+had looked for their strongest support, went over.
+
+"You people want us to abandon a planet we've built up from nothing,
+and all the time and money we've invested in it, to go back to Gram
+and pull your chestnuts out of the fire? Gehenna with you! We're
+staying here and defending our own planet. If you're smart, you'll
+stay here with us."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Bigglersport delegation was still on Tanith, trying to recruit
+mercenaries from the King of Tradetown and dickering with a
+Gilgamesher to transport them to Gram, when the big lie turned
+into something like the truth.
+
+The observation post on the Moon of Tanith picked up an emergence at
+twenty light-minutes due north of the planet. Half an hour later,
+there was another one at five light-minutes; a very small one, and
+then a third at two light-seconds, and this was detectable by radar
+and microray as a ship's pinnace. He wondered if something had
+happened on Amaterasu or Beowulf; somebody like Gratham or the
+Everrards might have decided to take advantage of the defensive
+mobilization on Tanith. Then they switched the call from the pinnace
+over to his screen, and Prince Simon Bentrik was looking out of it.
+
+"I'm glad to see you! Your wife and son are here, worried about you,
+but safe and well." He turned to shout to somebody to find young
+Count Steven of Ravary and tell him to tell his mother. "How are you?"
+
+"I had a broken leg when I left Moonbase, but that's mended on the
+way," Bentrik said. "I have little Princess Myrna aboard with me.
+For all I know, she's Queen of Marduk, now." He gulped slightly.
+"Prince Trask, we've come as beggars. We're begging help for
+our planet."
+
+"You've come as honored guests, and you'll get all the help we can
+give you." He blessed the Xochitl invasion scare, and the big lie
+which was rapidly ceasing to be a lie; Tanith had the ships and
+men and the will to act. "What happened? Makann deposed the King
+and took over?"
+
+It came to that, Bentrik told him. It had started even before the
+election. The People's Watchmen had possessed weapons that had been
+made openly and legally on Marduk for trade to the Neobarbarian
+planets and then clandestinely diverted to secret People's Welfare
+arsenals. Some of the police had gone over to Makann; the rest had
+been terrorized into inaction. There had been riots fomented in
+working-class districts of all the cities as pretexts for further
+terrorization. The election had been a farce of bribery and
+intimidation. Even so, Makann's party had failed of a complete
+majority in the Chamber of Representatives, and had been compelled
+to patch up a shady coalition in order to elect a favorable Chamber
+of Delegates.
+
+"And, of course, they elected Makann Chancellor; that did it,"
+Bentrik said. "All the opposition leaders in the Chamber of
+Representatives have been arrested, on all kinds of ridiculous
+charges--sex-crimes, receiving bribes, being in the pay of foreign
+powers, nothing too absurd. Then they rammed through a law
+empowering the Chancellor to fill vacancies in the Chamber of
+Representatives by appointment."
+
+"Why did the Crown Prince lend himself to a thing like that?"
+
+"He hoped that he could exercise some control. The Royal Family
+is an almost holy symbol to the people. Even Makann was forced
+to pretend loyalty to the King and the Crown Prince...."
+
+"It didn't work; he played right into Makann's hands. What happened?"
+
+The Crown Prince had been assassinated. The assassin, an unknown man
+believed to be a Gilgamesher, had been shot to death by People's
+Watchmen guarding Prince Edvard at once. Immediately Makann had
+seized the Royal Palace to protect the King, and immediately there
+had been massacres by People's Watchmen everywhere. The Mardukan
+Planetary Army had ceased to exist; Makann's story was that there
+had been a military plot against the King and the government.
+Scattered over the planet in small detachments, the army had been
+wiped out in two nights and a day. Now Makann was recruiting it up
+again, exclusively from the People's Welfare Party.
+
+"You weren't just sitting on your hands, were you?"
+
+"Oh, no," Bentrik replied. "I was doing something I wouldn't have
+thought myself capable of, a few years ago. Organizing a mutineering
+conspiracy in the Royal Mardukan Navy. After Admiral Shefter was
+forcibly retired and shut up in an insane asylum, I disappeared
+and turned into a civilian contragravity-lifter operator at the
+Malverton Navy Yard. Finally, when I was suspected, one of the
+officers--he was arrested and tortured to death later--managed
+to smuggle me onto a lighter for the Moonbase. I was an orderly
+in the hospital there. The day the Crown Prince was murdered, we
+had a mutiny of our own. We killed everybody we even suspected of
+being a Makannist. The Moonbase has been under attack from the
+planet ever since."
+
+There was a stir behind him; turning, he saw Princess Bentrik and
+the boy enter the room. He rose.
+
+"We'll talk about this later. There are some people here...."
+
+He motioned them forward and turned away, shoo-ing everybody else
+out of the room.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The news was all over Rivington, and then all over Tanith, while
+the pinnace was still coming down. There was a crowd at the
+spaceport, staring as the little craft, with its blazon of the
+crowned and planet-throned dragon, settled onto its landing legs,
+and reporters of the Tanith News Service with their screen pickups.
+He met Prince Bentrik, a little in advance of the others, and
+managed to whisper to him hastily:
+
+"While you're talking to anybody here, always remember that Andray
+Dunnan is working with Zaspar Makann, and as soon as Makann
+consolidates his position he's sending an expedition against
+Tanith."
+
+"How in blazes did you find that out, here?" Bentrik demanded.
+"From the Gilgameshers?"
+
+Then Harkaman and Rathmore and Valkanhayn and Lothar Ffayle and
+the others were crowding up behind, and more people were coming off
+the pinnace, and Prince Bentrik was trying to embrace both his wife
+and his son at the same time.
+
+"Prince Trask." He started at the voice, and was looking into deep
+blue eyes under coal-black hair. His pulse gave a sudden jump, and
+he said, "Valerie!" and then, "Lady Alvarath; I'm most happy to see
+you here." Then he saw who was beside her, and squatted on his heels
+to bring himself down to a convenient size. "And Princess Myrna.
+Welcome to Tanith, Your Highness!"
+
+The child flung her arms around his neck. "Oh, Prince Lucas! I'm so
+glad to see you. There's been such awful things happened!"
+
+"There won't be anything awful happen here, Princess Myrna. You are
+among friends; friends with whom you have a treaty. Remember?"
+
+The child began to cry, bitterly. "That was when I was just a
+play-Queen. And now I know what they meant when they talked about
+when Grandpa and Pappa would be through being King. Pappa didn't
+even get to be King!"
+
+Something big and warm and soft was trying to push between them;
+a dog with long blond hair and floppy ears. In a year and a half,
+puppies can grow surprisingly. Mopsy was trying to lick his face.
+He took the dog by the collar and straightened.
+
+"Lady Valerie, will you come with us?" he asked. "I'm going to find
+quarters for Princess Myrna."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"Is it Princess Myrna, or is it Queen Myrna?" he asked.
+
+Prince Bentrik shook his head. "We don't know. The King was alive
+when we left Moonbase, but that was five hundred hours ago. We don't
+know anything about her mother, either. She was at the Palace when
+Prince Edvard was murdered; we've heard absolutely nothing about
+her. The King made a few screen appearances, parroting things Makann
+wanted him to say. Under hypnosis. That was probably the very least
+of what they did to him. They've turned him into a zombi."
+
+"Well, how did Myrna get to Moonbase?"
+
+"That was Lady Valerie, as much as anybody else. She and Sir Thomas
+Kobbly, and Captain Rainer. They armed the servants at Cragdale with
+hunting rifles and everything else they could scrape up, captured
+Prince Edvard's space-yacht, and took off in her. Took a couple of
+hits from ground batteries getting off, and from ships around
+Moonbase getting in. Ships of the Royal Mardukan Navy!" he added
+furiously.
+
+The pinnace in which they had made the trip to Tanith had taken
+a few hits, too, running the blockade. Not many; her captain had
+thrown her into hyperspace almost at once.
+
+"They sent the yacht off to Gimli," Bentrik said. "From there,
+they'll try to rally as many of the Royal Navy units as haven't gone
+over to Makann. They're to assemble on Gimli and await my return.
+If I don't return in fifteen hundred hours from the time I left
+Moonbase, they're to use their own judgment. I'd expect that
+they'd move in on Marduk and attack."
+
+"That's sixty-odd days," Otto Harkaman said. "That's an awfully long
+time to expect that lunar base to hold out, against a whole planet."
+
+"It's a strong base. It was built four hundred years ago, when
+Marduk was fighting a combination of six other planets. It held out
+against continuous attack, once, for almost a year. It's been
+constantly strengthened ever since."
+
+"And what have they to throw at it?" Harkaman persisted.
+
+"When I left, six ships of the former Royal Navy, that had gone
+over to Makann. Four fifteen-hundred-footers, same class as the
+_Victrix_, and two thousand-footers. Then, there were four of
+Andray Dunnan's ships--"
+
+"You mean, he really is on Marduk?"
+
+"I thought you knew that, and I was wondering how you'd found out.
+Yes: _Fortuna_, _Bolide_, and two armed merchantmen, a Baldurbuilt
+ship called the _Reliable_, and your friend _Honest Horris_."
+
+"You didn't really believe Dunnan was on Marduk?" Boake Valkanhayn
+asked.
+
+"Actually, I didn't. I had to have some kind of a story, to talk
+those people out of that crusade against Omfray of Glaspyth." He
+left unmentioned Valkanhayn's own insistence on a plundering
+expedition against Xochitl. "Now that it turns out to be true,
+I'm not surprised. We decided, long ago, that Dunnan was planning
+to raid Marduk. It appears that we underestimated him. Maybe he
+was reading about Hitler, too. He wasn't planning any raid; he
+was planning conquest, in the only way a great civilization can
+be conquered--by subversion."
+
+"Yes," Harkaman put in. "Five years ago, when Dunnan started this
+programme, who was this Makann, anyhow?"
+
+"Nobody," Bentrik said. "A crackpot agitator in Drepplin; he had
+a coven of fellow-crackpots, who met in the back room of a saloon
+and had their office in a cigar box. The next year, he had a suite
+of offices and was buying time on a couple of telecasts. The year
+after that, he had three telecast stations of his own, and
+was holding rallies and meetings of thousands of people. And
+so on, upward."
+
+"Yes. Dunnan financed him, and moved in behind him, the same way
+Makann moved in behind the King. And Dunnan will have him shot
+the way he had Prince Edvard shot, and use the murder as a pretext
+to liquidate his personal followers."
+
+"And then he'll own Marduk. And we'll have the Mardukan navy coming
+out of hyperspace on Tanith," Valkanhayn added. "So we go to Marduk
+and smash him now, while he's still little enough to smash."
+
+There had been a few who had wanted to do that about Hitler, and
+a great many, later, who had regretted that it hadn't been done.
+
+"The _Nemesis_, the _Corisande_, and the _Space Scourge_ for sure?"
+he asked.
+
+Harkaman and Valkanhayn agreed; Valkanhayn thought the _Viking's
+Gift_ of Beowulf would go along, and Harkaman was almost sure of
+the _Black Star_ and _Queen Flavia_. He turned to Bentrik.
+
+"Start that pinnace off for Gimli at once; within the hour if
+possible. We don't know how many ships will be gathered there,
+but we don't want them wasted in detail-attacks. Tell whoever's
+in command there that ships from Tanith are on the way, and to
+wait for them."
+
+Fifteen hundred hours, less the five hundred Bentrik was in space
+from Marduk. He hadn't time to estimate voyage-time to Gimli from
+the other Mardukan trade-planets, and nobody could estimate how many
+ships would respond.
+
+"It may take us a little time to get an effective fleet together.
+Even after we get through arguing about it. Argument," he told
+Bentrik, "is not exclusively a feature of democracies."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Actually, there was very little argument, and most of that among
+the Mardukans. Prince Bentrik insisted that Crown Princess Myrna
+would have to be taken along; King Mikhyl would be either dead or
+brainwashed into imbecility by now, and they would have to have
+somebody to take the throne. Lady Valerie Alvarath, Sir Thomas
+Kobbly, the tutor, and the nurse Margot refused to be separated
+from her. Prince Bentrik was equally firm, with less success, on
+leaving his wife and son on Tanith. In the end, it was agreed that
+the entire Mardukan party would space out on the _Nemesis_.
+
+The leader of the Bigglersport delegation attempted an impassioned
+tirade about going to the aid of strangers while their own planet
+was being enslaved. He was booed down by everybody else and informed
+that Tanith was being defended where a planet ought to be, on
+somebody else's real estate. When the Bigglersporters emerged
+from the meeting, they found that their own space-yacht had been
+commandeered and sent off to Amaterasu and Beowulf for assistance,
+that the regiment of local infantry they had enlisted from the King
+of Tradetown had been taken over by the Rivington authorities, and
+that the Gilgamesh freighter they had chartered to transport them
+to Gram would now take them to Marduk.
+
+The problem broke into two halves: the purely naval action that
+would be fought to relieve the Moon of Marduk, if it still held out,
+and to destroy the Dunnan and Makann ships, and the ground-fighting
+problem of wiping out Makann's supporters and restoring the Mardukan
+monarchy. A great many of the people of Marduk would be glad of
+a chance to turn on Makann, once they had arms and were properly
+supported. Combat weapons were almost unknown among the people,
+however, and even sporting arms uncommon. All the small arms and
+light artillery and auto-weapons available were gathered up.
+
+The _Grendelsbane_ came in from Beowulf, and the _Sun Goddess_ from
+Amaterasu. Three independent Space Viking ships were still in orbit
+on Tanith; they joined the expedition. There would be trouble with
+them on Marduk; they'd want to loot. Let the Mardukans worry about
+that. They could charge it off as part of the price for letting
+Zaspar Makann get into power in the first place.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There were twelve spacecraft in line outside the Moon of Tanith,
+counting the three independents and the forcibly chartered
+Gilgamesher troop-transport; that was the biggest fleet Space
+Vikings had ever assembled in their history. Alvyn Karffard said
+as much while they were checking the formation by screen.
+
+"It isn't a Space Viking fleet," Prince Bentrik differed. "There
+are only three Space Vikings in it. The rest are the ships of three
+civilized planets. Tanith, Beowulf and Amaterasu."
+
+Karffard was surprised. "You mean _we're_ civilized planets? Like
+Marduk, or Baldur or Odin, or...?"
+
+"Well, aren't you?"
+
+Trask smiled. He'd begun to suspect something of the sort a couple
+of years ago. He hadn't really been sure until now. His most junior
+staff officer, Count Steven of Ravary, didn't seem to appreciate
+the compliment.
+
+"We _are_ Space Vikings!" he insisted. "And we are going to battle
+with the Neobarbarians of Zaspar Makann."
+
+"Well, I won't argue the last half of it, Steven," his father told him.
+
+"Are you people done yakking about who's civilized and who isn't?"
+Guatt Kirbey asked. "Then give the signal. All the other ships are
+ready to jump."
+
+Trask pressed the button on the desk in front of him. A light went
+on over Kirbey's control panel as one would on each of the other
+ships. He said, "Jumping," around the stem of his pipe, and twisted
+the red handle and shoved it in.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Four hundred and fifty hours, in the private universe that was the
+_Nemesis_; outside, nothing else existed, and inside there was
+nothing to do but wait, as each hour carried them six trillion miles
+nearer to Gimli. At first, the ruthless and terrible Space Viking,
+Steven, Count of Ravary, was wildly excited, but before long he
+found that there was nothing exciting going on; it was just a
+spaceship, and he'd been on ships before. Her Highness the Crown
+Princess, or maybe her Majesty the Queen of Marduk, stopped being
+excited about the same time, and she and Steven and Mopsy played
+together. Of course, Myrna was only a girl, and two years younger
+than Steven, but she was, or at least might be, his sovereign, and
+beside, she had been in a space action, if you call what lies
+between a planet and its satellite space and if you call being shot
+at without being able to shoot back an action, and Relentless
+Ravary, the Interstellar Terror, had not. This rather made up
+for being a girl and a mere baby of going-on-ten.
+
+One thing, there were no lessons. Sir Thomas Kobbly fancied himself
+as a landscape-painter and spent most of his time arguing techniques
+with Vann Larch, and Steven's tutor, Captain Rainer was a normal-space
+astrogator and found a kindred spirit in Sharll Renner. This left
+Lady Valerie Alvarath at a loose end. There were plenty of volunteers
+to help her fill in the time, but Rank Hath Its Privileges; Trask
+undertook to see to it that she did not suffer excessively from
+shipboard ennui.
+
+Sharll Renner and Captain Rainer approached him, during the cocktail
+hour before dinner, some hundred hours short of emergence.
+
+"We think we've figured out where Dunnan's base is," Renner said.
+
+"Oh, good!" Everybody else had, on a different planet. "Where's yours?"
+
+"Abaddon," the Count of Ravary's tutor said. When he saw that the
+name meant nothing to Trask, he added, "The ninth, outer, planet of
+the Marduk system." He said it disgustedly.
+
+"Yes; remember how you had Boake and Manfred out with their ships,
+checking our outside planets to see if Prince Viktor might be hiding
+on one of them? Well, what with the time element, and the way the
+_Honest Horris_ was shuttling back and forth from Marduk to some
+place that wasn't Gimli, and the way Dunnan was able to bring his
+ships in as soon as the shooting started on Marduk, we thought he
+must be on an uninhabited outer planet of the Marduk system."
+
+"I don't know why we never thought of that, ourselves," Rainer put
+in. "I suppose because nobody ever thinks of Abaddon for any reason.
+It's only a small planet, about four thousand miles in diameter, and
+it's three and a half billion miles from primary. It's frozen solid.
+It would take almost a year to get to it on Abbot drive, and if your
+ship has Dillinghams, why not take a little longer and go to a good
+planet? So nobody bothered with Abaddon."
+
+But for Dunnan's purpose, it would be perfect. He called Prince
+Bentrik and Alvyn Karffard to him; they found the idea instantly
+convincing. They talked about it through dinner, and held a general
+discussion afterward. Even Guatt Kirbey, the ship's pessimist, could
+find no objection to it. Trask and Bentrik began at once making
+battle plans. Karffard wondered if they hadn't better wait till they
+got to Gimli and discuss it with the others.
+
+"No," Trask told him. "This is the flagship; here's where the
+strategy is decided."
+
+"Well, how about the Mardukan Navy?" Captain Rainer asked. "I think
+Fleet Admiral Bargham's in command at Gimli."
+
+Prince Simon Bentrik was silent for a moment, as though he realized,
+with reluctance, that the big decision was no longer avoidable.
+
+"He may be, at present, but he won't be when I get there. I will be."
+
+"But ... Your Highness, he's a fleet admiral; you're just a
+commodore."
+
+"I am not just a commodore. The King is a prisoner, and for all we
+know dead. The Crown Prince is dead. The Princess Myrna is a child.
+I am assuming the position of Regent and Prince-Protector of the Realm."
+
+
+
+
+XXVI
+
+
+There was a little difficulty on Gimli with Fleet Admiral Bargham.
+Commodores didn't give orders to fleet admirals. Well, maybe regents
+did, but who gave Prince Bentrik authority to call himself regent?
+Regents were elected by the Chamber of Delegates, on nomination of
+the Chancellor.
+
+"That's Zaspar Makann and his stooges you're talking about?" Bentrik
+laughed.
+
+"Well, the Constitution...." He thought better of that, before
+somebody asked him what Constitution. "Well, a Regent has to be
+chosen by election. Even members of the Royal Family can't just
+make themselves Regent by saying they are."
+
+"I can. I just have. And I don't think there are going to be many
+more elections, at least for the present. Not till we make sure the
+people of Marduk can be trusted with the control of the government."
+
+"Well, the pinnace from Moonbase reported that there were six Royal
+navy battleships and four other craft attacking them," Bargham
+objected. "I only have four ships here; I sent for the ones on the
+other trade-planets, but I haven't heard from any of them. We can't
+go there with only four ships."
+
+"Sixteen ships," Bentrik corrected. "No, fifteen and one Gilgamesher
+we're using for a troopship. I think that's enough. You'll remain
+here on Gimli, in any case, admiral; as soon as the other ships come
+in, you'll follow to Marduk with them. I am now holding a meeting
+aboard the Tanith flagship _Nemesis_. I want your four ship-commanders
+aboard immediately. I am not including you because you're remaining
+here to bring up the late comers and as soon as this meeting is over
+we are spacing out."
+
+Actually, they spaced out sooner; the meeting lasted the whole three
+hundred and fifty hours to Abaddon. A ship's captain, if he has a
+good exec, as all of them had, needs only sit at his command-desk
+and look important while the ship is going into and emerging from
+a long jump; the rest of the time he can study ancient history or
+whatever his shipboard hobby is. Rather than waste three hundred and
+fifty hours of precious time, each captain turned his ship over to
+his exec and remained aboard the _Nemesis_; even on so spacious a
+craft the officers' country north of the engine rooms was crowded
+like a tourist hotel in mid-season. One of the four Mardukans was
+the Captain Garravay who had smuggled Bentrik's wife and son off
+Marduk, and the other three were just as pro-Bentrik, pro-Tanith,
+and anti-Makann. They were, on general principles, also anti-Bargham.
+There must be something wrong with any fleet admiral who remained
+in his command after Zaspar Makann came to power.
+
+So, as soon as they spaced out, there was a party. After that,
+they settled down to planning the Battle of Abaddon.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+There was no Battle of Abaddon.
+
+It was a dead planet, one side in night and the other in dim
+twilight from the little speck of a sun three and a half billion
+miles away, jagged mountains rising out of the snow that covered it
+from pole to pole. The snow on top would be frozen CO_2; according
+to the thermocouples, the surface temperature was well below
+minus-100 Centigrade. No ships on orbit circled it; there was
+a little faint radiation, which could have been from naturally
+radioactive minerals; there was no electrical discharge detectable.
+
+There was considerable bad language in the command room of the
+_Nemesis_. The captains of the other ships were screening in,
+wanting to know what to do.
+
+"Go on in," Trask told them. "Englobe the planet, and go down to
+within a mile if necessary. They could be hiding somewhere on it."
+
+"Well, they're not hiding at the bottom of any ocean, that's for
+sure," somebody said. It was one of those feeble jokes at which
+everybody laughs because nothing else is laughable about the
+situation.
+
+Finally, they found it, at the north pole, which was no colder than
+anywhere else on the planet. First radiation leakage, the sort that
+would come from a closed-down nuclear power plant. Then a modicum of
+electrical discharge. Finally the telescopic screens picked up the
+spaceport, a huge oval amphitheater excavated out of a valley
+between two jagged mountain ranges.
+
+The language in the command room was just as bad, but the tone had
+changed. It was surprising what a wide range of emotions could be
+expressed by a few simple blasphemies and obscenities. Everybody
+who had been deriding Sharll Renner were now acclaiming him.
+
+But it was lifeless. The ships came crowding in; air-locked
+landing-craft full of space-armored ground-fighters went down.
+Screens in the command room lit as they transmitted in views.
+Depressions in the carbon-dioxide snow where the hundred-foot
+pad-feet of ships' landing-legs had pressed down. Ranks of
+cargo-lighters that had plied to and from other ships or orbit.
+And, all around the cliff-walled perimeter, air-locked doors to
+caverns and tunnels. A great many men, with a great deal of equipment,
+had been working here in the estimated five or six years since
+Andray Dunnan--or somebody--had constructed this base.
+
+Andray Dunnan. They found his badge, the crescent, blue on black, on
+things. They found equipment that Harkaman recognized as having been
+part of the original cargo stolen with the _Enterprise_. They even
+found, in his living quarters, a blown-up photoprint picture of
+Nevil Ormm, draped in black. But what they did not find was a single
+vehicle small enough to be taken aboard a ship, or a single scrap of
+combat equipment, not even a pistol or a hand grenade.
+
+Dunnan had gone, but they knew whither, and where to find him.
+The conquest of Marduk had moved into its final phase.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Marduk was on the other side of the sun from Abaddon with
+ninety-five million miles--close, but not inconveniently so, Trask
+thought--to spare. Guatt Kirbey and the Mardukan astrogator who was
+helping him made it within a light-minute. The Mardukan thought that
+was fine; Kirbey didn't. The last microjump was aimed at the Moon of
+Marduk, which was plainly visible in the telescopic screen. They
+came out within a light-second and a half, which Kirbey admitted was
+reasonably close. As soon as the screens cleared, they saw that they
+weren't too late. The Moon of Marduk was under fire and firing back.
+
+They'd have detection, and he knew what they were detecting--a clump
+of sixteen rending distortions of the fabric of space-time, as
+sixteen ships came into sudden existence in the normal continuum.
+Beside him, Bentrik had a screen on; it was still milky-white,
+and he was speaking into a radio hand-phone.
+
+"Simon Bentrik, Prince-Protector of Marduk, calling Moonbase."
+Then, slowly, he repeated his screen-combination twice. "Come in,
+Moonbase; this is Simon Bentrik, Prince-Protector, speaking."
+
+He waited ten seconds, and was about to start again, when the screen
+flickered. The man who appeared in it wore the insignia of a
+Mardukan navy commodore. He needed a shave, but he was grinning
+happily. Bentrik greeted him by name.
+
+"Hello, Simon; glad to see you. Your Highness, I mean; what is this
+Prince-Protector thing?"
+
+"Somebody had to do it. Is the King still alive?"
+
+The grin slid off the commodore's face, starting with his eyes.
+
+"We don't know. At first, Makann had him speaking by screen--you
+know what it was like--urging everybody to obey and co-operate
+with 'our trusted Chancellor.' Makann always appeared on the screen
+with him."
+
+Bentrik nodded. "I remember."
+
+"Before you left, Makann kept quiet, and let the King make the
+speech. After a while, the King wasn't able to speak coherently;
+he'd stammer, and repeat. So then Makann did all the talking; they
+couldn't even depend on him to parrot what they were giving him with
+an earplug phone. Then he stopped appearing entirely. I suppose
+there were physical symptoms they couldn't allow to be seen."
+Bentrik was cursing horribly under his breath; the officer
+at Moonbase nodded. "I hope for his sake that he is dead."
+
+Poor Goodman Mikhyl. Bentrik was saying, "So do I." Trask agreed,
+mentally. The commodore at Moonbase was still talking:
+
+"We got two more renegade RMN ships, within a hundred hours after
+you left." He named them. "And we got one of the Dunnan ships, the
+_Fortuna_. We blew out the Malverton Navy Yard. They're still using
+the Antarctic Naval Base, but we've knocked out a good deal of that.
+We got the _Honest Horris_. They made two attempts to land on us and
+lost a couple of ships. Eight hundred hours ago, they were joined by
+the rest of Dunnan's fleet, five ships. They made a landing on
+Malverton while it was turned away from us. Makann announced that
+they were RMN units from the trade-planets that had joined him. I
+suppose the planet-side public swallowed that. He also announced that
+their commander, Admiral Dunnan, was in command of the People's
+Armed Forces."
+
+Dunnan's ground-fighters would be in control of Malverton. By now,
+the odds were that Makann was as much his prisoner as King Mikhyl
+VIII had been Makann's.
+
+"So Dunnan has conquered Marduk. All he has to do, now, is make it
+stick," he said. "I see four ships off Moonbase; how many more have
+they?"
+
+"These are _Bolide_ and _Eclipse_, Dunnan's ships, and former Royal
+Mardukan Navy ships _Champion_ and _Guardian_. There are five
+orbiting off the planet: Ex-RMNS _Paladin_, and Dunnan ships
+_Starhopper_, _Banshee_, _Reliable_ and _Exporter_. The last
+two are listed as merchantmen, but they're performing like
+regulation battlecraft."
+
+The four that had been circling Moonbase broke orbit and started
+toward the relieving fleet; one took a hit from a Moonbase missile,
+which staggered her but did no evident damage. Two ships which had
+been orbiting the planet also changed course and started out. The
+command room was silent except for a subdued chuckling from a
+computer which was estimating enemy intentions by observed data and
+Games Theory. Three more came hurrying out from the planet, and the
+two in the lead slowed to let them catch up. He wanted to be able
+to engage the four from off the satellite before the five from the
+planet joined them, but Karffard's computers said it couldn't be done.
+
+"All right, we have to take all our bad eggs in one basket," he
+said. "Try to hit them as soon after they join as possible."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The computers began chuckling again. The serving-robots were doing
+a rush business in hot coffee. Prince Bentrik's son, sitting beside
+his father, had stopped being Ruthless Ravary the Demon of the
+Spaceways and was a very young officer going into his first space
+battle, more scared and at the same time happier than he had ever
+been in his short life. Captain Garravay of the _Vindex_ was making
+signal to the other ships from Gimli: "_Royal Navy; smash the
+traitors first!_" He could understand and sympathize, even if
+he couldn't approve of putting personal ahead of tactical
+considerations, and made a quick sealed-beam call to Harkaman to be
+prepared to plug any holes they left in formation if they broke away
+in search of vengeance. He also ordered the _Black Star_ and the
+_Sun Goddess_ to shepherd the lightly armed and troop-crammed
+Gilgamesh freighter out of danger. The two clumps of Dunnan-Makann
+ships were converging rapidly, and Alvyn Karffard was screaming into
+a phone to somebody to get more speed.
+
+At a thousand miles, the missiles started going out, and the two
+groups of ships, four and five, were equidistant from each other and
+from the allied fleet, at the points of a triangle that was growing
+smaller by the second. The first fire-globes of intercepted missiles
+spread from their seeds of brief white light. A red light flashed on
+the damage-board. An enemy ship took a hit. The captain of the
+_Queen Flavia_ was on a screen, saying that his ship was heavily
+damaged. Three ships bearing the Mardukan dragon-and-planet circled
+madly around each other at what looked, in the screen, like just
+over pistol-range, two of them firing into the third, which was
+replying desperately. The third one blew up, and somebody was
+yelling out of a screenspeaker, "Scratch one traitor!"
+
+Another ship blew up somewhere, and then another. He heard somebody
+say, "There went one of ours," and wondered which one it was. Not
+the _Corisande_, he hoped; no, it wasn't, he could see her rushing
+after two other ships which were, in turn, speeding toward the
+_Black Star_, the _Sun Goddess_ and the Gilgamesh freighter. Then
+the _Nemesis_ and the _Starhopper_ were within gun-range, pounding
+each other savagely.
+
+The battle had tied itself into a ball of gyrating, fire-spitting
+ships that went rolling toward the planet, which was swinging in and
+out of the main viewscreen and growing rapidly larger. By the time
+they were down to the inner edge of the exosphere, the ball had
+started to unwind, ship after ship dropping out of it and going
+into orbit, some badly damaged and some going to attack damaged
+enemies. Some of them were completely around the planet, hidden
+by it. He saw three ships approaching _Corisande_, _Sun Goddess_,
+and the Gilgamesher. He got Harkaman on the screen.
+
+"Where's the _Black Star_?" he asked.
+
+"Gone to Em-See-Square," Harkaman replied. "We got the two
+Dunnan-Makanns. _Bolide_ and _Reliable_."
+
+Then young Steven of Ravary, who had been monitoring one of the
+intership screens, had a call from Captain Gompertz of the
+_Grendelsbane_, and at the same moment somebody else was yelling,
+"Here comes the _Starhopper_ again!"
+
+"Tell him to wait a moment; we have troubles," he said.
+
+_Nemesis_ and _Starhopper_ sledge-hammered each other and parried
+with counter-missiles, and then, quite unexpectedly, the
+_Starhopper_ went to Em-See-Square.
+
+There was an awful lot of Em being converted to Ee off Marduk,
+today. Including Manfred Ravallo; that grieved him. Manfred was
+a good man, and a good friend. He had a girl in Rivington....
+Nifflheim, there were eight hundred good men aboard the _Black
+Star_, and most of them had girls who'd wait in vain for them on
+Tanith. Well, what had Otto Harkaman said, so long ago, on Gram?
+Something about old age not being a usual cause of death among
+Space Vikings, wasn't it?
+
+Then he remembered that Gompertz of the _Grendelsbane_ was trying
+to get him. He told young Count Steven to switch him over.
+
+"We just lost one of our Mardukans," Gompertz told him, in his
+staccato Beowulf accent. "I think she was the _Challenger_. The ship
+that got her looks like the _Banshee_; I'm turning to engage her."
+
+"Which way; west around the planet? Be right with you, captain."
+
+
+
+
+XXVII
+
+
+It was like finishing a word puzzle. You sit staring at it, looking
+for more spaces to print letters into, and suddenly you realize
+that there are no more, that the puzzle is done. That was how the
+space-battle of Marduk, the Battle _off_ Marduk, ended. Suddenly
+there were no more colored fire-globes opening and fading, no more
+missiles coming, no more enemy ships to throw missiles at. Now it
+was time to take a count of his own ships, and then begin thinking
+about the Battle _on_ Marduk.
+
+The _Black Star_ was gone. So was RMNS _Challenger_, and RMNS
+_Conquistador_. _Space Scourge_ was badly hammered; worse than after
+the Beowulf raid, Boake Valkanhayn said. The _Viking's Gift_ was
+heavily damaged, too, and so was the _Corisande_, and so, from the
+looks of the damage board, was the _Nemesis_. And three ships were
+missing--the three independent Space Vikings, _Harpy_, _Curse of
+Cagn_, and Roger-fan-Morvill Esthersan's _Damnthing_.
+
+Prince Bentrik frowned over that. "I can't think that all three
+of those ships would have been destroyed, without anybody seeing
+it happen."
+
+"Neither can I. But I can think that all those ships broke out of
+the battle together and headed in for the planet. They didn't come
+here to help liberate Marduk, they came here to fill their cargo
+holds. I only hope the people they're robbing all voted the Makann
+ticket in the last election." A crumb of comfort occurred to him,
+and he passed it on. "The only people who are armed to resist them
+will be Makann's storm-troops and Dunnan's pirates; they'll be the
+ones to get killed."
+
+"We don't want any more killing than...." Prince Simon broke off
+suddenly. "I'm beginning to talk like his late Highness Crown Prince
+Edvard," he said. "He didn't want bloodshed, either, and look whose
+blood was shed. If they're doing what you think they are, I'm afraid
+we'll have to kill a few of your Space Vikings, too."
+
+"They aren't my Space Vikings." He was a little surprised to find
+that, after almost eight years of bearing the name himself, he was
+using it as an other-people label. Well, why not? He was the ruler
+of the civilized planet of Tanith, wasn't he? "But let's not start
+fighting them till the main war's over. Those three shiploads are
+no worse than a bad cold; Makann and Dunnan are the plague."
+
+It would still take four hours to get down, in a spiral of
+deceleration. They started the telecasts which had been filmed and
+taped on the voyage from Gimli. The Prince-Protector Simon Bentrik
+spoke: The illegal rule of the traitor Makann was ended. His deluded
+followers were advised to return to their allegiance to the Crown.
+The People's Watchmen were ordered to surrender their arms and
+disband; in localities where they refused, the loyal people were
+called upon to co-operate with the legitimate armed forces of
+the Crown in exterminating them, and would be furnished arms
+as soon as possible.
+
+Little Princess Myrna spoke: "If my grandfather is still alive,
+he is your King; if he is not, I am your Queen, and until I am old
+enough to rule in my own right, I accept Prince Simon as Regent
+and Protector of the Realm, and I call on all of you to obey him
+as I will."
+
+"You didn't say anything about representative government, or
+democracy, or the constitution," Trask mentioned. "And I noticed
+the use of the word 'rule,' instead of 'reign.'"
+
+"That's right," the self-proclaimed Prince-Protector said. "There's
+something wrong with democracy. If there weren't, it couldn't be
+overthrown by people like Makann, attacking it from within by
+democratic procedures. I don't think it's fundamentally unworkable.
+I think it just has a few of what engineers call bugs. It's not
+safe to run a defective machine till you learn the defects and
+remedy them."
+
+"Well, I hope you don't think our Sword-World feudalism doesn't have
+bugs." He gave examples, and then quoted Otto Harkaman about barbarism
+spreading downward from the top instead of upward from the bottom.
+
+"It may just be," he added, "that there is something fundamentally
+unworkable about government itself. As long as _Homo sapiens terra_
+is a wild animal, which he has always been and always will be until
+he evolves into something different in a million or so years, maybe
+a workable system of government is a political science impossibility,
+just as transmutation of elements was a physical-science impossibility
+as long as they tried to do it by chemical means."
+
+[Illustration]
+
+"Then we'll just have to make it work the best way we can, and when
+it breaks down, hope the next try will work a little better, for a
+little longer," Bentrik said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Malverton grew in the telescopic screens as they came down. The Navy
+Spaceport, where Trask had landed almost two years before, was in
+wreckage, sprinkled with damaged ships that had been blasted on the
+ground, and slagged by thermonuclear fires. There was fighting in
+the air all over the city proper, on building-tops, on the ground,
+and in the air. That would be the _Damnthing_-_Harpy_-_Curse of
+Cagn_ Space Vikings. The Royal Palace was the center of one of
+half a dozen swirls of battle that had condensed out of the
+general skirmishing.
+
+Paytrik Morland started for it with the first wave of
+ground-fighters from the _Nemesis_. The Gilgamesh freighter, like
+most of her ilk, had huge cargo ports all around; these began
+opening and disgorging a swarm of everything from landing-craft
+and hundred-foot airboats to one man air-cavalry single-mounts.
+The top landing-stages and terraces of the palace were almost
+obscured by the flashes of auto-cannon shells and the smoke and
+dust of projectiles. Then the first vehicles landed, the firing
+from the air stopped, and men fanned out as skirmishers,
+occasionally firing with small arms.
+
+Trask and Bentrik were in the armory off the vehicle-bay, putting on
+combat equipment, when the twelve-year-old Count of Ravary joined
+them and began rummaging for weapons and a helmet.
+
+"You're not going," his father told him. "I'll have enough to worry
+about taking care of myself...."
+
+That was the wrong approach. Trask interrupted:
+
+"You're to stay aboard, Count," he said. "As soon as things
+stabilize, Princess Myrna will have to come down. You'll act as
+her personal escort. And don't think you're being shoved into the
+background. She's Crown Princess, and if she isn't Queen now, she
+will be in a few years. Escorting her now will be the foundation of
+your naval career. There isn't a young officer in the Royal Navy who
+wouldn't trade places with you."
+
+"That was the right way to handle him, Lucas," Bentrik approved,
+after the boy had gone away, proud of his opportunity and his
+responsibility.
+
+"It'll do just what I said for him." He stopped for a moment, to
+play with an idea that had just struck him. "You know, the girl will
+be Queen in a few years, if she isn't now. Queens need Prince
+Consorts. Your son's a good boy; I liked him the first moment I saw
+him, and I've liked him better ever since. He'd be a good man on
+the throne beside Queen Myrna."
+
+"Oh, that's out of the question. Not the matter of consanguinity,
+they're about a sixteenth cousin. But people would say I was abusing
+the Protectorship to marry my son onto the Throne."
+
+"Simon, speaking as one sovereign prince to another, you have a lot
+to learn. You've learned one important lesson already, that a ruler
+must be willing to use force and shed blood to enforce his rule. You
+have to learn, too, that a ruler cannot afford to be guided by his
+fears of what people will say about him. Not even what history will
+say about him. A ruler's only judge is himself."
+
+Bentrik slid the transpex visor of his helmet up and down
+experimentally, checked the chambers of his pistol and carbine.
+
+"All that matters to me is the peace and well-being of Marduk. I'll
+have to talk it over with ... with my only judge. Well, let's go."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The top terraces were secure when their car landed. More vehicles
+were coming down and discharging men; a swarm of landing craft were
+sinking past the building toward the ground two thousand feet below.
+Auto-weapons and small arms and light cannon banged, and bombs and
+recoilless-rifle shells crashed, on the lower terraces. They put the
+car down one of the shaftways until they ran into heavy fire from
+below, at the limit of the advance, and then turned into a broad
+hallway, floating high enough to clear the heads of the men on foot.
+It looked like the part of the Palace where he had lodged when he
+had been a guest there but it probably wasn't.
+
+They came to hastily constructed barricades of furniture and
+statuary and furnishings, behind which Makann's People's Watchmen
+and Andray Dunnan's Space Vikings were making resistance. They
+entered rooms dusty with powdered plaster and acrid with powder
+fumes, littered with corpses. They passed lifter-skids being towed
+out with wounded. They went through rooms crowded with their own
+men--"_Keep your fingers off things; this isn't a looting
+expedition!_" "_You stupid cretin, how did you know there wasn't a
+man hiding behind that?_" In one huge room, ballroom or concert room
+or something, there were prisoners herded, and men from the
+_Nemesis_ were setting up polyencephalographic veridicators, sturdy
+chairs with wires and adjustable helmets and translucent globes
+mounted over them. A couple of Morland's men were hustling a
+People's Watchman to one and strapping him into a chair.
+
+"You know what this is, don't you?" one of them was saying. "This is
+a veridicator. That globe'll light blue; the moment you try to lie
+to us, it'll turn red. And the moment it turns red, I'm going to
+hammer your teeth down your throat with the butt of this pistol."
+
+"Have you found anything out about the King, yet?" Bentrik asked him.
+
+He turned. "No. Nobody we've questioned so far knows anything later
+than a month ago about him. He just disappeared." He was going to
+say something else, saw Bentrik's face, and changed his mind.
+
+"He's dead," Bentrik said dully. "They tortured him and brainwashed
+him and used him as a ventriloquist's dummy on the screen as long as
+they could; when they couldn't let the people see him any more,
+they stuffed him into a converter."
+
+They did find Zaspar Makann, hours later. Maybe he could have told
+them something, if he had been alive, but he and a few of his
+fanatical followers had barricaded themselves in the Throne room and
+died trying to defend it. They found Makann on the Throne, the top
+of his head blown away, a pistol death-gripped in his hand, and the
+Great Crown lying on the floor, the velvet inner cap bullet-pierced
+and splattered with blood and brain tissue. Prince Bentrik picked it
+up and looked at it disgustedly.
+
+"We'll have to have something done about that," he said. "I really
+didn't think he'd do just this. I thought he wanted to abolish the
+Throne, not sit on it."
+
+Except for one chandelier smashed and several corpses that had to be
+dragged out, the Ministerial Council room was intact. They set up
+headquarters there. Boake Valkanhayn and several other ship-captains
+joined them. There was fighting going on in several places inside
+the Palace, and the city was still in a turmoil. Somebody managed
+to get in touch with the captains of the _Damnthing_, the _Harpy_
+and the _Curse of Cagn_ and bring them to the Palace. Trask attempted
+to reason with them, to no avail.
+
+"Prince Trask, you're my friend, and you've always dealt fairly with
+me," Roger-fan-Morvill Esthersan said. "But you know just how far
+any Space Viking captain can control his crew. These men didn't come
+here to correct the political mistakes of Marduk. They came here for
+what they could haul away. I could get myself killed trying to stop
+them now...."
+
+"I wouldn't even try," the captain of the _Curse of Cagn_ put in.
+"I came here for what I could make out of this planet, myself."
+
+"You can try to stop them," said the captain of the _Harpy_.
+"You'll find it even harder than what you're doing now."
+
+Trask looked at some of the reports that had come in from elsewhere
+on the planet. Harkaman had landed on one of the big cities to the
+east, and the people had risen against Makann's local bosses and
+were helping wipe out the People's Watchmen with arms they had been
+furnished. Valkanhayn's exec had landed on a large concentration
+camp where close to ten thousand of Makann's political enemies had
+been penned; he had distributed all his available weapons and was
+calling for more. Gompertz of the _Grendelsbane_ was at Drepplin;
+he reported just the reverse. The people there had risen in support
+of the Makann regime, and he wanted authorization to use nuclear
+weapons against them.
+
+"Could you talk your people into going to some other city?" Trask
+asked. "We have a city for you; big industrial center. It ought to
+be fine looting. Drepplin."
+
+"The people there are Mardukan subjects, too," Bentrik began. Then
+he shrugged. "It's not what we'd like to do, it's what we have to.
+By all means, gentlemen. Take your men to Drepplin, and nobody will
+object to anything you do."
+
+"And when you have that place looted out, try Abaddon. You were
+aground there, Captain Esthersan. You know what all Dunnan left there."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A couple of Space Vikings--no, Royal Army of Tanith men--brought in
+the old woman, dirty, in rags, almost exhausted.
+
+"She wants to talk to Prince Bentrik; won't talk to anybody else.
+Says she knows where the King is."
+
+Bentrik rose quickly, brought her to a chair, poured a glass of wine
+for her.
+
+"He's still alive, Your Highness. The Crown Princess Melanie and I
+... I'm sorry, Your Highness; Dowager Crown Princess ... have been
+taking care of him, the best way we could. If you'll only come
+quickly...."
+
+Mikhyl VIII, Planetary King of Marduk, lay on a pallet of filthy
+bedding on the floor of a narrow room behind a mass-energy converter
+which disposed of the rubbish and sewage and generated power for
+some of the fixed equipment on one of the middle floors of the east
+wing of the palace. There was a bucket of water, and on a rough
+wooden bench lay a cloth-wrapped bundle of food. A woman, haggard
+and disheveled, wearing a suit of greasy mechanic's coveralls and
+nothing else, squatted beside him. The Crown Princess Melanie, whom
+Trask remembered as the charming and gracious hostess of Cragdale.
+She tried to rise, and staggered.
+
+"Prince Bentrik! And it's Prince Trask of Tanith!" she cried.
+"Just hurry; get him out of here and to where he can be taken
+care of. Please." Then she sat down again on the floor and fell
+over, unconscious.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They couldn't get the story. The Princess Melanie had collapsed
+completely. Her companion, another noblewoman of the court, could
+only ramble disconnectedly. And the King merely lay, bathed and
+fed in a clean bed, and looked up at them wonderingly, as though
+nothing he saw or heard conveyed any meaning to him. The doctors
+could do nothing.
+
+"He has no mind, no more mind than a new-born baby. We can keep him
+alive, I don't know how long. That's our professional duty. But it's
+no kindness to His Majesty."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The little pockets of resistance in the Palace were wiped out,
+through the next morning and afternoon. All but one, far
+underground, below the main power plant. They tried sleep-gas; the
+defenders had blowers and sent it back at them. They tried blasting;
+there was a limit to what the fabric of the building would stand.
+And nobody knew how long it would take to starve them out.
+
+On the third day, a man crawled out, pushing a white shirt tied to
+the barrel of a carbine ahead of him.
+
+"Is Prince Lucas Trask of Tanith here?" he asked. "I won't speak to
+anybody else."
+
+They brought Trask quickly. All that was visible of the other man
+was the carbine-barrel and the white shirt. When Trask called to
+him, he raised his head above the rubble behind which he was hiding.
+
+"Prince Trask, we have Andray Dunnan here; he was leading us, but
+now we've disarmed him and are holding him. If we turn him over to
+you, will you let us go?"
+
+"If you all come out unarmed, and bring Dunnan with you, I promise
+you, the rest of you will be let outside this building and allowed
+to go away unharmed."
+
+"All right. We'll be coming out in a minute." The man raised his
+voice. "It's agreed!" he called. "Bring him out."
+
+There were fewer than two score of them. Some wore the uniforms of
+high officers of the People's Watchmen or of People's Welfare Party
+functionaries; a few wore the heavily braided short jackets of Space
+Viking officers. Among them, they propelled a thin-faced man with a
+pointed beard, and Trask had to look twice at him before he
+recognized the face of Andray Dunnan. It looked more like the face
+of Duke Angus of Wardshaven as he last remembered it. Dunnan looked
+at him in incurious contempt.
+
+"Your dotard king couldn't rule without Zaspar Makann, and Makann
+couldn't rule without me, and neither can you," he said. "Shoot this
+gang of turncoats, and I'll rule Marduk for you." He looked at Trask
+again. "Who are you?" he demanded. "I don't know you."
+
+Trask slipped the pistol from his holster, thumbing off the safety.
+
+"I am Lucas Trask. You've heard that name before," he said. "Stand
+away from behind him, you people."
+
+"Oh, yes; the poor fool who thought he was going to marry Elaine
+Karvall. Well, you won't, Lord Trask of Traskon. She loves me, not
+you. She's waiting for me now, on Gram...."
+
+Trask shot him through the head. Dunnan's eyes widened in momentary
+incredulity; then his knees gave way, and he fell forward on his
+face. Trask thumbed on the safety and holstered the pistol, and
+looked at the body on the concrete.
+
+It hadn't made the least difference. It had been like shooting a
+snake, or one of the nasty scorpion-things that infested the old
+buildings in Rivington. Just no more Andray Dunnan.
+
+"Take that carrion and stuff it in a mass-energy converter," he
+said. "And I don't want anybody to mention the name of Andray Dunnan
+to me again."
+
+He didn't look at them haul Dunnan's body away on a lifter-skid;
+he watched the fifty-odd leaders of the overthrown misgovernment
+of Marduk shamble away to freedom, guarded by Paytrik Morland's
+riflemen. Now there was something to reproach himself for; he'd
+committed a separate and distinct crime against Marduk by letting
+each one of them live. Unless recognized and killed by somebody
+outside, every one of them would be at some villainy before next
+sunrise. Well, King Simon I could cope with that.
+
+He started when he realized how he had thought of his friend. Well,
+why not? Mikhyl's mind was dead; his body would not survive it more
+than a year. Then a child Queen, and a long regency, and long
+regencies were dangerous. Better a strong King, in name as well as
+power. And the succession could be safeguarded by marrying Steven
+and Myrna. Myrna had accepted, at eight, that she must some day
+marry for reasons of state; why not her playmate Steven?
+
+And Simon Bentrik would see the necessity. He was neither a fool nor
+a moral coward; he only needed to take some time to adjust to ideas.
+The rabble who had bought their lives with their leader's had gone,
+now. Slowly, he followed them, thinking.
+
+Don't press the idea on Simon too hard; just expose him to it and
+let him adopt it. And there would be the treaty--Tanith, Marduk,
+Beowulf, Amaterasu; eventually, treaties with the other civilized
+planets. Nebulously, the idea of a League of Civilized Worlds began
+to take shape in his mind.
+
+Be a good idea if he adopted the title of King of Tanith for
+himself. And cut loose from the Sword-Worlds; especially cut loose
+from Gram. Let Viktor of Xochitl have it. Or Garvan Spasso. Viktor
+wouldn't be the last Space Viking to take his ships back against
+the Sword-Worlds. Sooner or later, civilization in the Old Federation
+would drive them all home to loot the planets that had sent them out.
+
+Well, if he was going to be a king, shouldn't he have a queen? Kings
+usually did. He climbed into the little hall-car and started up a
+long shaft. There was Valerie Alvarath. They'd enjoyed each other's
+society on the _Nemesis_. He wondered if she would want to make it
+permanent, even on a throne....
+
+Elaine was with him. He felt her beside him, almost tangibly. Her
+voice was whispering to him: _She loves you, Lucas. She'll say yes.
+Be good to her, and she'll make you happy._ Then she was gone, and
+he knew that she would never return.
+
+Good-by, Elaine.
+
+
+[Illustration: FIN]
+
+
+Notes:
+Inconsistent hyphenation; the former forms were all changed to the latter:
+  Space-Scourge (7) vs. Space Scourge (41)
+  Sun-Goddess (3) vs. Sun Goddess (3)
+
+  Jaganath (2) vs. Jagannath (4)
+  Amaterasun (1) vs. Amaterasuan[s] (1)
+  handphone (1) vs. hand-phone (3)
+  planetside (1) vs. planet-side (1)
+  slagpile (1) vs. slag-pile (1)
+  trade planets (3) vs. trade-planets (10)
+  two hand (1) vs. two-hand (1)
+  air cavalry (1) vs. air-cavalry (2)
+  smallarms (1) vs. small arms (5)
+
+Thinkos:
+  Admiral of the Royal Mardukan Navy." [Chap. XIV]
+was changed to
+  Admiral of the Royal Navy of Gram."
+
+  one of the Gram-Marduk freighters,  [Chap. XXIII]
+was changed to
+  one of the Gram-Tanith freighters,
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Space Viking, by Henry Beam Piper
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SPACE VIKING ***
+
+***** This file should be named 20728.txt or 20728.zip *****
+This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
+        https://www.gutenberg.org/2/0/7/2/20728/
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, William Woods and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
+will be renamed.
+
+Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
+one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
+(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
+permission and without paying copyright royalties.  Special rules,
+set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
+copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
+protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark.  Project
+Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
+charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission.  If you
+do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
+rules is very easy.  You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
+such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
+research.  They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
+practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks.  Redistribution is
+subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
+redistribution.
+
+
+
+*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
+
+THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
+PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
+
+To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
+distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
+(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at
+https://gutenberg.org/license).
+
+
+Section 1.  General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic works
+
+1.A.  By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
+and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
+(trademark/copyright) agreement.  If you do not agree to abide by all
+the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
+all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
+If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
+terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
+entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
+
+1.B.  "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark.  It may only be
+used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
+agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement.  There are a few
+things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
+even without complying with the full terms of this agreement.  See
+paragraph 1.C below.  There are a lot of things you can do with Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
+and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.  See paragraph 1.E below.
+
+1.C.  The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
+or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic works.  Nearly all the individual works in the
+collection are in the public domain in the United States.  If an
+individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
+located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
+copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
+works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
+are removed.  Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
+Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
+freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
+this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
+the work.  You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
+keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
+Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
+
+1.D.  The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
+what you can do with this work.  Copyright laws in most countries are in
+a constant state of change.  If you are outside the United States, check
+the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
+before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
+creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
+Gutenberg-tm work.  The Foundation makes no representations concerning
+the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
+States.
+
+1.E.  Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
+
+1.E.1.  The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
+access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
+whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
+phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
+Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
+copied or distributed:
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+1.E.2.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
+from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
+posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
+and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
+or charges.  If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
+with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
+work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
+through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
+Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
+1.E.9.
+
+1.E.3.  If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
+with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
+must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
+terms imposed by the copyright holder.  Additional terms will be linked
+to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
+permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
+
+1.E.4.  Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
+work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
+
+1.E.5.  Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
+electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
+prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
+active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm License.
+
+1.E.6.  You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
+compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
+word processing or hypertext form.  However, if you provide access to or
+distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
+"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
+posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
+you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
+copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
+request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
+form.  Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
+
+1.E.7.  Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
+performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
+unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
+
+1.E.8.  You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
+access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
+that
+
+- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
+     the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
+     you already use to calculate your applicable taxes.  The fee is
+     owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
+     has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
+     Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation.  Royalty payments
+     must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
+     prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
+     returns.  Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
+     sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
+     address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
+     the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
+
+- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
+     you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
+     does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
+     License.  You must require such a user to return or
+     destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
+     and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
+     Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
+     money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
+     electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
+     of receipt of the work.
+
+- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
+     distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
+
+1.E.9.  If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
+electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
+forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
+both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
+Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark.  Contact the
+Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
+
+1.F.
+
+1.F.1.  Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
+effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
+public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
+collection.  Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
+"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
+corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
+property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
+computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
+your equipment.
+
+1.F.2.  LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
+of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
+Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
+Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
+liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
+fees.  YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
+LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
+PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3.  YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
+TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
+LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
+INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
+DAMAGE.
+
+1.F.3.  LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
+defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
+receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
+written explanation to the person you received the work from.  If you
+received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
+your written explanation.  The person or entity that provided you with
+the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
+refund.  If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
+providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
+receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund.  If the second copy
+is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
+opportunities to fix the problem.
+
+1.F.4.  Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
+in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER
+WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
+WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
+
+1.F.5.  Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
+warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
+If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
+law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
+interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
+the applicable state law.  The invalidity or unenforceability of any
+provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
+
+1.F.6.  INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
+trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
+providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
+with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
+promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
+harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
+that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
+or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
+work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
+Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
+
+
+Section  2.  Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
+electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
+including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers.  It exists
+because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
+people in all walks of life.
+
+Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
+assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
+goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
+remain freely available for generations to come.  In 2001, the Project
+Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
+and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
+To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
+and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
+and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org.
+
+
+Section 3.  Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
+Foundation
+
+The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
+501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
+state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
+Revenue Service.  The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
+number is 64-6221541.  Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at
+https://pglaf.org/fundraising.  Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
+permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
+
+The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
+Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
+throughout numerous locations.  Its business office is located at
+809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email
+business@pglaf.org.  Email contact links and up to date contact
+information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official
+page at https://pglaf.org
+
+For additional contact information:
+     Dr. Gregory B. Newby
+     Chief Executive and Director
+     gbnewby@pglaf.org
+
+
+Section 4.  Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
+Literary Archive Foundation
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
+spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
+increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
+freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
+array of equipment including outdated equipment.  Many small donations
+($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
+status with the IRS.
+
+The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
+charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
+States.  Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
+considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
+with these requirements.  We do not solicit donations in locations
+where we have not received written confirmation of compliance.  To
+SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
+particular state visit https://pglaf.org
+
+While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
+have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
+against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
+approach us with offers to donate.
+
+International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
+any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
+outside the United States.  U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
+
+Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
+methods and addresses.  Donations are accepted in a number of other
+ways including including checks, online payments and credit card
+donations.  To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate
+
+
+Section 5.  General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
+works.
+
+Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
+concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
+with anyone.  For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project
+Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
+
+
+Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
+editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
+unless a copyright notice is included.  Thus, we do not necessarily
+keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
+
+
+Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
+
+     https://www.gutenberg.org
+
+This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
+including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
+Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
+subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.