standard furniture windsor - Hallo friend furniture stands lover, At this time sharing furniture stands entitled standard furniture windsor, I have provided furniture stands ideas. hopefully content of posts that I wrote this home design, Furniture Decorating, interior, furniture stands can be useful. OK, following its coverage of furniture stands ideas..

About : standard furniture windsor
Title : standard furniture windsor

standard furniture windsor

space viking by h. beam piper i they stood together at the parapet, theirarms about each other's waists, her head against his cheek. behind, the broad leaved shrubberygossiped softly with the wind, and from the lower main terrace came music and laughingvoices. the city of wardshaven spread in front of them, white buildings rising from the widespaces 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 asyellow as a ripe peach. his eye caught a twinkle ten miles to thesouthwest, and for an instant he was puzzled.

then he frowned. the sunlight on the two thousand-footglobe of duke angus' new ship, the enterprise, back at the gorram shipyards after her finaltrial cruise. he didn't want to think about that, now. instead, he pressed the girl closer and whisperedher name, "elaine," and then, caressing every syllable, "lady elaine trask of traskon." "oh, no, lucas!" her protest was half jokingand 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 sincethe 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 traskonnew house," he told her. "tomorrow, we'll have our dinner there, and watch the sunsettogether." "i know. i thought that was to be our sunset-watchingplace." "you have been peeking," he accused. "traskonnew house was to be your surprise." "i always was a present-peeker, new year'sand my birthdays. but i only saw it from the air. i'll be very surprised at everythinginside," she promised. "and very delighted." and when she'd seen everything and traskonnew house wasn't a surprise any more, they'd

take a long space trip. he hadn't mentionedthat 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 shewould see clear blue skies again, and stars at night. the cloud-veil hid the stars fromgram, and elaine had missed them, since coming home from excalibur. the shadow of an aircar fell briefly uponthem and they looked up and turned their heads, in time to see it sink with graceful dignitytoward 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 someof his people come ahead of him. they should

get back to their guests, he supposed. thenhe took her in his arms and kissed her, and she responded ardently. it must have beenall of five minutes since they'd done that before. a slight cough behind them brought them apartand their heads around. it was sesar karvall, gray-haired and portly, the breast of hisblue coat gleaming with orders and decorations and the sapphire in the pommel of his dress-daggertwinkling. "i thought i'd find you two here," elaine'sfather smiled. "you'll have tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow together, but need i remind youthat today we have guests, and more coming every minute."

"who came in the ward car?" elaine asked. "rovard grauffis. and otto harkaman; you nevermet him, did you, lucas?" "no; not by introduction. i'd like to, beforehe spaces out." he had nothing against harkaman personally; only against what he represented."is the duke coming?" "oh, surely. lionel of newhaven and the lordof northport are coming with him. they're at the palace now." karvall hesitated. "hisnephew'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 noticeof, if he keeps it up after tomorrow." for his seconds and andray dunnan's, thatwas; he hoped it wouldn't come to that. he didn't want to have to shoot a kinsman tothe 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'thave subjected yourself to that! the man is insane!" then he saw her bare shoulders, andwas even more shocked. "elaine, your shawl!" her hands went up and couldn't find it; shelooked about in confused embarrassment. amused,

lucas picked it from the shrub onto whichshe had tossed it and draped it over her shoulders, his hands lingering briefly. then he gesturedto 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-greenbasin. another piece of loot from one of the old federation planets; that was somethinghe'd tried to avoid in furnishing traskon new house. there'd be a lot of that comingto gram, after otto harkaman took the enterprise to space. "i'll have to come back, some time, and visitthem," elaine whispered to him. "they'll miss me."

"you'll find a lot of new friends at yournew home," he whispered back. "you wait till tomorrow." "i'm going to put a word in the duke's earabout 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 hasany influence over him at all." dunnan's mother had been the duke's youngersister; from his father he had inherited what had originally been a prosperous barony. nowit was mortgaged to the top of the manor-house aerial-mast. the duke had once assumed dunnan'sdebts, and refused to do so again. dunnan had gone to space a few times, as a juniorofficer on trade-and-raid voyages into the

old federation. he was supposed to be a fairastrogator. he had expected his uncle to give him command of the enterprise, which had beenridiculous. disappointed in that, he had recruited a mercenary company and was seeking militaryemployment: 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 elainekarvall, a passion which seemed to nourish itself on its own hopelessness. maybe it wouldbe a good idea to take that space trip right away. there ought to be a ship leaving bigglersportfor 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 coatsof the men making shifting color-patterns among the flower-beds and on the lawns andunder the trees. serving-robots, flame-yellow and black in the karvall colors, floated aboutplaying soft music and offering refreshments. there was a continuous spiral of changingcostume-color around the circular robo-table. voices babbled happily like a mountain river. as they stood looking down, another aircarcircled low; green and gold, lettered panplanet news service. sesar karvall swore in irritation. "didn't there use to be something they calledprivacy?" he asked. "it's a big story, sesar."

it was; more than the marriage of two peoplewho happened to be in love with each other. it was the marriage of the farming and ranchingbarony of traskon and the karvall steel mills. more, it was public announcement that thewealth 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 beclosed until morning-after-next, and there would be dancing in every park and feastingin every tavern. to sword-worlders, any excuse for a holiday was better than none. "they're our people, sesar; they have a rightto 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 clusterof 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 rovardgrauffis, small and saturnine, duke angus' henchman, and burt sandrasan, lady lavina'sbrother. they spoke, and then an upper-servant, his tabard blazoned with the yellow flameand 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. iknow your attitude, but he's a good sort. personally, i wish we had a few like him aroundhere." that was his main objection. there were fewerand fewer men of that sort on any of the sword-worlds. ii a dozen men clustered around the bartendingrobot—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 whomhe knew only distantly. and otto harkaman. harkaman was a space viking. that would haveset him apart, even if he hadn't topped the tallest of them by a head. he wore a shortblack jacket, heavily gold-braided, and black

trousers inside ankle-boots; the dagger onhis belt was no mere dress-ornament. his tousled red-brown hair was long enough to furnishextra padding in a combat-helmet, and his beard was cut square at the bottom. he had been fighting on durendal, for oneof 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 pennilessrefugee on flamberge, owning only the clothes he stood in and his personal weapons and theloyalty of half a dozen adventurers as penniless as himself, when duke angus had invited himto gram to command the enterprise. "a pleasure, lord trask. i've met your lovelybride-to-be, and now that i meet you, let

me congratulate both." then, as they werehaving a drink together, he put his foot in it by asking: "you're not an investor in thetanith adventure, are you?" he said he wasn't, and would have let it goat that. young basil gorram had to get his foot in, too. "lord trask does not approve of the tanithadventure," he said scornfully. "he thinks we should stay home and produce wealth, insteadof 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 robberyand murder," he agreed. "space vikings are professional robbers and murderers. and youobject? perhaps you find me personally objectionable?" "i wouldn't have shaken your hand or had adrink 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. youcouldn't possibly do anything worse than those people have been doing to one another forthe 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 conversationwas 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 gramfor 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 coupleof engineers, a foreman. there was grudging agreement from the others. burt sandrasan'sengine-works had lost almost as many, of the

same kind. even lothar ffayle admitted tolosing a computerman and a guard-sergeant. and after they were gone, the farms and ranchesand factories would go on, almost but not quite as before. nothing on gram, nothingon any of the sword-worlds, was done as efficiently as three centuries ago the whole level ofsword-world life was sinking, like the east coastline of this continent, so slowly asto be evident only from the records and monuments of the past. he said as much, and added: "and the genetic loss. the best sword-worldgenes are literally escaping to space, like the atmosphere of a low-gravity planet, eachgeneration begotten by fathers slightly inferior to the last. it wasn't so bad when the spacevikings raided directly from the sword-worlds;

they got home once in a while. now they'reconquering planets in the old federation for bases, and staying there." everybody had begun to relax; this wouldn'tbe a quarrel. harkaman, who had shifted his drink back to his right hand, chuckled. "that's right. i've fathered my share of bratsin the old federation, and i know space vikings whose fathers were born on old federationplanets." he turned to basil gorram. "you see, the gentleman isn't crazy, at all. that'swhat 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 triedto 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-worldsis 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 stayand 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 spreadout on twelve planets? they had that many on terra alone. and it took us eight centuriesto reach that." that had been since the ninth century, atomicera, 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 thefederation had never heard of and wouldn't find for a long time. that had been the worldthey had called excalibur. from it, their grandchildren had colonized joyeuse and durendaland flamberge; haulteclere had been colonized in the next generation from joyeuse, and gramfrom haulteclere. "we're not expanding, lothar; we're contracting.we stopped expanding three hundred and fifty years ago, when that ship came back to morglayfrom the old federation and reported what had been happening out there since the bigwar. before that, we were discovering new planets and colonizing them. since then, we'vebeen picking the bones of the dead terran

federation." something was going on by the escalators tothe landing stage. people were moving excitedly in that direction, and the news cars werecircling 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 anothersword-world in forty or fifty years." "inside another century, we'll conquer thewhole federation," baron rathmore declared. he was a politician and never let exaggerationworry him.

"what i don't understand," harkaman said,"is why you support duke angus, lord trask, if you think the tanith adventure is doinggram so much harm." "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 coulddo that. this planet needs a single sovereignty. i don't know how much you've seen of it outsidethis 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'teven keep their own knights and petty-barons in order. why, there's a miserable little war down insouthmain continent that's been going on for

over two centuries." "that's probably where dunnan's going to takethat army of his," a robot-manufacturing baron said. "i hope it gets wiped out, and dunnanwith it." "you don't have to go to southmain; just goto glaspyth," somebody else said. "well, if we don't get a planetary monarchyto 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 nothingflat. might be a good thing if they did, too;

it would stop us squabbling among ourselves." harkaman looked at him in surprise. "justwho do you think the neobarbarians are, anyhow?" he asked. "some race of invading nomads; attila'shuns in spaceships?" "well, isn't that who they are?" gorram asked. "nifflheim, no! there aren't a dozen and ahalf 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'dsmashed the means of production and killed off all the technical brains. survivors onplanets hit during the interstellar wars,

from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries,who lost the machinery of civilization. followers of political leaders on local-dictatorshipplanets. companies of mercenaries thrown out of employment and living by pillage. religiousfanatics following self-anointed prophets." "you think we don't have plenty of neobarbarianmaterial here on gram?" trask demanded. "if you do, take a look around." glaspyth, somebody said. "that collection of over-ripe gallows-fruitandray dunnan's recruited," rathmore mentioned. alex gorram was grumbling that his shipyardwas full of them; agitators stirring up trouble, trying to organize a strike to get rid ofthe robots.

"yes," harkaman pounced on that last. "i knowof 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 centurypre-atomic. and after venus seceded from the first federation, before the second federationwas organized." "you're interested in history?" rathmore asked. "a hobby. all spacemen have hobbies. there'svery little work aboard ship in hyperspace; boredom is the worst enemy. my guns-and-missilesofficer, 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 sellingthem. my hyperspatial astrogator, guatt kirbey,

composes music; he tries to express the mathematicsof 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 inhabitedplanets 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 carriedknobbed plastic truncheons. the space viking set down his drink.

"let's go," he said. "our host is callingup his troops; i think the guests ought to find battle-stations, too."iii the gaily-dressed crowd formed a semicirclefacing the landing-stage escalators; everybody was staring in embarrassed curiosity, thosebehind craning over the shoulders of those in front. the ladies had drawn up their shawlsin frigid formality; many had even covered their heads. there were four news-servicecars hovering above; whatever was going on was getting a planetwide screen showing. thekarvall 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 shovedthe sergeant aside. "make way, here!" he bellowed. "let these guards pass." with that, he almosthurled 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 karvalland rovard grauffis and several others were standing. facing them, four men in black cloaks stoodwith their backs to the escalators. two were commonfolk retainers; hired gunmen, to beprecise. they were at pains to keep their hands plainly in sight, and seemed to be wishingthemselves elsewhere. the man in front wore

a diamond sunburst jewel on his beret, andhis cloak was lined with pale blue silk. his thin, pointed face was deeply lined aboutthe 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; traskwondered briefly how soon he would have to look at him from twenty-five meters over thesights 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 whencehe 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 sendme." "my daughter has sent you no messages, lorddunnan," sesar karvall said, with forced patience. "none but the one i just gave you, that shewants nothing whatever to do with you." "you think i believe that? you're holdingher a prisoner; satan only knows how you've been torturing her to force her into thisabominable marriage—" there was a stir among the bystanders; thatwas 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 irondeposits on traskon land. and my loving uncle, he wants the help of both of them in stealingomfray of glaspyth's duchy. and here's this loan-shark of a ffayle, trying to claw mylands away from me, and rovard grauffis, the fetchdog of my uncle who won't lift a fingerto save his kinsman from ruin, and this foreigner harkaman who's swindled me out of commandof the enterprise. you're all plotting against me—" "sir nevil," grauffis said, "you can see thatlord dunnan's not himself. if you're a good friend to him, you'll get him out of herebefore duke angus arrives."

ormm leaned forward and spoke urgently indunnan's ear. dunnan pushed him angrily away. "great satan, are you against me, too?" hedemanded. ormm caught his arm. "you fool, do you wantto ruin everything, now—" he lowered his voice; the rest was inaudible. "no, curse you, i won't go till i've spokento her, face to face—" dunnan interrupts wedding party there was another stir among the spectators;the crowd was parting, and elaine was coming through, followed by her mother and lady sandrasanand five or six other matrons. they all had their shawls over their heads, right endsover left shoulders; they all stopped except

elaine, who took a few steps forward and confrontedandray dunnan. he had never seen her look more beautiful, but it was the icy beautyof 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 lovesyou. why are you letting them force you into this wicked marriage?" "no one is forcing me; i am marrying lordtrask willingly and happily, because i love him. now, please, go and make no more troubleat 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 stopyou. i'll take you away from all these cruel, greedy people. you love me, you've alwaysloved me. you've told me you loved me, again and again—" yes, in his own private dream-world, a worldof fantasy that had now become andray dunnan's reality, in which an elaine karvall whom hisimagination had created existed only to love him. confronted by the real elaine, he simplyrejected the reality. "i never loved you, lord dunnan, and i nevertold 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 throughthe 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 againstme, betraying me. i know what it's about; you all want to cheat me of my rights, andkeep my usurping uncle on the ducal throne. and you, you false-hearted harlot, you'rethe worst of them all!" sir nevil ormm caught his shoulder and spunhim around, propelling him toward the escalators. dunnan struggled, screaming inarticulatelylike a wounded wolf. ormm was cursing furiously. "you two!" he shouted. "help me, here. gethold of him."

dunnan was still howling as they forced himonto the escalator, the backs of the two retainers' cloaks, badged with the dunnan crescent, lightblue on black, hiding him. after a little, an aircar with the blue crescent blazonrylifted 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 grauffisput 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, sirrovard?" otto harkaman asked, sharply and seriously. "oh, he claims that his mother was born ayear and a half before duke angus and the true date of her birth falsified to give angusthe succession. why, his present grace was three years old when she was born. i was oldduke fergus' esquire; i carried angus on my shoulder when andray dunnan's mother was presentedto 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 thatought to be deactivated, before they blow things up." "we couldn't do that," grauffis said. "afterall, he's duke angus' nephew—" "i could do it," harkaman said. "he only hasthree hundred men in this company of his. why you people ever let him recruit them satanonly knows," he parenthesized. "i have eight hundred; five hundred ground-fighters. i'dlike to see how they shape up in combat, before we space out. i can have them ready for actionin two hours, and it'd be all over before midnight."

"no, captain harkaman; his grace would neverpermit it," grauffis vetoed. "you have no idea of the political harm that would do amongthe independent lords on whom we're counting for support. you weren't here on gram whenduke ridgerd of didreksburg had his sister sancia's second husband poisoned—"iv they halted under the colonnade; beyond, thelower main terrace was crowded, and a medley of old love songs was wafting from the soundoutlets, for the sixth or eighth time around. he looked at his watch; it was ninety secondslater than the last time he had done so. give it fifteen more minutes to get started, andanother 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 wouldbe in the aircar, bulleting toward traskon. the love songs stopped abruptly; after a momentarysilence, a trumpet, considerably amplified, blared; the "ducal salute." the crowd stoppedshifting, the buzz of voices ceased. at the head of the landing-stage escalators therewas a glow of color and the ducal party began moving down. a platoon of guards in red andyellow, with gilded helmets and tasseled halberds. an esquire bearing the sword of state. dukeangus, 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 ofcheering; the news-service aircars got into position above the procession. cousin nikkolayand a few others stepped out from between

the pillars into the sunlight; there was asimilar movement at the other side of the terrace. the ducal party reached the end ofthe central walkway, halted and deployed. "all right; let's shove off," cousin nikkolaysaid, stepping forward. ten minutes since they had come outside; anotherfive to get into position. fifty minutes, now, till he and elaine—lady elaine traskof traskon, for real and for always—would be going home. "sure the car's ready?" he asked, for thehundredth time. his cousin assured him that it was. figuresin 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. sesarkarvall's gentleman-secretary, and the karvall lawyer; executives of the steel mills, thekarvall guard-captain. sesar himself, with elaine on his arm; she was wearing a shawlof black and yellow. he looked around in sudden fright; "for the love of satan, where's ourshawl?" he demanded, and then relaxed when one of his gentlemen exhibited it, green andtawny 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 hisguard-captain. he had a thin, pointed face, almost femininelysensitive, and a small pointed beard. he was bareheaded except for the narrow golden circletwhich he spent most of his waking time scheming

to convert into a royal crown. the guard-captainrepeated the question. "i am sir nikkolay trask; i bring my cousinand liege-lord, lucas, lord trask, baron of traskon. he comes to receive the lady-demoiselleelaine, daughter of lord sesar karvall, baron of karvall mills, and the sanction of yourgrace 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 traskof 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 preciselegal phraseology. marriages between noble

houses were not matters to be left open todispute; a great deal of spilled blood and burned powder had resulted from ambiguityon 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 ofa misplaced comma. "and these persons here before us do enterinto this marriage freely?" the duke asked, when the reading had ended. he stepped forwardas he spoke, and his esquire gave him the two-hand sword of state, heavy enough to beheada bisonoid. trask stepped forward; sesar karvall brought elaine up. the lawyers and henchmenobliqued 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 extendedit; 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 legitimateand lawful successors?" "we do." not only he and elaine, but all aroundthem, and all the throng in the gardens, answered, the spectators in shouts. very clearly, aboveit all, somebody, with more enthusiasm than discretion, was bawling: "long live angusthe first of gram!"

"and we, angus, do confer upon you two, andyour houses, the right to wear our badge as you see fit, and pledge ourself to maintainyour rights against any and all who may presume to invade them. and we declare that this marriagebetween you two, and this agreement between your respective houses, does please us, andwe avow you two, lucas and elaine, to be lawfully wed, and who so questions this marriage challengesus, in our teeth and to our despite." that wasn't exactly the wording used by aducal lord on gram. it was the formula employed by a planetary king, like napolyon of flambergeor rodolf of excalibur. and, now that he thought of it, angus had consistently used the royalfirst-person plural. maybe that fellow who had shouted about angus the first of gramhad only been doing what he'd been paid to

do. this was being telecast, and omfray ofglaspyth and ridgerd of didreksburg would both be listening; as of now, they'd starthiring mercenaries. maybe that would get rid of dunnan for him. the duke gave the two-hand sword back to hisesquire. 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 respectablewoman ever did that in public, and her mother caught and folded it. he stepped forward anddraped the trask colors over her shoulders, and then took her in his arms. the cheeringbroke out again, and some of sesar karvall's guardsmen began firing a pom-pom somewhere.

it took a little longer than he had expectedto finish with the toasts and shake hands with those who crowded around. finally, theexit march started, down the long walkway to the landing stage, and the duke and hisparty moved away to the rear to prepare for the wedding feast at which everybody but thebride 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 clungto 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, thatwas westlands telecast & teleprint—had floated

just ahead of them and was letting down towardthe landing stage. for a moment, he was angry; that went beyond the outer-orbit limits ofjournalistic propriety, even for westlands t & t. then he laughed; today he was too happyfor anger about anything. at the foot of the escalator, elaine kicked off her gilded slippers—therewas another pair in the car; he'd seen to that personally—and they stepped onto theescalator and turned about. the bridesmaids rushed forward, and began struggling for theslippers, to the damage and disarray of their gowns, and when they were half way up, elaineheaved the bouquet and it burst apart among them like a bomb of colored fragrance, andthe girls below snatched at the flowers, shrieking deliriously. elaine stood, blowing kissesto everybody, and he was shaking his clasped

hands over his head, until they were at thetop. when they turned and stepped off, the orangeand blue aircar had let down directly in front of them, blocking their way. now he was reallyfurious, and started forward with a curse. then he saw who was in the car. andray dunnan, his thin face contorted andthe narrow mustache writhing on his upper lip; he had a slit beside the window openand was tilting the barrel of a submachine gun up and out of it. he shouted, and at the same time tripped elaineand flung her down. he was throwing himself forward to cover her when there was a blastingmultiple report. something sledged him in

the chest; his right leg crumpled under him.he fell— he fell and fell and fell, endlessly, throughdarkness, out of consciousness. v he was crucified, and crowned with a crownof thorns. who had they done that to? somebody long ago, on terra. his arms were drawn outstiffly, and hurt; his feet and legs hurt, too, and he couldn't move them, and therewas this prickling at his brow. and he was blind. 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'tmove his head, but by shifting his eyes he saw that he was completely naked and surroundedby a tangle of tubes and wires, which puzzled him briefly. then he knew that he was noton a bed, but on a robomedic, and the tubes would be for medication and wound drainageand intravenous feeding, and the wires would be to electrodes imbedded in his body fordiagnosis, 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 thecattle range. 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 futilelyto rise. "elaine!" he called. "elaine, where are you?" there was a stir and somebody came into hislimited view; his cousin, nikkolay trask. "nikkolay; andray dunnan," he said. "whathappened to elaine?" nikkolay winced, as though something he hadexpected to hurt had hurt worse than he had expected. "lucas." he swallowed. "elaine ... elaineis dead." elaine is dead. that didn't make sense. "she was killed instantly, lucas. hit sixtimes; i don't think she even felt the first

one. she didn't suffer at all." somebody moaned, and then he realized thatit had been himself. "you were hit twice," nikkolay was tellinghim. "one in the leg; smashed the femur. and one in the chest. that one missed your heartby an inch." "pity it did." he was beginning to rememberclearly, now. "i threw her down, and tried to cover her. i must have thrown her straightinto 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. stolethe enterprise and took her off-planet." "i want to get him myself."

he started to rise again; nikkolay noddedto 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 roomgrew 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 hadgotten so dark. he woke again, fitfully, and it would be daylightand he could see the yellow sky through an open window or it would be night and the wall-lightswould be on. there would always be somebody with him. nikkolay's wife, dame cecelia; rovardgrauffis; lady lavina karvall—he must have slept a long time, for she was so much olderthan he remembered—and her brother, burt

sandrasan. and a woman with dark hair, ina white smock with a gold caduceus on her breast. once, duchess flavia, and once duke angushimself. he asked where he was, not much caring. they told him, at the ducal palace. he wished they'd all go away, and let himgo wherever elaine was. then it would be dark, and he would be tryingto find her, because there was something he wanted desperately to show her. stars in thesky at night, that was it. but there were no stars, there was no elaine, there was noanything, and he wished that there was no lucas trask, either.

but there was an andray dunnan. he could seehim standing black-cloaked on the terrace, the diamonds in his beret-jewel glitteringevilly; he could see the mad face peering at him over the rising barrel of the submachinegun. and then he would hunt for him without finding him, through the cold darkness ofspace. the waking periods grew longer, and duringthem his mind was clear. they relieved him of his crown of electronic thorns. the feedingtubes came out, and they gave him cups of broth and fruit juice. he wanted to know whyhe had been brought to the palace. "about the only thing we could do," rovardgrauffis told him. "they had too much trouble at karvall house as it was. you know, sesargot shot, too."

"no." so that was why sesar hadn't come tosee 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 buthis dress-dagger. dunnan gave him a quick burst; i think that was why he didn't havetime to finish you off. by that time, the guards who'd been shooting blanks from thatrapid-fire gun got in a clip of live rounds and fired at him. he got out of there as fastas he could. they have sesar on a robomedic like yours. he isn't in any danger." the drainage tubes and medication tubes cameout; the tangle of wires around him was removed, and the electrodes with them. they bandagedhis 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 hedidn'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 youby then." "i'll never enter that house as long as ilive, 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 lessas he grew stronger. visitors came often,

bringing amusing little gifts, and he foundthat he enjoyed their company. he wanted to know what had really happened, and how dunnanhad gotten away. "he pirated the enterprise," rovard grauffistold him. "he had that company of mercenaries of his, and he'd bribed some of the peopleat the gorram shipyards. i thought alex would kill his chief of security when he found outwhat had happened. we can't prove anything—we're trying hard enough to—but we're sure omfrayof 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 planningthat for months; before he started recruiting

that company. i think he meant to do it thenight before the wedding. then he tried to persuade the lady-demoiselle elaine to elopewith him—he seems to have actually thought that was possible—and when she humiliatedhim, he decided to kill both of you first." he turned to otto harkaman, who had accompaniedhim. "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 telecastand teleprint car?" "oh. the morning of the wedding, he screenedwestlands editorial office and told them he had the inside story on the marriage and whythe duke was sponsoring it. made it sound as though there was some scandal; insistedthat a reporter come to dunnan house for a

face-to-face interview. they sent a man, andthat was the last they saw him alive; our people found his body at dunnan house whenwe were searching the place afterward. we found the car at the shipyard; it had takena couple of hits from the guns at karvall house, but you know what these press carsare 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 befinished?" grauffis laughed bitterly. "building the enterprisetook everything we had. the duchy's on the

edge of bankruptcy now. we stopped work onthe second ship six months ago because we didn't have enough money to keep on with herand still get the enterprise finished. we were expecting the enterprise to make enoughin 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," harkamanadded. "worse. king napolyon was going to help the elmersans, and i'd have gotten acommand in that. it's too late for that now." he picked up his cane and used it to pushhimself to his feet. the broken leg had mended, but he was still weak. he took a few totteringsteps, paused to lean on the cane, and then

forced himself on to the open window and stoodfor a moment staring out. then he turned. "captain harkaman, it might be that you couldstill 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, harkamansaid: "i'd count it an honor, lord trask. but wherewill you get a ship?" "she's half finished now. you already havea crew for her. duke angus can finish her for me, and pay for it by pledging his newbarony 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 saidpromptly. "but, lucas; traskon is all you own." "if i have a ship, i won't need them. i amturning space viking." that brought harkaman to his feet with a roarof approval. grauffis looked at him, his mouth slightly open. "lucas trask—space viking," he said. "nowi've heard everything." well, why not? he had deplored the effectsof viking raiding on the sword-worlds, because

gram was a sword-world, and traskon was ongram, and traskon was to have been the home where he and elaine would live and where theirchildren and children's children would be born and live. now the little point on whichall of it had rested was gone. "that was another lucas trask, rovard. he'sdead, now." vi grauffis excused himself to make a screencall and then returned to excuse himself again. evidently duke angus had dropped whateverhe was doing as soon as he heard what his henchman had to tell him. harkaman was silentuntil after he was out of the room, then said: "lord trask, this is a wonderful thing forme. 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 expenseof yours." "don't worry about that. if anybody's beingtaken advantage of, you are. i need a space-captain, and your misfortune is my own good luck." harkaman started to pack tobacco into hispipe. "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 sortof 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 dothey mean anything to you? i know they don't to a good many spacemen, even. we talk gliblyabout ten to the hundredth power, but emotionally we still count, 'one, two, three, many.' aship in hyperspace logs about a light-year an hour. you can go from here to excaliburin thirty hours. but you could send a radio message announcing the birth of a son, andhe'd be a father before it was received. the old federation, where you're going to huntdunnan, occupies a space-volume of two hundred billion cubic light-years. and you're huntingfor one ship and one man in that. how are you going to do it, lord trask?" "i haven't started thinking about how; alli know is that i have to do it. there are

planets in the old federation where spacevikings come and go; raid-and-trade bases, like the one duke angus planned to establishon 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 bythe time we get there, he'll be gone for a year and a half to two years. we've been raidingthe old federation for over three hundred years, lord trask. at present, i'd say thereare at least two hundred space viking ships in operation. why haven't we raided it barelong ago? well, that's the answer: distance and voyage-time. you know, dunnan could dieof old age—which is not a usual cause of death among space vikings—before you caughtup with him. and your youngest ship's-boy

could die of old age before he found out aboutit." "well, i can go on hunting for him till idie, then. there's nothing else that means anything to me." "i thought it was something like that. i won'tbe with you, all your life. i want a ship of my own, like the corisande, that i loston durendal. some day, i'll have one. but till you can command your own ship, i'll commandher for you. that's a promise." some note of ceremony seemed indicated. summoninga robot, he had it pour wine for them, and they pledged each other. rovard grauffis had recovered his aplomb bythe time he returned accompanied by the duke.

if angus had ever lost his, he gave no indicationof it. the effect on everybody else was literally seismic. the generally accepted view was thatlord trask's reason had been unhinged by his tragic loss; there might, he conceded, bemore than a crumb of truth in that. at first, his cousin nikkolay raged at him for alienatingthe barony from the family, and then he learned that duke angus was appointing him vicar-baronand giving him traskon new house for his residence. immediately he began acting like one at thedeath-bed of a rich grandmother. the wardshaven financial and industrial barons, whom he hadknown only distantly, on the other hand, came flocking around him, offering assistance andhailing him as the savior of the duchy. duke angus' credit, almost obliterated by the lossof the enterprise, was firmly re-established,

and theirs with it. there were conferences at which lawyers andbankers 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-shipof 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 conferredeither in person or by screen with engineers and shipyard executives. his rooms at theducal palace were converted, almost overnight, from sickrooms to offices. the doctors, whohad recently been urging him to find new interests

and activities, were now warning of the dangersof overexertion. harkaman finally added his voice to theirs. "you take it easy, lucas." they had droppedformality and were on a first-name basis now. "you got hulled pretty badly; you let damage-controlwork on you, and don't strain the machinery till it's fixed. we have plenty of time. we'renot 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 moreof 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 andprowled about the room for a few minutes, then came back and sat down again. "no. that was duke angus' idea, not his. hecouldn'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'sassociates and accomplices; duke angus was still hoping for positive proof to implicateomfray of glaspyth in the piracy. dunnan had with him a dozen and a half employees of thegorram shipyards whom he had corrupted. there was some technical ability among them, butfor the most part they were agitators and

trouble-makers and incompetent workmen. evenunder the circumstances, alex gorram was glad to see the last of them. as for dunnan's ownmercenary company, there were about a score of former spacemen among them; the rest gradeddown 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 routineraiding," harkaman said. "they'd never under any circumstances be able to put in a baseon tanith. unless dunnan's completely crazy, which i doubt, he's gone to some regular vikingbase planet, like hoth or nergal or dagon or xochitl, to recruit officers and engineersand able spacemen." "all that machinery and robotic equipmentand so on that was going to tanith—was that

aboard when he took the ship?" "yes, and that's another reason why he'd goto 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 aclass-g sun. very much like haulteclere or flamberge. it was one of the last planetsthe federation colonized before the big war. nobody knows what happened, exactly. therewasn't any interstellar war; at least, you don't find any big slag-puddles where citiesused to be. they probably did a lot of fighting among themselves, after they got out of thefederation. there's still some traces of combat-damage

around. then they started to decivilize, downto the pre-mechanical level—wind and water power and animal power. they have draft-animalsthat look like introduced terran carabaos, and a few small sailboats and big canoes andbateaux on the rivers. they have gunpowder, which seems to be the last thing any peoplelose. "i was there, five years ago. i liked tanithfor 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 camehere, your duke was thinking about xipototec. i convinced him that tanith was a better planetfor his purpose." "dunnan might go there, at that. he mightthink he was scoring one on duke angus. after

all, he has all that equipment." "and nobody to use it. if i were dunnan, i'dgo 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. harkamanknew the planet, and was friendly with the haulteclere noble who ruled it. the work went on at the gorram shipyard; ithad taken a year to build the enterprise, but the steel-mills and engine-works wereover the preparatory work of tooling up, and

material and equipment was flowing in a steadystream. lucas let them persuade him to take more rest, and day by day grew stronger. soonhe was spending most of his time at the shipyard, watching the engines go in—abbot lift-and-drivefor normal space, dillingham hyperdrive, power-converters, pseudograv, all at the center of the globularship. 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 armoredwork-craft and cargo-lighters; the rest of the work was more easily done in space. atthe 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 theship herself.

otto harkaman was beginning to be distressedbecause the ship still lacked a name. he didn't like having to speak of her as "her," or "theship," 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 associatedwith 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 whichthe criminal dunnan had invoked against himself, supplied it, nemesis it was. now he was studying his new profession ofinterstellar robbery and murder against which he had once inveighed. otto harkaman's handfulof 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 sciencein music; sharll renner, the normal-space astrogator. alvyn karffard, the exec, whohad been with harkaman longest of all. and sir paytrik morland, a local recruit, formerlyguard-captain to count lionel of newhaven, who commanded the ground-fighters and thecombat contragravity. they were using the farms and villages of traskon for drill andpractice, and he noticed that while the nemesis would carry only five hundred ground and airfighters, over a thousand were being trained. he commented to rovard grauffis. "yes. don't mention it outside," the duke'shenchman 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 willfind out what a space viking raid is really like." and duke angus would tax his new subjectsof glaspyth to redeem the pledges on his new barony of traskon. some old pre-atomic writerharkaman was fond of quoting had said, "gold will not always get you good soldiers, butgood soldiers can get you gold." the nemesis came back to the gorram yardsand settled onto her curved landing legs like a monstrous spider. the enterprise had bornethe ward sword and atom-symbol; the nemesis should bear his own badge, but the bisonoidhead, tawny on green, of traskon, was no longer

his. he chose a skull impaled on an uprightsword, and it was blazoned on the ship when he and harkaman took her out for her shakedowncruise. when they landed again at the gorram yards,two hundred hours later, they learned that a tramp freighter from morglay had come intobigglersport in their absence with news of andray dunnan. her captain had come to wardshavenat duke angus' urgent invitation and was waiting for them at the ducal palace. they sat, a dozen of them, around a tablein the duke's private apartments. the freighter captain, a small, precise man with a grayingbeard, alternately puffed at a cigarette and sipped from a beaker of brandy.

"i spaced out from morglay two hundred hoursago," he was saying. "i'd been there twelve local days, three hundred galactic standardhours, 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 hoursout of windsor, on curtana, now." the room was still. the breeze fluttered curtainsat the open windows; from the garden below, winged night-things twittered. "i never expected it," harkaman said. "i thoughthe'd take the ship out to the old federation at once." he poured wine for himself. "ofcourse, 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 grauffissaid. "we have very little direct trade with curtana. it's only an accident we heard aboutthis 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, fromthe sword and atom-symbol to the blue crescent. and the ill-feeling on the part of other captainsand 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 wastoo busy getting a cargo together for morglay,

to pay much attention. almost a full spaceshipcomplement, officers and spacemen of every kind. and a lot of industrial engineers andtechnicians." "then he is going to use that equipment thatwas aboard, and put in a base somewhere," somebody said. "if he left curtana twelve hundred hours ago,he's still in hyperspace," guatt kirbey said. "it's over two thousand from curtana to thenearest old federation planet." "how far to tanith?" duke angus asked. "i'msure that's where he's gone. he'd expect me to finish the other ship and equip her likethe enterprise and send her out; he'd want to get there first."

"i'd thought that tanith would be the lastplace 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 sanelogic 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 allowingfor that," rovard grauffis said. "dunnan hates all of us. he hates his grace, here. he hateslord lucas, and sesar karvall; of course, he may think he killed both of them. he hatescaptain 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 ofgold 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 sureof anything, but we have some reasons for thinking he went to tanith, and that's morethan we have for any other planet in the old federation. i won't try to estimate the oddsagainst our finding him there, but they're

a good deal bigger anywhere else. we'll gothere, first." vii the outside viewscreen, which had been vacantlygray for over three thousand hours, was now a vertiginous swirl of color, the indescribablecolor of a collapsing hyperspatial field. no two observers ever saw it alike, and noimagination 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 gotused to. even guatt kirbey, the astrogator, was sitting with his pipe clenched in hismouth, staring at the screen. then, in an instant, the stars, which hadliterally not been there before, filled the

screen with a blaze of splendor against theblack 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, pickingup his cup. "good, gehenna; it was perfect," somebodyelse said. kirbey was relighting his pipe. "oh, i supposeit'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 littlecloser. need three microjumps, now, and i'll have to cut the last one pretty fine. nowdon't bother me." he began punching buttons

for data and fiddling with setscrews and verniers. for a moment, in the screen, trask could seethe face of andray dunnan. he blinked it away and reached for his cigarettes, and put onein his mouth wrong-end-to. when he reversed it and snapped his lighter, he saw that hishand was trembling. otto harkaman must have seen that, too. "take it easy, lucas," he whispered. "keepyour 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 heisn't it's a disappointment. if we don't, and he is, it's a disaster." others, it seemed, thought the same way. thebattle-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 rightand shoved it in viciously. again the screen boiled with colored turbulence; again darkand mighty forces stalked through the ship like demons in a sorcerer's tower. the screenturned featureless gray as the pickups stared blindly into some dimensionless noplace. thenit convulsed with color again, and this time

ertado's star, still in the center, was acoin-sized disk, with the little sparks of its seven planets scattered around it. tanithwas the third—the inhabitable planet of a g-class system usually was. it had a singlemoon, barely visible in the telescopic screen, five hundred miles in diameter and fifty thousandoff-planet. "you know," kirbey said, as though he wasafraid 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 touse the expression "micro-" about a distance of fifty-five million miles, too. "what do you think about it?" harkaman askedhim, as deferentially as though seeking expert

guidance instead of examining his apprentice."where should guatt put us?" "as close as possible, of course." that wouldbe a light-second at the least; if the nemesis came out of hyperspace any closer to anythingthe size of tanith, the collapsing field itself would kick her back. "we have to assume dunnan'sbeen 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, thesame 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, andcome out with the moon directly between us and the planet. if it's occupied, we can knockit off on the way in."

"a lot of captains would try to come out withthe moon masked off by the planet," harkaman said. "would you?" the big man shook his tousled head. "no. ifthey 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 straightin. you hearing this, guatt?" "yeah. it makes sense. sort of. now, stoppestering me. sharll, look here a minute." the normal-space astrogator conferred withhim; alvyn karffard, the executive officer, joined them. finally kirbey pulled out thebig red handle, twisted it, and said, "all

right, jumping." he shoved it in. "i supposei cut it too fine; now we'll get kicked back half a million miles." the screen convulsed again; when it clearedthe third planet was directly in the center; its small moon, looking almost as large, wasa little above and to the right, sunlit on one side and planetlit on the other. kirbeylocked the red handle, gathered up his tobacco and lighter and things from the ledge, andpulled 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 thesix hundred power screen. "i don't see anything to shoot. five hundredmiles; 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-oddmillion. 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-eighttrillion miles in that time. well, it took a man just as long to walk acrossa room today as it had taken pharaoh the first,

or homo sap. in the telescopic screen tanith looked likeany picture of any terra-type planet from space, with cloud-blurred contours of seasand continents and a vague mottling of gray and brown and green, topped at the pole byan 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 otherold hands seemed to recognize it. karffard was talking by phone to paul koreff, the signals-and-detectionofficer, who could detect nothing from the moon and nothing that was getting throughthe van allen belt from the planet. maybe they'd guessed wrong, at that. maybedunnan hadn't gone to tanith at all.

harkaman, who had the knack of putting himselfto sleep at will, with some sixth or n-th sense posted as a sentry, leaned back in hischair and closed his eyes. trask wished he could, too. it would be hours before anythinghappened, and until then he needed all the rest he could get. he drank more coffee, chain-smokedcigarettes; he rose and prowled about the command room, looking at screens. signals-and-detectionwas 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 satdown, 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 andstared at it.

he woke with a start. the screen-image wasmuch larger, now. river courses and the shadow lines of mountains were clearly visible. itmust be early autumn in the northern hemisphere; there was snow down to the sixtieth paralleland a belt of brown was pushing south against the green. harkaman was sitting up, eatinglunch. by the clock, it was four hours later. "have a good nap?" he asked. "we're pickingup some stuff, now. radio and screen signals. not much, but some. the locals wouldn't havelearned 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 byspace vikings, the locals picked up bits and scraps of technology very quickly. in thefour months of idleness and long conversations

while they were in hyperspace he had heardmany stories confirming that. but from the level to which tanith had sunk, radio andscreen 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 upwith local women, men who had made themselves unpopular with their shipmates, men who justliked the planet and wanted to stay. they were always welcomed by the locals for whatthey 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 therebeside the locals."

dunnan. he looked again at the battle-stationsboard; it was still uniformly red-lighted. everything was on full combat ready. he summoneda 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-fielddistortion effect. it was still too far to be sure. he went back to his lunch. he hadfinished it and was lighting a cigarette over his coffee when a red light flashed and avoice 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-fifthnorth parallel," he said, aside. "could be from a ship hiding against the planet. there'snothing at all on the moon." they seemed to be approaching the planet moreand 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 flashedonce more. "ship detected! just outside atmosphere, comingaround the planet from the west." "is she the enterprise?" "can't tell, yet," karffard said, and thencried: "there she is, in the screen! that spark, about thirty degrees north, just offthe west side."

aboard her, too, voices from speakers wouldbe shouting, "ship detected!" and the battle station board would be blazing red. and andraydunnan, at the command-desk— "she's calling us." that was paul koreff'svoice, 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 politeand communicate. what's her screen-combination?" koreff's voice gave it, and harkaman punchedit out. the communication screen in front of them lit at once; trask shoved over hischair beside harkaman's, his hands tightening on the arms. would it be dunnan himself, andwhat would his face show when he saw who confronted

him out of his own screen? it took him an instant to realize that theother ship was not the enterprise at all. the enterprise was the nemesis' twin; hercommand 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 handsof a slack captain and a slovenly crew. and the man who sat facing him in the screenwas not andray dunnan, or any man he had ever seen before. a dark-faced man, with an oldscar that ran down one cheek from a little below the eye; he had curly black hair, onhis head and on a v of chest exposed by an open shirt. there was an ashtray in frontof him, and a thin curl of smoke rose from

a cigar in it, and coffee steamed in an ornatebut 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 thescreen, to assure himself that his face was not betraying him. beside him, otto harkamanwas laughing. "why, captain valkanhayn; this is an unexpectedpleasure. that's the space scourge you're in, i take it? what are you doing here ontanith?"

a voice from one of the speakers shouted thata second ship had been detected coming over the north pole. the dark-faced man in thescreen 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. youtwo were just made for one another. and you have a little planet, all your very own. i'mso 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," harkamantold him. "we outgun you and spasso together; why, a couple of our pinnaces could knockthe 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—beforehe 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 thatthe enterprise you're in?"

"oh, no. pardon my remissness, captain valkanhayn,"harkaman apologized. "this is the nemesis. the gentleman with me, lord lucas trask, isowner-aboard, for whom i am commanding. lord trask, captain boake valkanhayn, of the spacescourge. captain valkanhayn is a space viking." he said that as though expecting it to bedisputed. "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 wardshavenhasn't any ships," harkaman replied. "this

ship is the property and private adventureof lord trask. the enterprise, for which we are looking, is owned and commanded by oneandray dunnan." the man with the scarred face and hairy chesthad picked up his cigar and was puffing on it mechanically. now he took it out of hismouth as though he wondered how it had gotten there in the first place. "but isn't the duke of wardshaven sendinga ship here to establish a base? that was what we'd heard. we heard you'd gone fromflamberge to gram to command for him." "where did you hear this? and when?" "on hoth. that'd be about two thousand hoursago; 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 whenyou got it, though. how long have you been here on tanith?" "about a thousand hours." harkaman cluckedsadly at that. "pity you wasted all that time. well, it wasnice talking to you, boake. say hello to garvan for me when he comes up." "you mean you're not staying?" valkanhaynwas horrified, an odd reaction for a man who had just been expecting a bitter battle todrive them away. "you're just spacing right out again?"

harkaman shrugged. "do we want to waste timehere, lord trask? the enterprise has obviously gone somewhere else. she was still in hyperspacewhen captain valkanhayn and his accomplice arrived here." "is there anything worth staying for?" thatseemed to be the reply harkaman was expecting. "beside poultry, that is?" harkaman shook his head. "this is captainvalkanhayn's planet; his and captain spasso's. let them be stuck with it." "but, look; this is a good planet. there'sa 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'tgive 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 garvanon screen and switch him over to your ship—" "well, we have a lot of sword-world merchandiseaboard," harkaman said. "we could make you good prices on some of it. how are you fixedfor robotic equipment?" "but aren't you going to stay here?" valkanhaynwas almost in a panic. "listen, suppose i

talk to garvan, and we all get together onthis. just excuse me for a minute—" as soon as he had blanked out, harkaman threwback his head and guffawed as though he had just heard the funniest and bawdiest jokein the galaxy. trask, himself, didn't feel like laughing. "the humor escapes me," he admitted. "we camehere on a fools' errand." "i'm sorry, lucas." harkaman was still shakingwith mirth. "i know it's a letdown, but that pair of chiseling chicken thieves! i couldalmost pity them, if it weren't so funny." he laughed again. "you know what their ideawas?" 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 anythingto fight with—or anything worth fighting for. i didn't know they'd teamed up, but thatfigures. nobody else would team up with either of them. what must have happened, this storyof duke angus' tanith adventure must have filtered out to them, and they thought thatif they got here first, i'd think it was cheaper to take them in than run them out. i probablywould have, too. they do have ships, of a sort, and they do raid, after a fashion. butnow, there isn't going to be any tanith base, and they have a no-good planet and they'restuck with it." "can't they make anything out of it themselves?"

"like what?" harkaman hooted. "they have noequipment, and they have no men. not for a job like that. the only thing they can dois space out and forget it." "we could sell them equipment." "we could if they had anything to use formoney. they haven't. one thing, we do want to let down and give the men a chance to walkon ground and look at a sky for a while. the girls here aren't too bad, either," harkamansaid. "as i remember, some of them even take a bath, now and then." "that's the kind of news of dunnan we're goingto get. by the time we'd get to where he's been reported, he'd be a couple of thousandlight-years away," he said disgustedly. "i

agree; we ought to give the men a chance toget off the ship, here. we can stall this pair along for a while and we won't have anytrouble with them." the three ships were slowly converging towarda point fifteen thousand miles off-planet and over the sunset line. the space scourgebore the device of a mailed fist clutching a comet by the head; it looked more like awhisk broom than a scourge. the lamia bore a coiled snake with the head, arms and bustof a woman. valkanhayn and spasso were taking their time about screening back, and he beganto wonder if they weren't maneuvering the nemesis into a cross-fire position. he mentionedthis to harkaman and alvyn karffard; they both laughed.

"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 theirships," harkaman explained. "they've gone in debt to their crews for supplies and maintenancetill everybody owns everything in common. the ships look like it, too. they don't evencommand, really; they just preside over elected command-councils." finally, they had both of the more or lesscommanders on screen. valkanhayn had zipped up his shirt and put on a jacket. garvan spassowas a small man, partly bald. his eyes were a shade too close together, and his thin mouthhad a bitterly crafty twist. he began speaking

at once: "captain, boake tells me you say you're nothere in the service of the duke of wardshaven at all." he said it aggrievedly. "that's correct," harkaman said. "we camehere because lord trask thought another gram ship, the enterprise, would be here. sinceshe isn't, there's no point in our being here. we do hope, though, that you won't make anydifficulty 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 trickus into letting him land—"

"captain spasso," trask cut in. "will youplease 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 youthought, if you were here ahead of him and in a posture of defense, that he'd take youinto the duke's service rather than waste ammunition and risk damage and casualtieswiping you out. well, i'm very sorry, gentlemen. captain harkaman is in my service, and i'mnot 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 screenon his own ship. "i get it!" spasso cried suddenly. "there'stwo 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 merelycapitalizing on their nuisance-value, they might find themselves holding the balanceof power in a struggle for the planet. all sorts of profitable perfidies were possible. "why, sure you can land, otto," valkanhaynsaid. "i know what it's like to be three thousand hours in hyper, myself."

"you're at this old city with the two talltower-buildings, aren't you?" harkaman asked. he looked up at the viewscreen. "ought tobe 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 biggang of locals working for us—" rivington spaceport the city was familiar, from otto harkaman'sdescriptions 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 spiredalmost three thousand feet above it, with a great spaceport like an eight-pointed starat 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 prosperingworld. then the sun of the federation had gone down. nobody knew what had happened ontanith after that, but evidently none of it had been good. at first, the two towers seemed as sound aswhen they had been built; gradually it became apparent that one was broken at the top. forthe most part, the smaller buildings scattered widely around them were standing, though hereand there mounds of brush-grown rubble showed where some had fallen in. the spaceport lookedgood—a central octagon mass of buildings, the landing-berths, and, beyond, the triangularareas of airship docks and warehouses. the

central building was outwardly intact, andthe ship-berths seemed clear of wreckage and rubble. by the time the nemesis was following thespace scourge and the lamia down, towed by her own pinnaces, the illusion that they wereapproaching a living city had vanished. the interspaces between the buildings were chokedwith forest-growth, broken by a few small fields and garden-plots. at one time, therehad been three of the high buildings, literally vertical cities in themselves. where the thirdhad stood was a glazed crater, with a ridge of fallen rubble lying away from it. somebodymust have landed a medium missile, about twenty kilotons, against its base. something of thesame sort had scored on the far edge of the

spaceport, and one of the eight arrowheadsof docks and warehouses was an indistinguishable slag-pile. the rest of the city seemed to have died ofneglect rather than violence. it certainly hadn't been bombed out. harkaman thought mostof the fighting had been done with subneutron bombs or omega-ray bombs, that killed thepeople without damaging the real estate. or bio-weapons; a man-made plague that had gottenout of control and all but depopulated the planet. "it takes an awful lot of people, workingtogether at an awful lot of jobs, to keep a civilization running. smash the installationsand kill the top technicians and scientists,

and the masses don't know how to rebuild andgo back to stone hatchets. kill off enough of the masses and even if the planet and theknow-how is left, there's nobody to do the work. i've seen planets that decivilized bothways. tanith, i think, is one of the latter." that had been during one of the long after-dinnerbull sessions on the way out from gram. somebody, one of the noble gentlemen-adventurers whohad joined the company after the piracy of the enterprise and the murder, had asked: "but some of them survived. don't they knowwhat happened?" "'in the old times, there were sorcerers.they built the old buildings by wizard arts. then the sorcerers fought among themselvesand went away,'" harkaman said. "that's all

they know about it." you could make any kind of an explanationout of that. as the pinnaces pulled and nudged the nemesisdown to her berth, he could see people, far down on the spaceport floor, at work. eithervalkanhayn and spasso had more men than the size of their ships indicated, or they hadgotten 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 andtextiles and powder and other things made elsewhere. it was accessible only by oxcartstraveling a hundred miles across the plains;

it had been built by a contragravity-usingpeople with utter disregard for natural travel and transportation routes. "i don't envy the poor buggers," harkamansaid, looking down at the antlike figures on the spaceport floor. "boake valkanhaynand garvan spasso have probably made slaves of the lot of them. if i was really goingto put in a base here, i wouldn't thank that pair for the kind of public-relations workthey've been doing among the locals." ix that was just about the situation. spassoand valkanhayn and some of their officers met them on the landing stage of the big buildingin the middle of the spaceport, where they

had established quarters. entering and goingdown a long hallway, they passed a dozen men and women gathering up rubbish from the floorwith shovels and with their hands and putting it into a lifter-skid. both sexes wore shapelessgarments of coarse cloth, like ponchos, and flat-soled sandals. watching them was anotherlocal in a kilt, buskins and a leather jerkin; he wore a short sword on his belt and carrieda wickedly thonged whip. he also wore a space viking combat helmet, painted with the deviceof spasso's lamia. he bowed as they approached, putting a hand to his forehead. after theyhad passed, they could hear him shouting at the others, and the sound of whip-blows. you make slaves out of people, and some willalways be slave-drivers; they will bow to

you, and then take it out on the others. harkaman'snose was twitching as though he had a bit of rotten fish caught in his mustache. "we have about eight hundred of them. therewere only three hundred that were any good for work here; we gathered the rest up atvillages 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," valkanhayntold him. "we send parties out with landing craft. they'll let down on a village, runthe locals out, gather up what's around and bring it here. once in a while they put upa fight, but the best they have is a few crossbows

and some muzzle-loading muskets. when theydo, we burn the village and machine-gun everybody we see." "that's the stuff," harkaman approved. "ifthe cow doesn't want to be milked, just shoot her. of course, you don't get much milk outof her again, but—" the room to which their hosts guided themwas at the far end of the hall. it had probably been a conference room or something of thesort, and originally it had been paneled, but the paneling had long ago vanished. holeshad been dug here and there in the walls, and he remembered having noticed that thedoor was gone and the metal groove in which it had slid had been pried out.

there was a big table in the middle, and chairsand couches covered with colored spreads. all the furniture was handmade, cunninglypegged together and highly polished. on the walls hung trophies of weapons—thrusting-spearsand throwing-spears, crossbows and quarrels, and a number of heavy guns, crude things,but carefully made. "pick all this stuff up off the locals?" harkamanasked. "yes, we got most of it at a big town downat the forks of the river," valkanhayn said. "we shook it down a couple of times. that'swhere we recruited the fellows we're using to boss the workers." then he picked up a stick with a leather-coveredknob 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 wearinga blue bathrobe several sizes too large for her, instead of the poncho things the slavesin the hallway wore. she had dark brown hair and gray eyes; if she had not been so obviouslyfrightened she would have been beautiful. she set the jugs on the table and broughtsilver 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 payingthese people anything for the work they do or for the things you take from them," harkamansaid. from the way the space scourge and lamia people laughed, it evidently was. harkamanshrugged. "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 wasincredulous. "damn bunch of savages!" "they aren't as savage as the xochitl localswere when haulteclere took it over. you've been there; you've seen what prince viktordoes with them now." "we haven't got the men or equipment theyhave 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 stayhere to hold the planet. if you take them both away, the locals, whom you have beenstudiously antagonizing, will swamp whoever

you leave behind. and if you don't leave anybodybehind, what's the use of having a planetary base?" "well, why don't you join us," spasso finallycame 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," valkanhaynconceded. "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 justlanded; tanith may have great possibilities. suppose we reserve decision for a while andlook around a little." there were stars in the sky, and, for goodmeasure, 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 noisefrom 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-planetwatch. there was firelight far below, and he could hear singing. suddenly he realizedthat it was the poor devils of locals whom

valkanhayn and spasso had enslaved. elainewent away quickly. "have your fill of space viking glamour, lucas?" he turned. it was baron rathmore, who hadcome along to serve for a year or so and then hitch a ride home from some base planet andcash in politically on having been with lucas trask. "for the moment. i'm told that this lot aren'ttypical." "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. ifandray dunnan had gotten here ahead of us,

he might have done one good thing in his wretchedlife. i can't understand why he didn't come here." "i think he still will," rathmore said. "iknew him and i knew nevil ormm. ormm's ambitious, and dunnan is insanely vindictive—" he brokeoff 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. thatwould be something constructive; dunnan's a destroyer. i think he took that cargo ofequipment somewhere and sold it. i think he'll wait till he's fairly sure the other shipis finished. then he'll come in and shoot the place up, the way—" he bit that offabruptly.

"the way he did my wedding; i think of itall the time." the next morning, he and harkaman took anaircar 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 andthe loss of civilized technologies. it was huddled on a long, irregularly triangularmound, 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 axesand dressed with adzes, stone after stone and brick after brick, that he could appreciateit. they even had it walled, with a palisade of tree-trunks behind which earth and rockshad been banked, and along the river were docks, at which boats were moored. the localssimply 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, longcanoe-like craft and round-bowed, many-oared barges, put out hastily into the river; throughbinoculars they could see people scattering from the surrounding fields, driving cattleahead of them. by the time they were over the city, nobody was in sight. they seemedto have developed a pretty fair air-raid warning

system in the nine-hundred-odd hours in whichthey had been exposed to the figurative mercies of boake valkanhayn and garvan spasso. ithadn't saved them entirely; a section of the city had been burned, and there were evidencesof shelling. light chemical-explosive stuff; this city was too good a cow for even thosetwo to kill before the milking was over. they circled slowly over it at a thousandfeet. when they turned away, black smoke began rising from what might have been pottery worksor 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 theriver. "you know, these people are civilized, ifyou don't limit the term to contragravity

and nuclear energy," harkaman said. "theyhave gunpowder, for one thing, and i can think of some rather impressive old terran civilizationsthat didn't have that much. they have an organized society, and anybody who has that is startingtoward civilization." "i hate to think of what'll happen to thisplanet if spasso and valkanhayn stay here long." "might be a good thing, in the long run. goodthings in the long run are often tough while they're happening. i know what'll happen tospasso and valkanhayn, though. they'll start decivilizing, themselves. they'll stay herefor a while, and when they need something they can't take from the locals they'll gochicken-stealing after it, but most of the

time they'll stay here lording it over theirslaves, 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 inthe meantime, the locals'll learn a lot from them." they turned the aircar west again along theriver. they looked at a few villages. one or two dated from the federation period; theyhad been plantations before whatever it was had happened. more had been built within thepast five centuries. a couple had recently been destroyed, in punishment for the crimeof self-defense. "you know," he said, at length, "i'm goingto do everybody a favor. i'm going to let

spasso and valkanhayn persuade me to takethis planet away from them." harkaman, who was piloting, turned sharply."you crazy or something?" "'when somebody makes a statement you don'tunderstand, don't tell him he's crazy. ask him what he means.' who said that?" "on target," harkaman grinned. "'what do youmean, lord trask?'" "i can't catch dunnan by pursuit; i'll haveto get him by interception. you know the source of that quotation, too. this looks to me likea good place to intercept him. when he learns i have a base here, he'll hit it, sooner orlater. and even if he doesn't, we can pick up more information on him, when ships startcoming 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 fouror five ships, space vikings, traders, gilgameshers and so on, on either of those planets allthe time. if we had the cargo dunnan took to space in the enterprise, we could starta base like that. but we haven't anything near what we need, and you know what spassoand valkanhayn have." "we can get it from gram. as it stands, theinvestors in the tanith adventure, from duke angus down, lost everything they put intoit. if they're willing to throw some good money after bad, they can get it back, anda handsome profit to boot. and there ought

to be planets above the rowboat and ox-cartlevel 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 withinfive hundred light-years. they won't be the kind spasso and valkanhayn are in the habitof raiding, though. and besides machinery, we can get gold, and valuable merchandisethat could be sold on gram. and if we could make a go of it, you'd go farther huntingdunnan by sitting here on tanith than by going looking for him. that was the way we usedto hunt marsh pigs on colada, when i was a kid; just find a good place and sit down andwait." they had valkanhayn and spasso aboard thenemesis for dinner; it didn't take much guiding

to keep the conversation on the subject oftanith and its resources, advantages and possibilities. finally, when they had reached brandy andcoffee, trask said idly: "i believe, together, we could really makesomething 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 wantedto know. "it was a spaceport," harkaman told him. "itcould 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 baseplanet with any kind of a cargo worth dickering over that hadn't taken some damage gettingit. prince viktor of xochitl makes a good half of his money on ship repairs, and sodo nikky gratham on jagannath and the everrards on hoth." "and engine works, hyperdrive, normal spaceand pseudograv," trask added. "and a steel mill, and a collapsed-matter plant. and robotic-equipmentworks, and—" "oh, that's out of all reason!" valkanhayncried. "it would take twenty trips with a ship the size of this one to get all thatstuff here, and how'd we ever be able to pay for it?"

"that's the sort of base duke angus of wardshavenplanned. the enterprise, practically a duplicate of the nemesis, carried everything that wouldbe needed to get it started, when she was pirated." "when she was—?" "now you're going to have to tell the gentlementhe truth," harkaman chuckled. "i intend to." he laid his cigar down, sippedsome of his brandy, and explained about duke angus' tanith adventure. "it was part of alarger plan; angus wanted to gain economic supremacy for wardshaven to forward his politicalambitions. 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 ofthe home planet in the end." he told them about the enterprise, and the cargo of industrialand construction equipment she carried, and then told them how andray dunnan had piratedher. "that wouldn't have annoyed me at all; i hadno money invested in the project. what did annoy me, to put it mildly, was that justbefore 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 thisship at my own expense, took on captain harkaman, who had been left without a command when theenterprise was pirated, and came out here to hunt dunnan down and kill him. i believethat i can do that best by establishing a

base on tanith myself. the base will haveto be operated at a profit, or it can't be operated at all." he picked up the cigar againand puffed slowly. "i am inviting you gentlemen to join me as partners." "well, you still haven't told us how we'regoing to get the money to finance it," spasso insisted. "the duke of wardshaven, and the others whoinvested in the original tanith adventure will put it up. it's the only way they canrecover what they lost on the enterprise." "but then, this duke of wardshaven will berunning it, not us," valkanhayn objected. "the duke of wardshaven," harkaman remindedhim, "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 threecrews," he began. "we will do nothing of the kind," trask toldhim. "i will be running things here on tanith. you people may allow your orders to be debatedand voted on, but i don't. you will inform your respective crews to that effect. anyorders you give them in my name will be obeyed without argument." "i don't know how the men'll take that," valkanhaynsaid.

"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 runningyour ships, or how your ships' crews have been running you. well, we don't do it thatway. lucas trask is owner, and i'm captain. i obey his orders on what's to be done, andeverybody 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 thesepeople you have working here are to be paid. they are not to be beaten by these plug-ugliesyou have guarding them. if any of them want to leave, they may do so; they will be givenpresents 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'llwork 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, andpromote the best and most intelligent to foremen. and those guards could be taken in hand bysome ground-fighter sergeant and given sword-world weapons and tactical training; use them totrain others; they'd need a sepoy army of some sort. even the best of good will is nosubstitute for armed force, conspicuously displayed and unhesitatingly used when necessary.

"and there'll be no more of this raiding villagesfor food or anything else. we will pay for anything we get from any of the locals." "we'll have trouble about that," valkanhaynpredicted. "our men think anything a local has belongs to anybody who can take it." "so do i," harkaman said. "on a planet i'mraiding. 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 andargument 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 smalllandholders 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 heatedarguments; baron rathmore made frequent speeches, while lord trask of tanith and admiral harkaman—thetitles were rathmore's suggestion—remained loftily aloof. on both ships, everybody ownedeverything in common, which meant that nobody owned anything. they had taken over tanithon the same basis of diffused ownership, and nobody in either crew was quite stupid enoughto 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 placethemselves under the authority of lord trask and admiral harkaman. after all, tanith wouldbe a feudal lordship, and the three ships together a fleet. admiral harkaman's first act of authoritywas to order a general inspection of fleet units. he wasn't shocked by the conditionof 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-worthyif the combat weren't too severe. his original estimate that the nemesis could have knockedboth of them to pieces was, if anything, over-conservative. the engines were only in fair shape, and thearmament was bad.

"we aren't going to spend our time sittinghere 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 beraided with impunity isn't worth the time it takes getting to it. we are going to haveto fight on every planet we hit, and i am not going to jeopardize the lives of the menunder me, which includes your crews as well as mine, because of under-powered and under-armedships." spasso tried to argue. "we've been gettingalong." harkaman cursed. "yes. i know how you've beengetting along; chicken-stealing on planets like set and xipototec and melkarth. not makingenough 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 thattill we have a shipyard of our own. but i will insist, at least, that your guns andlaunchers are in order. and your detection equipment; you didn't get a fix on the nemesistill we were less than twenty thousand miles off-planet." "we had better get the lamia in conditionfirst," trask said. "we can put her on off-planet watch, instead of that pair of pinnaces." work on the lamia started the next day, andconsiderable friction-heat was generated between her officers and the engineers sent over fromthe 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, astrogatorand so on. spasso's just an animated ventriloquist's dummy. i talked to all of them. none of themcan pin me down to anything, but they think we're going to heave spasso out of commandand appoint one of them, and each one thinks he'll be it. i don't know how long that'lllast, it's a string-and-tape job like the one we're having to do on the ship. it'llhold till we get something better." "we'll have to get rid of spasso," harkamanagreed. "i think we'll put one of our own people in his place. valkanhayn can stay incommand of the space scourge; he's a spaceman.

but spasso's no good for anything." the local problem was complicated, too. thelocals spoke lingua terra of a sort, like every descendant of the race that had goneout from the sol system in the third century, but it was a barely comprehensible sort. oncivilized 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, andtanith had lost that long ago. most of the people spasso and valkanhayn hadkidnaped and enslaved came from villages within a radius of five hundred miles. about halfof them wanted to be repatriated; they were given gifts of knives, tools, blankets, andbits 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 newswas 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 thanbefore. she was fitted with the best detection equipment that could be assembled, and puton 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 lamiaand space scourge officers, and rotated them back and forth.

the labor guards, a score in number, wererelieved of their duties, issued sword-world firearms, and given intensive training. thetrade tokens, stamps of colored plastic, were introduced, and a store was set up where theycould be exchanged for sword-world items. after a while, it dawned on the locals thatthe tokens could also be used for trading among themselves; money seemed to have beenone of the adjuncts of civilization that had been lost along tanith's downward path. afew 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 ofknowing which lever or button did what. give them a little time, trask thought, watchinga gang at work down on the spaceport floor.

it won't be many years before half of themwill 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 thatvalkanhayn would take her to gram; enough nemesis people would go along to insure goodfaith 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 commandif necessary, and guatt kirbey to do the astrogating. "we'll have to take the nemesis and the spacescourge out, first, and make a big raid," harkaman said. "we can't send the space scourgeback to gram empty. when baron rathmore and

lord valpry and the rest of them talk to dukeangus and the tanith investors, they'll have to have a lot more than some travel filmsof tanith. they'll have to be able to show that tanith is producing. we ought to havea 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, ithink we have a year to a year and a half before dunnan shows up here. i know, we werefooled trying to guess what he'd do before. but the sort of raid i have in mind, we'llneed two ships, and in any case, i don't want to leave both those ships here while we'regone, 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 makesure. we'll leave alvyn—that'll mean a lot of work for me that he'd otherwise do, onthe 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 onlythirty light-years from here. that won't amount

to much; just chicken-stealing. it'll giveour green hands some relatively safe combat-training, and it'll give us some idea of how spasso'sand valkanhayn's people behave, and give them confidence for the next job." "and then?" "amaterasu. my information about amaterasuis about twenty years old. a lot of things can happen in twenty years. all i know ofit—i was never there myself—is it's fairly civilized—about like terra just before thebeginning of the atomic era. no nuclear energy, they lost that, and of course nothing beyondit, but they have hydroelectric and solarelectric power, and nonnuclear jet aircraft, and somevery good chemical-explosive weapons, which

they use very freely on each other. it waslast 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 amaterasuto make any difference there, but if we saved amaterasu for last, we might be needing toomany repairs." "it's like that?" "yes. they have nuclear energy. i don't thinkit would be wise to mention beowulf to captains spasso and valkanhayn. wait till we've hitkhepera 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 nothingnessof hyperspace. garvan spasso—they had had no trouble in inducing him to come along—wasstaring avidly at the screen as though he could still see the ravished planet they hadleft. "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 infive 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 spokento the fellow, or anybody else, like that. gresham's law, extended: bad manners driveout good manners. spasso turned on him indignantly. "who do you think you are—?" "he thinks he's lord trask of tanith," harkamansaid. "he's right, too; he is." he looked searchingly at trask for a moment, then turnedback to spasso. "i'm just as tired as he is of hearing you pop your mouth about a lousytwo 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 tomeet expenses on. out of this raid, a ground-fighter

or an able spaceman will get a hundred andfifty stellars. we'll get about a thousand, ourselves. how long do you think we can stayin business doing this kind of chicken-stealing." "you call this chicken-stealing?" "i call it chicken-stealing, and so'll youbefore 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. evidentlyhe knew otto harkaman's reputation, and some of the things harkaman had done weren't hisidea of an easy way to make money. khepera had been easy; the locals hadn't hadanything to fight with. small arms, and light

cannon which hadn't been able to fire morethan 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, bitterlyand hopelessly—just as he would have, defending traskon. trask busied himself getting coffee and acigarette from one of the robots. when he looked up, spasso had gone away, and harkamanwas sitting on the edge of the desk, loading his short pipe. "well, you saw the elephant, lucas," harkamansaid. "you don't seem to have liked it." "elephant?"

"old terran expression i read somewhere. alli know is that an elephant was an animal about the size of one of your gram megatheres. theexpression 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 seenit, now." he'd been in combat before; he'd led the fighting-menof traskon during the boundary dispute with baron manniwel, and there were always banditsand cattle rustlers. he'd thought it would be like that. he remembered, five days, orwas it five ages, ago, his excited anticipation as the city grew and spread in the screenand the nemesis came dropping down toward it. the pinnaces, his four and the two fromthe space scourge, had gone spiraling out

a hundred miles beyond the city; the spacescourge had gone into a tighter circle twenty miles from its center; the nemesis had continuedher relentless descent until she was ten miles from the ground, before she began spewingout 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 hadgoofed. then the screenviews had begun coming in.the brief and hopeless fight in the city. he could still see that silly little fieldgun, it must have been around seventy or eighty millimeter, on a high-wheeled carriage, drawnby six shaggy, bandy-legged beasts. they had gotten it unlimbered and were trying to getit 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-cavalrymanwiped 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 vikingsas i could before they got me. terro-humans are all stupid like that. that's why we'rehuman."

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 suggestedthat the men ought to see him moving about among them; for his own part, he had felta compulsion to share their guilt. he and sir paytrik morland had been on foottogether in one of the big hollow buildings that had stood since khepera had been a memberrepublic of the terran federation. the air was acrid with smoke, powder smoke and thesmoke of burning. it was surprising, how much would burn, in this city of concrete and vitrifiedstone. 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 emptyhallway; 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 onthe floor with the body of a woman cradled on his lap. she was dead, half her head hadbeen blown off, but he was clasping her tightly, her blood staining his shirt, and sobbingheartbrokenly. a carbine lay forgotten on the floor beside him. "poor devil," morland said, and started forward. "no." trask stopped him with his left hand. withhis 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 ifhe had. how many more happinesses do you think we've smashed here today? and we don't evenhave dunnan's excuse of madness." the next morning, with everything of valuecollected and sent aboard, they had started cross-country for five hundred miles to anothercity, the first hundred over a countryside asmoke from burning villages valkanhayn'smen had pillaged the night before. there was no warning; khepera had lost electricity andradio and telegraph, and the spread of news

was at the speed of one of the beasts thelocals insisted on calling horses. by midafternoon, they had finished with that city. it had beenas bad as the first one. one thing, it was the center of a considerablecattle country. the cattle were native to the planet, heavy-bodied unicorns the sizeof a gram bisonoid or one of the slightly mutated terran carabaos on tanith, with longhair like a terran yak. he had detailed a dozen of the nemesis ground-fighters who hadbeen vaqueros on his traskon ranches to collect a score of cows and four likely bulls, withenough fodder to last them on the voyage. the odds were strongly against any of themliving to acclimate themselves to tanith, but if they did, they might prove to be oneof 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 gonethere first of all. they spent two days systematically pillaging it. the kheperans carried on considerableriver-traffic, with stern-wheel steamboats, and the waterfront was lined with warehousescrammed with every sort of merchandise. even better, the kheperans had money, and for themost part it was gold specie, and the bank vaults were full of it. unfortunately, the city had been built sincethe fall of the federation and the climb up from the barbarism that had followed, anda great deal of it was of wood. fires started almost at once, and it was almost completelyon fire by the end of the second day. it had

been visible in the telescopic screen evenafter they were out of atmosphere, a black smear until the turning planet carried itinto darkness and then a lurid glow. "it was a filthy business." harkaman nodded. "robbery and murder alwaysare. you don't have to ask me who said that space vikings are professional robbers andmurderers, but who was it said that he didn't care how many planets were raided and howmany innocents massacred in the old federation?" "a dead man. lucas trask of traskon." "you wish, now, that you'd kept traskon andstayed on gram?" "no. if i had, i'd have spent every hour wishingi was doing what i'm doing now. i can get

used to this, i suppose." "i think you will. at least, you kept yourrations down. i didn't on my first raid, and had bad dreams about it for a year." he gavehis coffee cup back to the robot and got to his feet. "get a little rest, for a coupleof hours. then draw some alcodote-vitamin pills from the medic. as soon as things aresecured, there'll be parties all over the ship, and we'll be expected to look in onevery 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 realizedthat 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-fivelight-seconds; by this time the whole planet knew they were coming, and nobody was wonderingwhy. paul koreff was monitoring at least twenty radio stations, assigning somebody to eachone as it was identified. what was coming in was uniformly excited, some panicky, andall in fairly standard lingua terra. garvan spasso was perturbed. so, in the communicationscreen from the space scourge, was boake valkanhayn. "they got radio, and they got radar," he clamored. "well, so what?" harkaman asked. "they hadradio and radar twenty years ago, when rock

morgan was here in the coalsack. but theydon't have nuclear energy, do they?" "well, no. i'm picking up a lot of industrialelectrical discharge, but nothing nuclear." "all right. a man with a club can lick a manwith his fists. a man with a gun can lick half a dozen with clubs. and two ships withnuclear weapons can lick a whole planet without them. think it's time, lucas?" he nodded. "paul, can you cut in on that eglonsbystation yet?" "what are you going to do?" valkanhayn wantedto 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 doit right, this time." valkanhayn was aghast, probably at the ideaof burning an unlooted city. spasso was sputtering something about, "... teach the dirty neobarbsa 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 wasno reply. "vann," he called guns-and-missiles. "a subcritdisplay job, about four miles over the city." he laid the phone down and looked to the undersideviewscreen. a little later, a silvery shape dropped away from the ship's south pole. thetelescopic 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 unfilteredscreen aboard the nemesis was the one tuned to the falling missile. the city of eglonsbyrushed upward in it, and then it went suddenly dark. there was an orange-yellow blaze inthe other screens. after a while, the filters went off and the telescopic screen went onagain. he picked up the phone. "space vikings calling eglonsby; this is yourlast warning. communicate at once." less than a minute later, a voice came outof one of the speakers: "eglonsby calling space vikings. your bombhas done great damage. will you hold your fire until somebody in authority can communicatewith you? this is the chief operator at the

central state telecast station; i have noauthority 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 somebodywho has authority to surrender the city to us. if this is not done within the hour, thecity and everybody in it will be obliterated." only minutes later, a new voice said: "this is gunsalis jan, secretary to pedrosanpedro, president of the council of syndics. we will switch president pedrosan over assoon 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 secondsthey had president pedrosan pedro. "we are prepared to resist, but we realizewhat this would cost in lives and destruction of property," he began. "you don't begin to. do you know anythingabout nuclear weapons?" "from history; we have no nuclear power ofany sort. we can find no fissionables on this planet." "the cost, as you put it, would be everythingand everybody in eglonsby and for a radius

of almost a hundred miles. are you still preparedto resist?" the president of the council of syndics wasn'tand 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 automaticallyratify 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 someoligarchy." he motioned to harkaman to take his thumb off the button. "how large is thiscouncil?"

"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-atomicon terra. benny the moose," harkaman said. "let's all go down and talk to them." when they were sure that the public had beenwarned to make no resistance, the nemesis went down to two miles, bulking over the centerof 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 closelyset than sword-worlders were accustomed to, with broad roadways between. in several placesthere were queer arrangements of crossed roadways,

apparently leading nowhere. harkaman laughedwhen he saw them. "airstrips. i've seen them on other planetswhere they've lost contragravity. for winged aircraft powered by chemical fuel. i hopewe have time for me to look around, here. i'll bet they even have railroads here." the "great damage" caused by the bomb wasabout 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 councilof syndics in a spacious and well-furnished chamber near the top of one of the medium-highbuildings. valkanhayn was surprised; in a

loud aside he considered that these peoplemust be almost civilized. they were introduced. amaterasuan surnames preceded personal names,which hinted at a culture and a political organization making much use of registrationby alphabetical list. they all wore garments which had the indefinable but unmistakableappearance of uniforms. when they had all seated themselves at a large oval table, harkamandrew his pistol and used the butt for a gavel. "lord trask, will you deal with these peopledirectly?" 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 completesubmission. as long as you remain submissive to us, we will do no damage beyond removalof 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, makeno mistake about that, but whatever the cost, it will be a cheap price for avoiding whatwe might otherwise do." the president and the syndics exchanged relievedglances. let the taxpayers worry about the cost; they'd come out of it with whole skins. "you understand, we want maximum value andminimum bulk," he continued. "jewels, objects of art, furs, the better grades of luxurygoods of all kinds. rare-element metals. and monetary metals, gold and platinum. you havea metallic-based currency, i suppose?" "oh, no!" president pedrosan was slightlyscandalized. "our currency is based on services

to society. our monetary unit is simply calleda credit." harkaman snorted impolitely. evidently he'dseen economic systems like that before. trask wanted to know if they used gold or platinumat all. "gold, to some extent, for jewelry." evidentlythey weren't complete economic puritans. "and platinum in industry, of course." "if they want gold, they should have raidedstolgoland," one of the syndics said. "they have a gold-standard currency." from the wayhe said it, he might have been accusing them of eating with their fingers, and possiblyof eating their own young. "i know, the maps we're using for this planetare a few centuries old; stolgoland doesn't

seem to appear on them." "i wish it didn't appear on ours, either."that was general dagrã³ ector, syndic for state protection. "it would have been a good thing for thiswhole planet if you'd decided to raid them instead of us," somebody else said. "it isn't too late for these gentlemen tomake 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. theactual currency is paper, theoretically redeemable in gold. in actuality, the circulation ofgold has been prohibited, and the entire gold

wealth of the nation is concentrated in vaultsat three depositories. we know exactly where they are." "you begin to interest me, president pedrosan." "i do? well, you have two large spaceshipsand six smaller craft. you have nuclear weapons, something nobody on this planet has. you havecontragravity, something that is hardly more than a legend here. on the other hand, wehave a million and a half ground-troops, jet aircraft, armored ground-vehicles, and chemicalweapons. if you will undertake to attack stolgoland, we will place this entire force at your disposal;general dagrã³ will command them as you direct. all that we ask is that, when you have loadedthe gold hoards of stolgoland aboard your

ships, you will leave our troops in possessionof the country." that was all there was to that meeting. therewas a second one; only trask, harkaman and sir paytrik morland represented the spacevikings, and the eglonsby government was represented by president pedrosan and general dagrã³.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 vaguestidea of what he was talking about. "you mean, warn them? certainly not. we will attack themby surprise. it will be nothing but plain self-defense," he added righteously. "theoligarchic capitalists of stolgoland have

been plotting to attack us for years." "yes. if you had carried out your originalintention of looting eglonsby, they would have invaded us the moment your ships liftedout. it's exactly what i'd do in their place." "but you maintain nominally friendly relationswith them?" "of course. we are civilized. the peace-lovinggovernment and people of eglonsby...." "yes, mr. president; i understand. and theyhave an embassy here?" "they call it that!" cried dagrã³. "it isa nest of vipers, a plague-spot of espionage and subversion ...!" "we'll grab that ourselves, right away," harkamansaid. "you won't be able to round up all their

agents outside it, and if we tried to, itwould cause suspicion. we'll have to put up a front to deceive them." "yes. you will go on the air at once, callingon the people to collaborate with us, and you will specifically order your troops mobilizedto assist us in collecting the tribute we are levying on eglonsby," trask said. "inthat 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 thetribute will consist of military equipment," dagrã³ added. "that will explain why our gunsand tanks are being loaded on your contragravity vehicles."

when the stolgonian embassy was seized bythe space vikings, the ambassador asked to be taken at once to their leader. he had aproposition: if the space vikings would completely disable the army of eglonsby and admit stolgoniantroops when they were ready to leave, the invaders would bring with them ten thousandkilos of gold. trask affected to be very hospitable to the offer. stolgoland lay across a narrow and shallowsea from the state of eglonsby; it was dotted with islands, and every one of them was, inturn, dotted with oil wells. petroleum was what kept the aircraft and ground-vehiclesof amaterasu in operation; oil, rather than ideology, was at the root of the enmity betweenthe 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-operatewith the space vikings, with an occasional lamentation about the masses of war materialsbeing taken. eglonsby espionage in stolgoland was similarly active. the stolgonian armieswere being massed at four seaports on the coast facing eglonsby, and there was a franticgathering of every sort of ship available. by this time, any sympathy that trask mighthave felt for either party had evaporated. the invasion of stolgoland started the fifthmorning after their arrival over eglonsby. before dawn, the six pinnaces went in, makinga wide sweep around the curvature of the planet

and coming in from the north, two to eachof the three gold-troves. they were detected by radar, eventually but too late for anyeffective resistance to be organized. two were even taken without a shot; by mid-morningall three had been blown open and the ingots and specie were being removed. the four seaports from whence the stolgonianinvasion of eglonsby was to have been launched were neutralized by nuclear bombing. neutralizedwas 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 thespace scourge, from landing craft and from the ships themselves, landed eglonsby troopson stolgonopolis. while they were sacking

the city, with all the usual atrocities, thespace 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 whenpresident pedrosan arrived at the newly conquered capital, announcing his intention of puttingthe 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 ofsteel and light-metal alloys. the city was

full of warehouses, and the warehouses werecrammed with valuables. in spite of the socialistic and egalitarian verbiage behind which thegovernment operated, there seemed to be a numerous elite class and if gold were nota monetary metal it was not despised for purposes of ostentation. there were several large artmuseums. vann larch, their nearest approach to an art specialist, took charge of cullingthe best from them. and there was a vast public library. intothis otto harkaman vanished, with half a dozen men and a contragravity scow. its historicalsection would be much poorer in the future. president pedrosan pedro was on the radiofrom 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'resacking eglonsby. you promised to leave eglonsby alone if i helped you get the gold of stolgoland." "i promised nothing of the kind. i promisedto help you take stolgoland. you've taken it," trask told him. "i promised to avoidunnecessary damage or violence. i've already hanged a dozen of my own men for rape, murderand wanton vandalism. now, we expect to be out of here in twenty-four hours. you'd betterbe back here before then. your own people are starting to loot. we did not promise tocontrol them for you." that was true. what few troops had been leftbehind, and the police, were unable to cope with the mobs that were pillaging in the wakeof the space vikings. everybody seemed to

be trying to grab what he could and let thevikings be blamed for it. he had been able to keep his own people in order. there hadbeen at least a dozen cases of rape and wanton murder, and the offenders had been promptlyhanged. 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 stolgolandby the time they had gotten their vehicles stowed and were lifting out. they didn't seemto be making much headway. harkaman, who had gotten his load of microbooks stowed and wasat 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 probablybring half his army back, leave the other half in stolgoland, and lose both. supposewe drop in, in about three or four years, just out of curiosity. if we make twenty percent of what we did this time, the trip would pay for itself." after they went into hyperspace and had theship 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 ableto say anything. khepera, he conceded, had been. lousy two or three million stellars;poo!

xiii beowulf was bad. valkanhayn and spasso had both been opposedto the raid. nobody raided beowulf; beowulf was too tough. beowulf had nuclear energyand nuclear weapons and contragravity and normal-space craft, they even had colonieson a couple of other planets of their system. they had everything but hyperdrive. beowulfwas a civilized planet, and you didn't raid civilized planets, not and get away with it. and beside, hadn't they gotten enough looton amaterasu? "no, we did not," trask told them. "if we'regoing to make anything out of tanith, we're

going to need power, and i don't mean windmillsand waterwheels. as you've remarked, beowulf has nuclear energy. that's where we get ourplutonium and our power units." so they went to beowulf. they came out ofhyperspace 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 withinpractical communicating distance, and they began making plans in an intership screenconference. "there are, or were, three chief sources offissionable ores," harkaman said. "the last ship to raid here and get away was stefankintour'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 toobadly, and it ought to be still operating. we'll go in from the south pole, and we'llhave to go in fast." they shifted personnel and equipment. theywould go in bunched, the pinnaces ahead; they and the space scourge would go down to theground, 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 spacescourge, taking with him morland and two hundred of the nemesis ground-fighters. most of thesingle-mounts, landing craft and manipulators and heavy-duty lifters went with him, jammingthe decks around the vehicle ports of valkanhayn's ship.

they jumped in to six light-minutes, and whilevalkanhayn's astrogator was still fiddling with his controls they began sensing radarand microray detection. when they came out again, they were two light-seconds off thesouth pole, and half a dozen ships were either in orbit or coming up from the planet. allnormal-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 theypounded back. missiles went out, and counter-missiles stopped them in rapidly expanding and quicklyvanishing globes of light. red lights flashed on the damage board, and sirens howled andklaxons squawked. in the outside-view screens,

they saw the nemesis vanish in a blaze ofradiance, 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 breachesin the hull and pumped air back into evacuated areas, and then more red lights came on. occasionally, he would glance toward boakevalkanhayn, 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 supernovaflash, and when the ball of incandescence widened to nothing the ship was gone. allvalkanhayn said was: "hope one of our boys did that."

they fought their way in and down, towardthe 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 andyelling: "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-distortedintership screen harkaman's image was laughing. "hellburner just went off; target about 50â°south, 25â° east of the sunrise line. that's where those missiles are coming from."

counter-missiles sped toward the big metalmelon; defense missiles, robot-launched, met them. the hellburner's track was marked firstby expanding red and orange globes in airless space and then by fire-puffs after it enteredatmosphere. it vanished into the darkness beyond the sunset, and then made sunlightof its own. it was sunlight; a bethe solar-phoenix reaction, and it would sustain itself forhours. he hoped it hadn't landed within a thousand miles of their objective. the ground operation was a nightmare of adifferent sort. he went down in a command car, with paytrik morland and a couple ofothers. there were missiles and gun batteries. there were darting patterns of flights ofcombat vehicles, blazing gunfire, and single

vehicles that shot past or blew up in frontof them. robots on contragravity—military robots, with missiles to launch, and workingrobots with only their own mass to hurl, flung themselves mindlessly at them. screens thatwent 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 reactionplants, became two distinct and concentrated battles, one at the packing plant and storagevaults and one at the power-unit cartridge factory. three pinnaces came down to form a triangleover each; the space scourge hung midway between, poured out a swarm of vehicles and big claw-armedmanipulators; armored lighters and landing

craft shuttled back and forth. the commandcar 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 theother lifters were bringing out loads of nuclear-electric power-unit cartridges, some as big as a tenliter 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 convincedthat he had really been killed, and was damned and would spend all eternity in this fire-rivenchaos, the nemesis began firing red flares and the speakers in all the vehicles weresignaling recall. he got aboard the space

scourge somehow, after assuring himself thatnobody who was alive was left behind. there were twenty-odd who weren't, and thesick bay was full of wounded who had gone up with cargo, and more were being helpedoff the vehicles as they were berthed. the car in which he had been riding had been hitseveral times, and one of the gunners was bleeding under his helmet and didn't seemaware of it. when he got to the command room, he found boake valkanhayn, his face drawnand weary, getting coffee from a robot and lacing it with brandy. "that's it," he said, blowing on the steamingcup. it was the battered silver one that had been in front of him when he had first appearedin the nemesis' screen. he nodded toward the

damage screen; everything had been patchedup, or the outer decks around breached portions of the hull sealed. "ship secure." he setdown 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-birdsas 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 soonas they were out of the last microjump; trask's gnawing fear that dunnan might attack in theirabsence had been groundless. incredibly, he realized, they had been gone only thirty-oddgalactic standard days, and in that time alvyn

karffard had done an incredible amount ofwork. he had gotten the spaceport completely clearedof rubble and debris, and he had the woods cleared away from around it and the two tallbuildings. the locals called the city rivvin; a few inscriptions found here and there init 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 ofthe planet. and he had established friendly relations with the people of tradetown andmade 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—thekhepera locals had called them kreggs, probably

a corruption of the name of some naturalistwho had first studied them—had come through the voyage and even the battle of beowulfin 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 wouldbe likely to eat. three of the cows proved to be with calf; these were isolated and watchedover with especial solicitude. the locals were inclined to take a poor viewof 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 nemesishad one pinnace berth knocked open, and everybody

was glad the beowulfers hadn't noticed thatand gotten a missile inside. the space scourge had taken a hit directly on her south polewhile lifting out from the planet, and a good deal of the southern part of the ship wassealed off when she came in. the nemesis was repaired as far as possible and put on off-planetpatrol, then they went to work on the space scourge, transferring much of her armamentto ground defense, clearing out all the available cargo space, and repairing her hull as faras possible. to repair her completely was a job for a regular shipyard, like alex gorram'son gram. and that was where the work would be done. boake valkanhayn would command her on thevoyage to and from gram. since beowulf, trask

had not only ceased to dislike the man, butwas beginning to admire him. he had been a good man once, before ill fortune which hadbeen only partly of his own making had overtaken him. he'd just let himself go and stoppedcaring. now he had taken hold of himself again. it had started showing after they had landedon amaterasu. he had begun to dress more neatly and speak more grammatically; to look andact more like a spaceman and less like a barfly. his men had begun to jump to obey when hegave an order. he had opposed the raid on beowulf, but that had been the dying struggleof the chicken-thief he had been. he had been scared, going in; well, who hadn't been, excepta 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, andhe had made sure everybody who had gone down and who was still alive was aboard beforehe 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 theloot of the three planets, to gram. he came to trask, fairly spluttering about it. "you know what'll happen?" he demanded. "he'llspace out with that cargo, and that'll be the last any of us'll hear of him again. he'llprobably take it to joyeuse or excalibur and buy himself a lordship with it."

"oh, i doubt that, garvan. a number of ourpeople are going along—guatt kirbey will be the astrogator; you'd trust him, wouldn'tyou? 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 inthe space scourge, too?" spasso would, very decidedly. trask nodded. "good. then we'll be sure nothing crookedis pulled," he said seriously. after spasso was gone, he got in touch withbaron rathmore. "see to it that he gets as much money that'sdue him as possible, when you get to gram. and ask duke angus, as a favor to give himsome meaningless position with a suitably

impressive title, lord chamberlain of theducal washroom, or something. then he can prime him with misinformation and give himan opportunity to sell it to omfray of glaspyth. then, of course, he could be contacted tosell 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 fromstolgoland, and paintings and statues from the art museums and fabrics and furs and jewelsand porcelains and plate from the markets of eglonsby. they loaded sacks and kegs ofspecie from khepera. most of the khepera loot wasn't worth hauling to gram, but it was farenough in advance of their own technologies to be priceless to the tanith locals.

some of these were learning simple machineoperations, and a few were able to handle contragravity vehicles that had been fittedwith adequate safety devices. the former slave guards had all become sergeants and lieutenantsin an infantry regiment that had been formed, and the king of tradetown borrowed some totrain his own army. some genius in the machine shop altered a matchlock musket to flintlockand showed the local gunsmiths how to do it. the kreggs continued to thrive, after thespace scourge departed. several calves were born, and seemed to be doing well; the biochemistryof tanith and khepera were safely alike. trask had hopes for them. every viking ship hadits own carniculture vats, but men tired of carniculture meat, and fresh meat was alwaysin demand. some day, he hoped, kregg-beef

would be an item of sale to ships puttingin on tanith, and the long-haired hides might even find a market in the sword-worlds. theyhad contragravity scows plying between rivington and tradetown regularly, now, and air-lorrieswere linking the villages. the boatmen of tradetown rioted occasionally against thisunfair competition. and in rivington itself, bulldozers and power shovels and manipulatorslabored, and there was always a rising cloud of dust over the city. there was so much to do, and only a trifleunder twenty-five galactic standard hours in a day to do it. there were whole days inwhich he never thought once of andray dunnan. a hundred and twenty-five days to gram, anda hundred and twenty-five days back. they

had long ago passed. of course, there wouldbe the work of repairing the space scourge, the conferences with the investors in theoriginal tanith adventure, the business of gathering the needed equipment for the newbase. even so, he was beginning to worry a little. worry about something as far out ofhis control as the space scourge was useless, he knew. he couldn't help it, though. evenharkaman, usually imperturbable, began to be fretful, after two hundred and seventydays had passed. they were relaxing in the living quartersthey had fitted out at the top of the spaceport building before retiring, both sprawled wearilyin chairs that had come from one of the better hotels of eglonsby, their drinks between themon a low table, the top of which was inlaid

with something that looked like ivory butwasn't. on the floor beside it lay the plans for a reaction-plant and mass-energy converterthey would build as soon as the space scourge returned with equipment for producing collapsium-platedshielding. "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 reactionplant." that was the first time either of them hadgotten close to the possibility that the ship mightn't return. trask laid his cigar in theashtray—it had come from president pedrosan pedro's private office—and splashed a littlemore brandy into his glass. "she'll be coming before long. we have enoughof 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 mighthappen on the ship. but we don't know what's been happening on gram. glaspyth and didreksburgcould 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 onhim. 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 drinkhe had started with, just as a regiment that has been decimated and recruited up to strengtha few times is still the same regiment.

the buzz of the communication screen—oneof the few things in the room that hadn't been looted somewhere—interrupted him. theyboth rose; harkaman, still carrying his drink, went to put it on. it was a man on duty inthe control room, overhead, reporting that two emergences had just been detected at twentylight-minutes due north of the planet. harkaman gulped his drink and set down the empty glass. "all right. you put out a general alert? switchanything that comes in over to this screen." he got out his pipe and was packing tobaccointo it mechanically. "they'll be out of the last microjump and about two light-secondsaway in a few minutes." trask sat down again, saw that his cigarettehad burned almost to the tip, and lit a fresh

one from it, wishing he could be as calm aboutit as harkaman. three minutes later, the control tower picked up two emergences at a light-secondand a half, a thousand or so miles apart. then the screen flickered, and boake valkanhaynwas looking out of it, from the desk in the newly refurbished command room of the spacescourge. he was a newly refurbished boake valkanhayn,too. his heavily braided captain's jacket looked like the work of one of the bettertailors 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 valkanhayncommanding, accompanied by chartered freighter rozinante, durendal, captain morbes. requestingpermission and instructions to orbit in." "baron valkanhayn?" harkaman asked. "that's right," valkanhayn grinned. "and ihave 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 navyof gram." "he did it!" trask cried. "he made himselfking of gram!" "that's right. and you're his trusty and well-lovedlucas, prince trask, and viceroy of his majesty's realm of tanith."

harkaman bristled at that. "the gehenna yousay. this is our realm of tanith." "is his majesty making it worth while to accepthis sovereignty?" trask asked. "that is, beside vellum scrolls?" valkanhayn was still grinning. "wait tillwe start sending cargo down. and wait till you see what's crammed into the other ship." "did spasso come back with you?" harkamanasked. "oh, no. sir garvan spasso entered the serviceof his majesty, king angus. he is chief of police at glaspyth, now, and nobody can callwhat he's doing there chicken-stealing, either. any chickens he steals, he steals the wholefarm to get them."

that didn't sound good. spasso could makeking angus' name stink all over glaspyth. or maybe he'd allow spasso to crush the adherentsof omfray, and then hang him for his oppression of the people. he'd read about somebody who'ddone something like that, in one of harkaman's old terran history books. baron rathmore had stayed on gram; so hadrolve hemmerding. the rest of the gentlemen-adventurers, all with shiny new titles of nobility, hadreturned. from them, as the two ships were getting into orbit, he learned what had happenedon gram since the nemesis had spaced out. duke angus had announced his intention ofcarrying on with the tanith adventure, and had started construction of a new ship atthe gorram yards. this had served plausibly

to explain all the activities of preparationfor the invasion of glaspyth, and had deceived duke omfray completely. omfray had alreadystarted a ship of his own; the entire resources of his duchy were thrown into an effort toget her finished and to space ahead of the one angus was building. work was going onfrantically on her when the wardshaven invaders hit glaspyth; she was now nearing completionas 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 wasnow 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 startedchanging their minds. only subjects of king angus will be allowed to invest in the tanithadventure." as for accepting king angus' annexation oftanith and accepting his sovereignty, that would also be advisable. they would need asword 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 gramfor many things which could not be gotten by raiding. "i suppose the king knows i'm not out herefor my health, or his profit?" he asked lord valpry, during one of the screen conversationsas the space scourge was getting into orbit. "my business out here is andray dunnan." "oh, yes," the wardshaven noble replied. "infact, he told me, in so many words, that he would be most happy if you sent him his nephew'shead in a block of lucite. what dunnan did touched his honor, too. sovereign princesnever see any humor in things like that."

"i suppose he knows that sooner or later dunnanwill try to attack tanith?" "if he doesn't, it isn't because i didn'ttell him often enough. when you see the defense armament we're bringing, you'll think he does." it was impressive, but nothing to the engineeringand industrial equipment. mining robots for use on the iron moon of tanith, and normal-spacetransports for the fifty thousand mile run between planet and satellite. a collapsed-matterproducer; 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 machineryto make machinery. and, best of all, two hundred engineers and highly skilled technicians.

quite a few industrial baronies on gram wouldrealize, before long, what they had lost in those men. he wondered what lord trask oftraskon would have thought about that. the prince of tanith was no longer interestedin what happened to gram. maybe, if things prospered for the next century or so, hissuccessors 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, whiletrask remained behind. they began unloading the rozinante, after setting her down at rivingtonspaceport. 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 thingas 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 wouldcompete with merchandise produced on gram. "that load will be a come-down, after whatthe space scourge took back, but we didn't want to send the rozinante back empty," hesaid. "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'tseem 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 repaya second visit. when he mentioned it, harkaman shrugged. "whyshould they mine it? there's only one thing it's good for, and you can't run a spaceshipon 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 needto tell them what gadolinium sells for on the sword-worlds." "we could, if we could do business with anybodythere, after what we did to eglonsby and stolgoland. where would we get plutonium?" "why do you think the beowulfers don't havehyperships, when they have everything else?" harkaman snapped his fingers. "by satan, that'sit!" then he looked at trask in alarm. "hey, you're not thinking of selling amaterasu plutoniumand beowulf gadolinium, are you?" "why not? we could make a big profit on bothends 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 likewe want a hole in the head." he couldn't see the objection. tanith andamaterasu 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 tanithbefore 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 undergroundchambers and man-made caverns could still be used, and in time the mines were reopenedand the steel mill put in, and eventually

ingots of finished steel were coming downby shuttle-craft. in the meantime, the shipyard had been laid out and was taking shape. the gram ship queen flavia—she had beenthe one found unfinished at glaspyth—came in three months after the rozinante startedback; she must have been finished while valkanhayn was still in hyperspace. she carried considerablecargo, some of it superfluous but all of it useful; everybody was investing in the tanithadventure now, and the money had to be spent for something. better, she brought close toa thousand men and women; the leakage of brains and ability from the sword-worlds was turninginto a flood. among them was basil gorram. trask remembered him as an insufferable youngtwerp, but he seemed to be a good shipyard

man. he very frankly predicted that in a fewyears his father's yards at wardshaven would be idle and all the tanith ships would betanith-built. a junior partner of lothar ffayle's also came out, to establish a branch of thebank of wardshaven at rivington. as soon as the queen flavia had dischargedher cargo and passengers, she took on five hundred ground-fighters from the lamia, nemesisand space scourge companies and spaced out on a raiding voyage. while she was gone, thesecond ship, the one duke angus had started at wardshaven and king angus had finished,the black star, came in. trask was slightly incredulous at realizingthat 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 findhim. the news of the gram base on tanith spreadslowly, 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 andsix months after the nemesis had come out of hyperspace to find boake valkanhayn andgarvan spasso on tanith, the first independent space viking came in, to sell a cargo andget repairs. they bought his loot—he had been raiding some planet rather above thelevel of khepera and below that of amaterasu—and healed the wounds his ship had taken gettingit. he had been dealing with the everrard family on hoth, and professed himself muchmore satisfied with the bargains he had gotten

on tanith and swore to return. he had never even heard of andray dunnan orthe enterprise. it was a gilgamesher that brought the firstnews. he had first heard of gilgameshers—the wordwas used indiscriminately for a native of or a ship from gilgamesh—on gram, from harkamanand karffard and vann larch and the others. since coming to tanith, he had heard aboutthem from every space viking, never in complimentary and rarely in printable terms. gilgamesh was rated, with reservations, asa civilized planet though not on a level with odin or isis or baldur or marduk or aton orany 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 darknessand 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 religiousobjections to violence, though they kept these within sensible limits, and were able andwilling to fight with fanatical ferocity in defense of their home planet. about a centurybefore, there had been a five-ship viking raid on gilgamesh; one ship had returned andhad 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 mademoney, sending most of it home. their society

seemed to be a loose theo-socialism, and theirreligion an absurd potpourri of most of the major monotheisms of the federation period,plus doctrinal and ritualistic innovations of their own. aside from their propensityfor sharp trading, their bigoted refusal to regard anybody not of their creed as morethan half human, and the maze of dietary and other taboos in which they hid from socialcontact with others, made them generally disliked. after their ship had gotten into orbit, threeof 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 theirpriests, wore a robe with a cowl, and the symbol of their religion, a blue trianglein 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 contaminationfrom the heathens who had sat in their chairs before them. they had a mixed cargo of generalmerchandise 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; ivoryor something very like it from somewhere else; diamonds and uller organic opals and zarathustrasunstones. they also had some platinum. they wanted machinery, especially contragravityengines and robots. dealing with gilgamesher

the trouble was, they wanted to haggle. haggling,it seemed, was the gilgamesh planetary sport. "have you ever heard of a space viking shipnamed 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, raidedchermosh more than a year ago," the priest-supercargo said. "some of our people tarry on chermoshto trade. this ship sacked the city in which they were; some of them lost heavily in world'sgoods." "that's a pity." the gilgamesh priest shrugged. "it is as yahthe almighty wills," he said, then brightened

slightly. "the chermoshers are heathens andworshipers 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 muchwailing 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 thatone 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 couplemore. 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 acouple 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 somethingto add, when he brought his ship in six months later. he sipped his drink slowly, as thoughhe 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 lotof loot. general merchandise, precious and semiprecious stones, a lot of carved and inlaidfurniture that looked as though it had come

from some neobarb king's palace, and sometemple stuff. buddhist; there were a couple of big gold dai-butsus. his crew were standingdrinks for all comers. some of them were pretty dark above the collar, as though they'd beenon 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 littleover a hundred hours after i came in, in company with another ship. the starhopper, captainteodor vaghn. the talk was that they were making a two-ship raid somewhere." the captainof the alborak thought for a moment. "one other thing. he was buying ammunition, everythingfrom pistol cartridges to hellburners. and

he was buying all the air-and-water recyclingequipment, and all the carniculture and hydroponic equipment, he could get." that was something to know. he thanked thespace viking, and then asked: "did he know, at the time, that i'm out herehunting 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 recordinghe had made of the conversation for harkaman and valkanhayn and karffard and some of theothers. somebody instantly said: "that temple stuff came from chermosh. they'rebuddhists, there. that checks with the gilgamesher's

story." "he got the furs on imhotep; he traded forthem," harkaman said. "nobody gets anything off imhotep by raiding. the planet's in themiddle 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 scatteredaround in settlements of a couple of hundred all along the face of the glaciers. they'reall hunters and trappers. they have some contragravity, and when a ship comes in, they spread thenews by radio and everybody brings his furs to town. they use telescope sights, and everybodyover ten years old can hit a man in the head at five hundred yards. and big weapons areno good; they're too well dispersed. so the

only way to get anything out of them is totrade for it." "i think i know where he was," alvyn karffardsaid. "on imhotep, silver is a monetary metal. on agni, they use silver for sewer-pipe. agniis 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'dgone to chermosh first. it was sure that he had gone to agni and then imhotep. guatt kirbeytried 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, andit's not on any terra-type planet," valkanhayn said. "otherwise, what would he want withall that air-and-water and hydroponic and carniculture stuff?" the old federation area was full of non-terra-typeplanets, 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. "hehas a nasty streak—sadistic—but he knows

his business and he has a good ship and awell-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," vannlarch said. "and he knows where we are, and that puts him one up on us."the big board xvi so andray dunnan was haunting him again. tinybits 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. apparentlyhis base, wherever it was, was fully self-sufficient.

it was certain, too, that dunnan knew he wasbeing hunted. one space viking who had talked with him quoted him as saying: "i don't wantany trouble with trask, and if he's smart he won't look for any with me." this madehim 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 tanithin addition to the lamia, which was on permanent patrol, and he installed more missile-launchingstations both on the moon and on the planet. there were three ships bearing the ward swordsand atom-symbol, and a fourth building on gram. count lionel of newhaven was buildingone of his own, and three big freighters shuttled across the three thousand light-years betweentanith and gram. sesar karvall, who had never

recovered from his wounds, had died; ladylavina had turned the barony and the business over to her brother, burt sandrasan, and goneto live on excalibur. the shipyard at rivington was finished, and now they had built the landing-legsof 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 dagrã³ ector during thedisorders following the looting of eglonsby; the troops left behind in stolgoland had mutiniedand 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 scourgereturned and declared peace against the whole

planet. there was no fighting; everybody knewwhat had happened to stolgoland and eglonsby. in the end, all the governments of amaterasujoined 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 theywere inclined to shoot first and negotiate afterward, a natural enough attitude in viewof experiences of the past. however, they had enough old federation-period textbooksstill in microprint to know what could be done with gadolinium. they decided to writeoff the past as fair fight and no bad blood,

and start over again. it would be some years before either planethad hyperships of their own. in the meantime, both were good customers, and rapidly becominggood friends. a number of young amaterasuans and beowulfers had come to tanith to studyvarious technologies. the tanith locals were studying, too. in thefirst year, trask had gathered the more intelligent boys of ten to twelve from each communityand begun teaching them. in the past year, he had sent the most intelligent of them offto 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 othersin some of the larger villages, and at rivington

there was something that could almost be calleda college. in another ten years or so, tanith would be able to pretend to the status ofcivilization. if only andray dunnan and his ships didn'tcome too soon. they would be beaten off, he was confident of that; but the damage tanithwould take, in the defense, would set back his work for years. he knew all too well whatspace viking ships could do to a planet. he'd have to find dunnan's base, smash it, destroyhis 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 whohad loved and lost her. what mattered now was planting and nurturing civilization ontanith.

but where would he find dunnan, in two hundredbillion 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 astring from one finger; a good ship, and an able, ruthless captain. the bolide; she andthe enterprise had made a raid on ithunn. the gilgameshers had settled there and oneof 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. itspeople had sunk to the village-peasant level; they had no wealth worth taking or carryingaway. it was, however, a place where a ship could be set down, and there were women, andthe locals had not lost the art of distillation, and made potent liquors. a crew could havefun there, much less expensively than on a regular viking base planet, and for the lasteight years a captain nial burrik, of the fortuna, had been occupying it, taking hisship out for occasional quick raids and spending most of the time living from day to day almoston the local level. once in a while, a gilgamesher would come in to see if he had anything totrade. it was a gilgamesher who brought the story to tanith, and it was almost two yearsold 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. youmay have heard of her; she is the one called the honest horris." trask laughed at that. her captain, horrissasstroff, called himself "honest horris," a misnomer which he had also bestowed on hisship. he was a trader of sorts. even the gilgameshers despised him, and not even a gilgamesher wouldhave taken a wretched craft like the honest horris to space. "he had been to melkarth before," the gilgameshersaid. "he and burrik are friends." he pronounced that like a final and damning judgment ofboth of them. "the story the locals told our

brethren of the fairdealer was that the honesthorris was landed beside burrik's ship for ten days, when two other ships came in. theysaid one had the blue crescent badge, and the other bore a green monster leaping fromone star to another." the enterprise and the starhopper. he wonderedwhy they'd gone to a planet like melkarth. maybe they knew in advance whom they'd findthere. "the locals thought there would be fighting,but there was not. there was a great feast, of all four crews. then everything of valuewas loaded aboard the fortuna, and all four ships lifted and spaced out together. theysaid 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, andpriest, shook their heads. "captain gurrash of the fairdealer said ithad been over a year before his ship put in there. he could still see where the landinglegs of the ships had pressed into the ground, but the locals said they had not been back." that made two more ships about which inquiriesmust 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 unitsof the royal navy of excalibur. then he became frightened, with an irrational retrospectivefright at what might have happened. it could

have, too, at any time in the last year anda 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, whenthey were warned and ready for them. there were other things to worry about. onewas the altering attitude of his majesty angus i. when the space scourge returned, the newly-titledbaron valkanhayn brought with him, along with the princely title and the commission as viceroyof tanith, a most cordial personal audiovisual greeting, warm and friendly. angus had madeit seated at his desk, bare headed and smoking

a cigarette. the one which had come on thenext ship out was just as cordial, but the king was not smoking and wore a small gold-circledcap-of-maintenance. by the time they had three ships in service on scheduled three-montharrivals, a year and a half later, he was speaking from his throne, wearing his crownand employing the first person plural for himself and finally the third person singularfor trask. by the end of the fourth year, there was no audiovisual message from himin person, and a stiff complaint from rovard grauffis to the effect that his majesty feltit unseemly for a subject to address his sovereign while seated, even by audiovisual. this wasaccompanied by a rather apologetic personal message from grauffis—now prime minister—tothe 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 dukeof wardshaven and that of the planetary king of gram. prince trask of tanith couldn't quite seeit. the king was simply the first nobleman of the planet. even kings like rodolf of excaliburor napolyon of flamberge didn't try to be anything more. thereafter, he addressed hisgreetings and reports to the prime minister, always with a personal message, to which grauffisreplied in kind. not only the form but also the content ofthe messages from gram underwent change. his majesty was most dissatisfied. his majestywas deeply disappointed. his majesty felt

that his majesty's colonial realm of tanithwas not contributing sufficiently to the royal exchequer. and his majesty felt that princetrask was placing entirely too much emphasis upon trade and not enough upon raiding; afterall, why barter with barbarians when it was possible to take what you wanted from themby 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 newhavenwas trading with tanith from his own spaceport. all goods from tanith should pass throughthe wardshaven spaceport. "look, rovard," he told the audiovisual camerawhich 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 anythingworth 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. wetrade 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 quoteme as saying that whoever has advised his majesty that that isn't good business is nofriend 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 inthe tanith adventure, she has every right to trade here."

he wondered why his majesty didn't stop lionelof 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 aslong as the great lords like count lionel and joris of bigglersport and alan of northportwant 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 ongram 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 oneof 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 ofblackcliffe. he was what was called an invalid, the last twenty years of his life. he wasalways attended by two male nurses about the size of otto harkaman. he was also said tobe slightly eccentric." the unfortunate grandfather of duke angushad always been a subject nice people avoided. the unfortunate grandfather of king anguswas probably a subject everybody who valued their necks avoided.

lothar ffayle had also come out on the bluecomet. he was just as outspoken. "i'm not going back. i'm transferring mostof the funds of the bank of wardshaven out here; from now on, it'll be a branch of thebank of tanith. this is where the business is being done. it's getting impossible todo business at all in wardshaven. what little business there is to do." "just what's been happening?" "well, taxation, first. it seems the moremoney came in from here, the higher taxes got on gram. discriminatory taxes, too; pinchedthe small landholding and industrial barons and favored a few big ones. baron spasso andhis 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 wasrun out. it seems there was a plot against the life of his majesty. it was exposed bythe zeal and vigilance of sir garvan spasso, who was elevated to the peerage and rewardedwith the lands of the conspirators." "you said business was bad, as business?" ffayle nodded again. "the big tanith boomhas busted. it got oversold; everybody wanted in on it. and they should never have builtthose two last ships, the speedwell and the goodhope; the return on them didn't justifyit. then, you're creating your own industries

and building your own equipment and armamenthere; that's caused a slump in industry on gram. i'm glad lavina karvall has enough moneyinvested to live on. and finally, the consumers' goods market is getting flooded with stuffthat's coming in from here and competing with gram industry." well, that was understandable. one of theships that made the shuttle-trip to gram would carry enough in her strong rooms, in goldand jewels and the like, to pay a handsome profit on the voyage. the bulk-goods thatwent into the cargo holds was practically taking a free ride, so anything on hand, stuffthat nobody would ordinarily think of shipping in interstellar trade, went aboard. a twothousand foot freighter had a great deal of

cargo space. baron trask of traskon hadn't even begun torealise what tanith base was going to cost gram. xvii as might be expected, the beowulfers finishedtheir hypership first. they had started with everything but a little know-how which hadbeen quickly learned. amaterasu had had to begin by creating the industry they neededto create the industry they needed to build a ship. the beowulf ship—she was named viking'sgift—came in on tanith five and a half years after the nemesis and the space scourge hadraided beowulf; her skipper had fought a normal-drive

ship in that battle. beside plutonium andradioactive isotopes, she carried a general cargo of the sort of luxury-goods unique tobeowulf which could always find a market in interstellar trade. after selling the cargo and depositing themoney in the bank of tanith, the skipper of the viking's gift wanted to know where hecould find a good planet to raid. they gave him a list, none too tough but all slightlyabove the chicken-stealing level, and another list of planets he was not to raid; planetswith which tanith was trading. six months later they learned that he hadshowed up on khepera, with which they were now trading, and had flooded the market therewith plundered textiles, hardware, ceramics

and plastics. he had bought kregg-meat andhides. "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 finddunnan'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 cruisingin 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 shortbut furious ship-action, battering the invader until he was glad to hyper out. then he hadgone directly to xochitl, arriving on the

heels of the ship he had beaten, and had hadit out both with the captain and prince viktor, serving them with an ultimatum to leave tanithtrade-planets alone in the future. "how did they take it?" trask asked, whenhe returned to report. "just about the way you would have. viktorsaid 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, andan apology—" "if i have to send him anything, i'll sendhim 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 moreraids by xochitl ships on any of their trade-planets. no mention of the incident was made in anyof 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 highlydispleased with our subject, lucas, prince and viceroy of tanith; we consider ourselvesvery badly served by prince trask. we therefore command him to return to gram, and renderto us account of his administration of our colony and realm of tanith."

after some hasty preparations, trask recordeda reply. he was sitting on a throne, himself, and he wore a crown just as ornate as kingangus', and robes of white and black imhotep furs. "we, lucas, prince of tanith," he began, "arequite 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 kingof gram, and to carry on trade relations with him and with his subjects. "we must, however, reject absolutely any effortson his part to dictate the internal policies of our realm of tanith. it is our earnesthope,"—dammit, he'd said "earnest," he should

have thought of some other word—"that noact on the part of his majesty the king of gram will create any breach in the friendshipexisting between his realm and ours." three months later, the next ship, which hadleft gram while king angus' summons was still in hyperspace, brought baron rathmore. shakinghands with him as he left the landing craft, trask wanted to know if he'd been sent outas the new viceroy. rathmore started to laugh and ended by cursing vilely. "no. i've come out to offer my sword to theking of tanith," he said. "prince of tanith, for the time being," traskcorrected. "the sword, however, is most acceptable. i take it you've had all of our blessed sovereignyou can stomach?"

"lucas, you have enough ships and men hereto take gram," rathmore said. "proclaim yourself king of tanith and then lay claim to the throneof gram and the whole planet would rise for you." rathmore had lowered his voice, but even sothe open landing stage was no place for this sort of talk. he said so, ordered a coupleof the locals to collect rathmore's luggage, and got him into a hall-car, taking him downto his living quarters. after they were in private, rathmore began again: "it's more than anybody can stand! there isn'tone of the old great nobility he hasn't alienated, or one of the minor barons, the landholdersand industrialists, the people who were always

the backbone of gram. and it goes from themdown to the commonfolk. assessments on the lords, taxes on the people, inflation to meetthe taxes, high prices, debased coinage. everybody's being beggared except this rabble of new lordshe has around him, and that slut of a wife and her greedy kinfolk...." trask stiffened. "you're not speaking of queenflavia, 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 thethrone. he remarried immediately." the girl's name meant nothing to trask; hedid know of her father, a baron valdiva. he

was lord of a small estate south of the wardlands 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 tothe dignity of the throne." "yes. you wouldn't know this lady-demoiselleevita; she was only seventeen when you left gram, and hadn't begun to acquire a reputationoutside her father's lands. she's made up for lost time since, though. and she has enoughuncles 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 dukeof 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 whata reputation you have on gram, now. everybody would rally to you." he shook his head, "i have a throne, hereon tanith. on gram i want nothing. i'm sorry for the way angus turned out, i thought he'dmake a good king. but since he's made an intolerable king, the lords and people of gram will haveto get rid of him for themselves. i have my own tasks, here."

rathmore shrugged. "i was afraid that wouldbe it," he said. "well, i offered my sword; i won't take it back. i can help you in whatyou're doing on tanith." the captain of the free space viking damnthingwas named roger-fan-morvill esthersan, which meant that he was some sword-worlder's acknowledgedbastard by a woman of one of the old federation planets. his mother's people could have beennergalers; 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 unwrappingthe 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 andholster. the leather was bisonoid-hide; the buckle of the belt was an oval enameled witha crescent, pale blue on black. the pistol was a plain 10-mm military model with groovedplastic grips; on the receiver it bore the stamp of the house of hoylbar, the firearmsmanufacturers of glaspyth. evidently it was one of the arms duke omfray had provided forandray dunnan's original mercenary company. "tetragrammaton?" he glanced over to the bigboard; there was no previous report from that planet. "how long ago?" "i'd say about three hundred hours. i camefrom there directly, less than two hundred and fifty hours. dunnan's ships had left theplanet three days before i got there."

that was practically sizzling hot. well, somethinglike that had to happen, sooner or later. the space viking was asking him if he knewwhat sort of a place tetragrammaton was. neobarbarian, trying to recivilize in a crudeway. small population, concentrated on one continent; farming and fisheries. a littleheavy industry, in a small way, at a couple of towns. they had some nuclear power, introduceda century or so ago by traders from marduk, one of the really civilized planets. theystill depended on marduk for fissionables; their export product was an abominably-smellingvegetable oil which furnished the base for delicate perfumes, and which nobody was everable 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-inventedthe railroad, and they need more steel than they can produce for themselves. i thoughti'd raid tetragrammaton for steel and trade it on rimmon for a load of heaven-tea. wheni 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'tthink 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 offa 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 thosetapes. now, you say you want steel?" "well, i haven't any money. that's why i wasgoing to raid tetragrammaton." "nifflheim with the money; your cargo's paidfor already. this," he said, touching the pistol, "and whatever's on the tapes."dealing with roger-fan-morvill esthersan they played off the tapes that evening. theyweren't particularly informative. the locals who had been interrogated hadn't been in actualcontact with dunnan's people except in combat. the man who had been carrying the 10-mm hoylbarwas the best witness of the lot, and he knew little. he had caught one of them alone, shothim from behind with a shotgun, taken his pistol, and then gotten away as quickly ashe 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 andsacked the town. after returning to their ships, they had opened fire with nuclear missiles. "sounds like dunnan," hugh rathmore said indisgust. "he just went kill-crazy. the bad blood of blackcliffe." "there are funny things about this," boakevalkanhayn 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, andthen began looting and massacring. there wasn't anything of real value there; all they tookwas what the men could carry themselves or stuff into their landing craft, and they didthat because they have what amounts to a religious taboo against landing anywhere and leavingwithout stealing something. the real loot was at these two other towns; a steel milland big stocks of steel at one, and all that skunk-apple oil at the other. so what didthey 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." "then they wanted to terrorize somebody offthe planet." "but nobody'd hear about it off-planet," somebodyprotested. "the mardukans would; they trade with tetragrammaton,"the acknowledged bastard of somebody named morvill said. "they have a couple of shipsa year there." "that's right," trask agreed. "marduk." "you mean, you think dunnan's trying to terrorizemarduk?" valkanhayn demanded. "great satan, even he isn't crazy enough for that!" baron rathmore started to say something aboutwhat 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'thave to look over his shoulder while he was making them. "i think he is, too," trask said. "i thinkthat is exactly what he is doing. don't ask me why; as otto is fond of remarking, he'scrazy and we aren't, and that gives him an advantage. but what have we gotten, sincethose gilgameshers told us about his picking up burrik's ship and the honest horris? untiltoday, we've heard nothing from any other space viking. what we have gotten was storiesfrom gilgameshers about raids on planets where they trade, and every one of them is alsoa planet where marduk ships trade. and in

every case, there has been little or nothingreported 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 andhis uncle both!" rathmore cried. "you mean, he's making a string of terror-raidson 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 makea fast raid?" "that's what i think. remember our fundamentalpostulate: dunnan is crazy. remember how he convinced himself that he was the rightfulheir to the ducal crown of wardshaven?" and remember his insane passion for elaine; hepushed that thought hastily from him. "now,

he's convinced that he's the greatest spaceviking in history. he has to do something worthy of that distinction. when was the lasttime anybody attacked a civilized planet? i don't mean gilgamesh, i mean a planet likemarduk." "a hundred and twenty years ago; prince havilgarof haulteclere, six ships, against aton. two ships got back. he didn't. nobody's triedit since," harkaman said. "so dunnan the great will do it. i hope hetries," he surprised himself by adding. "that's provided i find out what happened. then icould stop thinking about him." there was a time when he had dreaded the possibilitythat somebody else might kill dunnan before he could.xviii

seshat, obidicut, lugaluru, audhumla. the young man elevated by his father's deathin the dunnan raid to the post of hereditary president of the democratic republic of tetragrammatonhad been sure that the marduk ships which came to his planet traded also on those. therehad been some difficulty about making contact, and the first face-to-face meeting had begunin 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 spacesof charred and slagged rubble. "they blew up the steel mill here, and theoil-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 goneaway, this other ship came." "the damnthing? she bore the head of a beastwith 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 andmedicines for us." roger-fan-morvill esthersan hadn't mentioned that. "well, we'd like to help you, if we can. doyou 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 usanything. the man who did this to you is my enemy. now, i want to talk to every one ofyour 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 citieson which they had fallen were still-smoking pits literally burned into the ground andthe bedrock below, at the center of five hundred mile radii of slag and lava and scorched earthand burned forests. there had been a planetbuster; it had started a major earthquake. and halfa dozen thermonuclears. there were probably quite a few survivors—a human planetarypopulation is extremely hard to exterminate completely—but within a century they'd beback 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 planetnobody ever heard of, sitting on a golden throne, surrounded by a harem." he had begun to suspect that dunnan was doingsomething of just the sort. the greatest space viking of history would naturally found aspace 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 thefarthest 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 andthe screen cleared, audhumla looked like tanith or khepera or amaterasu or any other terra-typeplanet, a big disk brilliant with reflected

sunlight and glowing with starlit and moonlitatmosphere on the other. there was a single rather large moon, and, in the telescopicscreen, the usual markings of seas and continents and rivers and mountain-ranges. but therewas nothing to show.... oh, yes; lights on the darkened side, andfrom the size they must be vast cities. all the available data for audhumla was long outof date; a considerable civilization must have developed in the last half dozen centuries. another light appeared, a hard blue-whitespark that spread into a larger, less brilliant yellow light. at the same time, all the alarm-devicesin the command-room went into a pandemonium of jangling and flashing and squawking andhowling and shouting. radiation. energy-release.

contragravity distortion effects. infra-redoutput. a welter of indecipherable radio and communication-screen signals. radar and scanner-raybeams from the planet. trask's fist began hurting; he found thathe had been pounding the desk in front of him with it. he stopped it. "we caught him, we caught him!" he was yellinghoarsely. "full speed in, continuous acceleration, as much as we can stand. we'll worry aboutdecelerating when we're in shooting distance." the planet grew steadily larger; karffardwas taking him at his word about continuous acceleration. there'd be a gehenna of a billto pay when they started decelerating. on the planet, more bombs were going off justoutside atmosphere beyond the sunset line.

"ship observed. altitude about a hundred tofive hundred miles—hundreds, not thousands—35Ⱐnorth latitude, 15Ⱐwest of the sunset line.ship is under fire, bomb explosions near her," a voice whooped. somebody else was yelling that the city lightswere really burning cities, or burning forests. the first voice, having stopped, broke inagain: "ship is visible in telescopic screen, justat the sunset line. and there's another ship detected but not visible, somewhere aroundthe equator, and a third one somewhere out of sight, we can just get the fringe of hercontragravity 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; fora moment the planet was completely off-screen, and then its curvature came into the screenagainst 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'svoice. "she's leaking air and water vapor like crazy." "well, is she a good guy or a bad guy?" morlandwas yelling back, as though koreff's spectroscopes could distinguish. koreff ignored that.

"another ship making signal," he said. "she'sthe one coming up over the equator. sword-world impulse code; her communication-screen combination,and an identify-yourself." karffard punched out the combination as korefffurnished it. while trask was desperately willing his face into immobility, the screenlighted. 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," heheard himself saying. "we last met on the terrace at karvall house, did we not?" for once, the paper-white face of andray dunnan'sã¢me damnã©e 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 telescopicscreen, 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 wasspeaking rapidly into his hand-phone, and alvyn karffard was hurling his voice all overthe 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 wasplainly visible; he could see the oval patch of black with the blue crescent, and in hisscreen dunnan would be seeing the sword-impaled skull of the nemesis. if only he could be sure dunnan was thereto see it. if it had only been dunnan's face, instead of ormm's, that he had seen in thescreen. as it was, he couldn't be sure, and if one of the missiles that were already goingout 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 obligationthat was now meaningless to him. the enterprise launched counter-missiles;so did the nemesis. there were momentarily

unbearable flashes of pure energy and fromthem globes of incandescence spread and vanished. something must have gotten through; red lightsflashed on the damage board. it had been something heavy enough even to jolt the huge mass ofthe nemesis. at the same time, the other ship took a hit from something that would havevaporized 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 aroundthe horizon. another ship, the size of otto harkaman'scorisande ii, was approaching; she bore a tapering, red-nailed feminine hand danglinga planet by a string. they rushed toward each other, planting a garden of evanescent fire-flowersbetween them; they pounded one another with

guns, and then they sped apart. at the sametime, paul koreff was picking up an impulse-code signal from the third, crippled, ship; a screencombination. trask punched it out as he received it. a man in space armor was looking out of thescreen. 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 deviceof a dragonlike beast perched with its tail around a planet, and a crown above. he hada thin, high-cheeked face, with a vertical wrinkle between his eyes, and a clipped blondmustache. "who are you, stranger. you're fighting myenemies; does that make you a friend."

"i'm a friend of anybody who owns andray dunnanhis enemy. sword-world ship nemesis; i'm prince lucas trask of tanith, commanding." "royal mardukan ship victrix." the thin-facedman 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 stillhave a few missiles left. seventy per cent of the ship's sealed off, and we've been holedin a dozen places. we have power enough for lift and some steering-way. we can't makelateral way except at the expense of lift." which made the victrix practically a stationarytarget. he yelled over his shoulder at karffard

to cut speed all he could without tearingthings apart. "when that cripple comes into view, startcircling around her. get into a tight circle above her." he turned back to the man in thescreen. "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, princetrask." "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 enterprisehad taken damage in the last exchange; koreff's

spectroscopes showed her halo-ed with airand water vapor. her instruments would be getting the same story from the nemesis; wedge-shapedsegments extending six to eight decks in were sealed off in several places. then the onlything that could be seen with certainty was the blaze of mutually destroying missilesbetween. the short-range gun duel began and ended as they passed. in the screen, he had seen a fat round-nosedthing come up from the victrix, curving far out ahead of the passing enterprise. she wasalmost out of sight around the planet when she ran head-on into it, and vanished in anawesome blaze. for a moment, he thought she had been destroyed, then she lurched intosight and went around the curvature of audhumla.

trask and the mardukan were shaking handswith themselves at each other in their screens; everybody in the nemesis command room wasscreaming: "well shot, victrix! well shot!" then the yo-yo was coming around again, andvann larch was saying, "gehenna with this fooling around! i'll fix the expurgated unprintability!" he yelled orders—a jumble of code lettersand numbers—and things began going out. most of them blew up in space. then the yo-yoblew 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. "idon'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 beowulfersare good nuclear weaponeers." the enterprise came back, hastily, to seewhat 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 gotthrough. in the telescopic screen, a jagged hole was visible just below the equator ofthe enterprise, the edges curling outward. something, possibly a heavy missile in anopen tube, ready for launching, had gone off inside her. what the inside of the ship waslike, or how many of her company were still alive, was hard to guess.

there were some, and her launchers were stillspewing out missiles. they were intercepted and blew up. the hull of the enterprise bulkedhuge in the guidance-screen of the missile and filled it; the jagged crater that hadobliterated the bottom of dunnan's blue crescent blazon spread to fill the whole screen. thescreen went milky white as the pickup went off. all the other screens blazed briefly, untiltheir filters went on. even afterward, they glared like the cloud-veiled sun of gram athigh noon. finally, when the light-intensity had dropped and the filters went off, therewas nothing left of the enterprise but an orange haze.

somebody—paytrik, baron morland, he saw—waspounding him on the back and screaming inarticulately in his ear. a dozen space-armored officerswith planet-perched dragons on their breasts were crowding beside prince bentrik in thescreen from the victrix, whooping like drunken bisonoid-herders on payday night. "i wonder," he said, almost inaudibly, "ifi'll ever know if andray dunnan was on that ship." xix prince trask of tanith and prince simon bentrikwere dining together on an upper terrace of what had originally been the mansion houseof a federation period plantation. it had

been a number of other things since; now itwas the municipal building of a town that had grown around it, which had, somehow, escapedundamaged from the dunnan blitz. normally about five or ten thousand, the place wasnow jammed with almost fifty thousand homeless refugees from half a dozen other towns thathad been destroyed, overflowing the buildings and crowding into a sprawling camp of hastilybuilt 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 andreconstruction; this was the first meal the two commanders had been able to share in anyleisure at all. prince bentrik's enjoyment of it was somewhat impaired by the fact thatfrom 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 mardukin the nemesis, then." they were both speaking loudly, above the clank and clatter of machinerybelow. "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 forbringing me back to stand trial," bentrik said bitterly. "why, i'd have anybody shotwho let his ship get caught as i did mine. those two were down in atmosphere before iknew they'd come out of hyperspace."

"i think they were down on the planet beforeyour ship arrived." "oh, that's ridiculous, prince trask!" themardukan cried. "you can't hide a ship on a planet. not from the kind of instrumentswe 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 tohis mouth. he lowered it slowly to his plate. that was a theory he'd like to accept, ifhe could. "but the locals. they didn't know about it."

"they wouldn't. they have no off-planet detectionof 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 fromseshat. but if dunnan wanted to ambush your ship, he'd have thought of it, too. it's theonly 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 halfthe royal navy out now, patrolling our trade-planets. even if he wasn't aboard the enterprise whenyou blew her up, you've put a name on him and can tell us a good deal about him." heset down the wineglass. "why, if it weren't so utterly ridiculous, one might even thinkhe was making war on marduk." from trask's viewpoint, it wasn't ridiculousat 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 mardukcould patch her hull and replace her dillinghams and her abbot lift-and-drive engines and makeher temporarily spaceworthy, until she could be gotten to a shipyard. they concentratedon repairing the nemesis, and in another two weeks she was ready for the voyage. the six hundred hour trip to marduk passedpleasantly enough. the mardukan officers were good company, and found their space vikingopposite 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 listeningavidly to tales of each other's home planets. the space vikings were surprised and disappointedat 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 belongeddefinitely to the lower orders. "there's still too much free land and freeopportunity on the sword-worlds," trask explained. "nobody does much bowing and scraping to theclass above him; he's too busy trying to shove himself up into it. and the men who ship outas space vikings are the least class-conscious of the lot. think my men may have troubleon marduk about that? they'll all insist on doing their drinking in the swankiest placesin town."

"no. i don't think so. everybody will be soamazed that space vikings aren't twelve feet tall, with three horns like a zarathustradamnthing and a spiked tail like a fafnir mantichore that they won't even notice anythingless. 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 eliminatedbefore 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 alsoa hereditary monarchy, if that made any kind of sense. trask's efforts to explain the politicaland 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 oweshis position to the support of his great nobles; they owe theirs to their barons and landholdingknights; they owe theirs to their people. there are limits beyond which none of themcan go; after that, their vassals turn on "well, suppose the people of some barony rebel?won't the king send troops to support the baron?" "what troops? outside a personal guard andenough men to police the royal city and hold the crown lands, the king has no troops. ifhe wants troops, he has to get them from his great nobles; they have to get them from theirvassal barons, who raise them by calling out

their people." that was another source ofdissatisfaction with king angus of gram; he had been augmenting his forces by hiring off-planetmercenaries. "and the people won't help some other baron oppress his people; it might betheir turn next." "you mean, the people are armed?" prince bentrikwas incredulous. "great satan, aren't yours?" prince traskwas 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 thegovernment, at all; the government ruled in the king's name. there was the assembly; thechamber 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 toappoint him from the party holding the most seats in the chamber of representatives, andhe appointed the ministers, who handled the executive work of the government, only theirsubordinates in the different ministries were career-officials who were selected by competitiveexamination for the bottom jobs and promoted

up the bureaucratic ladder from there. this left trask wondering if the mardukanconstitution hadn't been devised by goldberg, the legendary old terran inventor who alwaysdid everything the hard way. it also left him wondering just how in gehenna the governmentof marduk ever got anything done. maybe it didn't. maybe that was what savedmarduk from having a real despotism. "well, what prevents the government from enslavingthe people? the people can't; you just told me that they aren't armed, and the governmentis." he continued, pausing now and then for breath,to catalogue every tyranny he had ever heard of, from those practiced by the terran federationbefore the big war to those practiced at eglonsby

on amaterasu by pedrosan pedro. a few of thevery mildest were pushing the nobles and people of gram to revolt against angus i. "and in the end," he finished, "the governmentwould be the only property owner and the only employer on the planet, and everybody elsewould be slaves, working at assigned tasks, wearing government-issued clothing and eatinggovernment food, their children educated as the government prescribes and trained forjobs selected for them by the government, never reading a book or seeing a play or thinkinga 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 peoplewould not legislate themselves into slavery." he wished otto harkaman were there. all heknew of history was the little he had gotten from reading some of harkaman's books, andthe 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 planetsand over ten centuries of time, in which people had done exactly that and hadn't known whatthey 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 andsimple. that planetary nationalist gang got into control fifty years ago, during the crisisafter 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 youngnobleman declared. "it could if zaspar makann's party wins controlof the assembly at the next election," somebody else said. "oh, then marduk's safe! the sun'll go novafirst," one of the junior royal navy officers 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 zasparmakann, and took occasion to bring it up in conversation with his shipboard guests. everytime he talked about makann to two or more mardukans, he heard at least three or moreopinions about the man. he was a political demagogue; on that everybody agreed. afterthat, opinions diverged. makann was a raving lunatic, and all the followershe had were a handful of lunatics like him. he might be a lunatic, but he had a dangerouslylarge 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 anassemblyman. he was just a smart crook, milking a lot of half-witted plebeians for all hecould get out of them. not just plebes, either;

a lot of industrialists were secretly financinghim, in hope that he would help them break up the labor unions. you're nuts; everybodyknew 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 gilgameshersoff the planet. well, that was one thing you had to give himcredit for. he wanted to run out the gilgameshers. everybody was in favor of that. now, trask could remember something he'd gottenfrom 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, fifteenhundred miles in diameter, and two insignificant twenty-mile chunks of rock. the big one wasfortified, and a couple of ships were in orbit around it. the nemesis was challenged as sheemerged from her last hyperjump; both ships broke orbit and came out to meet her, andseveral more were detected lifting away from the planet. prince bentrik took the communication screen,and immediately encountered difficulties. the commandant, even after the situation hadbeen explained twice to him, couldn't understand. a royal navy fleet unit knocked out in a battlewith space vikings was bad enough, but being

rescued and brought to marduk by another spaceviking 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 thenrespectfully polite to somebody he addressed as prince vandarvant. finally, after someminutes' wait, a frail, white-haired man in a little black cap-of-maintenance appearedin the screen. prince bentrik instantly sprang to his feet. so did all the other mardukansin the command room. "your majesty! i am most deeply honored!" "are you all right, simon?" the old gentlemanasked solicitously. "they haven't done anything to you, have they?"

"saved my life, and my men's, and treatedme 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 gentlemanmy deepest thanks." "his majesty, mikhyl the eighth, planetaryking of marduk," prince bentrik said. "his highness, lucas, prince trask, planetary viceroyof 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 theconfidence of my fellow sovereign king angus of gram. i will never be ungrateful for whatyou did for my cousin and for his officers and men. you must stay at the palace whileyou are on this planet; i am giving orders for your reception, and i wish you to be formallypresented 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 havethree horns and a spiked tail and stand twelve feet tall, himself. it took several hours for the nemesis to getinto orbit. bentrik spent most of them in

a screen-booth, and emerged visibly relieved. "nobody's going to be sticky about what happenedon audhumla," he told trask. "there will be a board of inquiry. i'm afraid i had to mixyou up in that. it's not only about the action on audhumla; everybody from the space ministerdown wants to hear what you know about this fellow dunnan. like yourself, we all hopehe went to em-see-square along with his flagship, but we can't take it for granted. we haveover a dozen trade-planets to protect, and he's hit more than half of them already." the process of getting into orbit took themaround 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, withno hiatus of neobarbarism, since it had first been colonized in the fourth century. evenso, the space vikings were amazed—and stubbornly refusing to show it—at what they saw inthe 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; likeany city of a contragravity-using people, it lay in a rough circle of buildings toweringout of green interspaces, surrounded by the smaller circles of spaceports and industrialsuburbs. the difference was that any of these were as large as camelot on excalibur or fourwardshavens on gram, and malverton itself

was almost half the size of the whole baronyof 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 ihope there never will be—gram would have cities like this, too." one thing; the government of a planet likemarduk 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 ofthe population and its problems. alvyn karffard took a quick look around himto 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 comingin, 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 leavea couple to hold the planet. beowulf had one, and another almost completed, and now therewas 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 hadalways been their inability to combine under one command in sufficient strength. besides, he didn't want to raid marduk. araid, if successful, would yield immense treasures, but cause a hundred, even a thousand, timesas much destruction, and he didn't want to destroy anything civilized. the landing stages of the palace were crowdedwhen he and prince bentrik landed, and, at a discreet distance, swarms of air-vehiclescircled, creating a control problem for the police. parting from bentrik, he was escortedto the suite prepared for him; it was luxurious in the extreme but scarcely above sword-worldstandards. there were a surprising number

of human servants, groveling and fawning andgetting underfoot and doing work robots could have been doing better. what robots therewere were inefficient, and much work and ingenuity had been lavished on efforts to copy humanform to the detriment of function. after getting rid of most of the superfluousservants, he put on a screen and began sampling the newscasts. there were telescopic viewsof the nemesis from some craft on orbit nearby, and he watched the officers and men of thevictrix being disembarked; there were other views of their landing at some naval installationon 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 spacevikings had captured prince bentrik and were holding him for ransom. beyond that, the governmentwas trying to sit on the whole story, and the opposition was hinting darkly at corruptdeals and sinister plots. prince bentrik arrived in the midst of an impassioned tirade againstpusillanimous traitors surrounding his majesty who were betraying marduk to the space vikings. "why doesn't your government publish the factsand put a stop to that nonsense?" trask asked. "oh, let them rave," bentrik replied. "thelonger the government waits, the more they'll be ridiculed when the facts are published." or, the more people will be convinced thatthe government had something to hush up, and

had to take time to construct a plausiblestory. he kept the thought to himself. it was their government; how they mismanagedit was their own business. he found that there was no bartending robot; he had to have ahuman servant bring drinks. he made up his mind to have a few of the nemesis robots sentdown 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 wouldbe an informal introduction first. this took place in a small ante-chamber offthe banquet hall; the crown prince and crown

princess and princess bentrik were there whenthey arrived. the crown prince was a man of middle age, graying at the temples, with theglassy stare that betrayed contact lenses. the resemblance between him and his fatherwas apparent; both had the same studious and impractical expression, and might have beenprofessors on the same university faculty. he shook hands with trask, assuring him ofthe gratitude of the court and royal family. "you know, simon is next in succession, aftermyself and my little daughter," he said. "that's too close to take chances with him." he turnedto bentrik. "i'm afraid this is your last space adventure, simon. you'll have to bea 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. "princetrask, my son wants to meet you, very badly. he's ten years old, and he thinks space vikingsare romantic heroes." "he should be one, for a while." he should just see a planet space vikingshad raided. most of the people at the upper end of thetable were diplomats—ambassadors from odin and baldur and isis and ishtar and aton andthe other civilized worlds. no doubt they hadn't actually expected horns and a spikedtail, or even tattooing and a nose ring, but after all, space vikings were just some sortof neobarbarians, weren't they? on the other hand, they had all seen views and gotten descriptionsof the nemesis, and had heard about the ship-action

on audhumla, and this prince trask—a spaceviking 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 conversationwith king mikhyl. so they were courteous through the meal, and tried to get as close as possibleto him in the procession to the throne room. king mikhyl wore a golden crown topped bythe planetary emblem, which must have weighed twice as much as a combat helmet, and fur-edgedrobes 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 standingto 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 theroomful filed up onto the dais to be received, and finally it was over and the king roseand proceeded, followed by his immediate suite between the bowing and curtsying court andout the wide doors. after a decent interval, crown prince edvard escorted him and princebentrik 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 onexcalibur, except that the drinks and canapes were being dispensed by human servants.

he was wondering what sort of court functionsangus the first of gram was holding by now. after half an hour, a posse of court functionariesapproached and informed him that it had pleased his majesty to command prince trask to attendhim in his private chambers. there was an audible gasp at this; both prince bentrikand the crown prince were trying not to grin too broadly. evidently this didn't happentoo often. he followed the functionaries from the ballroom, and the eyes of everybody elsefollowed him. old king mikhyl received him alone, in a small,comfortably shabby room behind vast ones of incredible splendor. he wore fur-lined slippersand a loose robe with a fur collar, and his little black cap-of-maintenance. he was standingwhen trask entered; when the guards closed

the door and left them alone, he beckonedtrask 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 tosummon 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 comfortableand quiet here, and i can sit down. your majesty was the center of attention in the throneroom, yet i seemed to detect a look of relief as you left it." "i try to hide it, as much as possible." theold 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. traskfelt that some gesture should be made on his own part. he unfastened the dress-dagger fromhis 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 secretsociety whose ritual he must guess at step by step. "right, goodman mikhyl." they lifted their glasses to each other anddrank; 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 professionalmurderers and robbers, as one of my fellow tradesmen says. the worst of it is that robberyand murder become just that: a trade, like servicing robots or selling groceries." "yet you fought two other space vikings tocover 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 screenis the only man dunnan can really trust. one or the other would stay wherever he has hisbase all the time." "and when you do kill him; what then?" "i'll go on trying to make a civilized planetof tanith. sooner or later, i'll have one quarrel too many with king angus, and thenwe will be our majesty lucas the first of tanith, and we will sit on a throne and receiveour subjects. and i'll be glad when i can get my crown off and talk to a few men whocall me 'shipmate,' instead of 'your majesty.'" "well, it would violate professional ethicsfor me to advise a subject to renounce his

sovereign, of course, but that might be anexcellent thing. you met the ambassador from ithavoll at dinner, did you not? three centuriesago, ithavoll was a colony of marduk—it seems we can't afford colonies, any more—andit seceded from us. ithavoll was then a planet like your tanith seems to be. today, it isa civilized world, and one of marduk's best friends. you know, sometimes i think a fewlights are coming on again, here and there in the old federation. if so, you space vikingsare helping to light them." "you mean the planets we use as bases, andthe things we teach the locals?" "that, too, of course. civilization needscivilized technologies. but they have to be used for civilized ends. do you know anythingabout 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. therewere four great nations; the two greatest were at the brink of war, and the others werewaiting 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 leaguefor 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 governmentdoesn't like it at all. it will be smashed sooner or later, but they'll never go backto divided sovereignty and nationalism again. the space vikings frightened them out of thatwhen the dangers inherent in it couldn't. maybe this man dunnan will do the same forus on marduk." "you have troubles?" "you've seen decivilized planets. how doesit happen?" "i know how it's happened on a good many:war. destruction of cities and industries. survivors among ruins, too busy keeping theirown bodies alive to try to keep civilization alive. then they lose all knowledge of howto be civilized."

"that's catastrophic decivilization. thereis also decivilization by erosion, and while it's going on, nobody notices it. everybodyis proud of their civilization, their wealth and culture. but trade is falling off; fewerships come in each year. so there is boastful talk about planetary self-sufficiency; whoneeds off-planet trade anyhow? everybody seems to have money, but the government is alwaysbroke. deficit spending—and always the vital social services for which the government hasto spend money. the most vital one, of course, is buying votes to keep the government inpower. and it gets harder for the government to get anything done. "the soldiers are sloppier at drill, and theiruniforms and weapons aren't taken care of.

the noncoms are insolent. and more and moreparts of the city are dangerous at night, and then even in the daytime. and it's beenyears since a new building went up, and the old ones aren't being repaired any more." trask closed his eyes. again, he could feelthe 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 nikkolayand otto harkaman. he said: "and finally, nobody bothers fixing anythingup. 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 mikhylslipped 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 stevenof ravary, wore the uniform of an ensign of the royal navy; he was accompanied by histutor, an elderly navy captain. they both stopped in the doorway of trask's suite, andthe boy saluted smartly. "permission to come aboard, sir?" he asked.

"welcome aboard, count; captain. belay theceremony and find seats; you're just in time for second breakfast." as they sat down, he aimed his ultravioletlight-pencil at a serving robot. unlike mardukan robots, which looked like surrealist conceptionsof pre-atomic armored knights, it was a smooth ovoid floating a few inches from the flooron its own contragravity; as it approached, its top opened like a bursting beetle shelland hinged trays of food swung out. the boy looked at it in fascination. "is that a sword-world robot, sir, or didyou 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, evenmore impressed than his young charge. he knew what went into it, and he had some conceptionof 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 allof them want soft jobs as nobles' servants," the captain said. "those that want any kindof jobs." "you need all your people for fighting men,don't you?" the boy count asked.

"well, we need a good many. the smallest ofour ships will carry five hundred men; most of them around eight hundred." the captain lifted an eyebrow. the complementof 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'rean 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," theold captain told him. "no. prince trask is my friend. he saved myfather's life." "and i won't fight you, either, count. we'llmake a lot of fireworks, and then we'll each go home and claim victory. how would thatbe?" "i've heard of things like that," the captainsaid. "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. kingsdon'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 ofravary 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 waya sword-world noble would talk, count steven," the board of inquiry, that afternoon, wasmore like a small and very sedate cocktail party. an admiral shefter, who seemed to bevery high high-brass, presided while carefully avoiding the appearance of doing so. alvynkarffard and vann larch and paytrik morland were there from the nemesis, and bentrik andseveral of the officers from the victrix,

and there were a couple of naval intelligenceofficers, 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 anysort 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 happenmany more times, though." "not many more, sir. i'd say it'll take mypeople a month, and then the time it'll take to get all the ships equipped as they comein." ship construction didn't think that wouldtake too long.

"we'll see to it that you get full informationon the new submarine detection system, prince trask," the admiral said. "you gentlemen understand you'll have to keepit under your helmets, though," one of the intelligence men added. "if it got out thatwe were informing space vikings about our technical secrets...." he felt the back ofhis neck in a way that made trask suspect that beheadment was the customary form ofexecution on marduk. "we'll have to find out where the fellow hashis base," operational planning said. "i take it, prince trask, that you're not going toassume that he was on his flagship when you blew it, and just put paid to him and forgethim?"

"oh, no. i'm assuming that he wasn't. i don'tbelieve he and ormm went anywhere on the same ship, after he came out here and establisheda base. i think one of them would stay home all the time." "well, we'll give you everything we have onthem," shefter promised. "most of that is classified and you'll have to keep quiet aboutit, too. i just skimmed over the summary of what you gave us; i daresay we'll both geta 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-typeplanet." he told them about dunnan's heavy purchases of air-and-water recycling equipmentand carniculture and hydroponic material.

"that, of course, helps a great deal." "yes; there are only about five million planetsin 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 citiesif you had the time and material." one of the intelligence officers had beennursing a glass with a tiny remnant of cocktail in it. he downed it suddenly, filled the glassagain, and glowered at it in silence for a while. then he drank it briskly and refilledit. "what i should like to know," he said, "ishow this double obscenity of a dunnan knew we'd have a ship on audhumla just when wedid," he said. "your talking about underwater

dome-cities reminded me of it. i don't thinkhe just pulled that planet out of a hat and then went there prepared to sit on the bottomof the ocean for a year and a half waiting for something to turn up. i think he knewthe victrix was coming to audhumla, and just about when." "i don't like that, commodore," shefter said. "you think i do, sir?" the intelligence officercountered. "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 itslowly and carefully. "it's been a long time since the navy's had anything like this toworry about." he turned to trask. "i suppose i can get in touch with you at the palacewhenever i must?" "well, prince trask and i have been invitedas house-guests at prince edvard's, i mean baron cragdale's, hunting lodge," bentriksaid. "we'll be going there directly from "ah." admiral shefter smiled slightly. besidenot having three horns and a spiked tail, this space viking was definitely persona gratawith the royal family. "well, we'll keep in contact, prince trask."cragdale hunting lodge the hunting lodge where crown prince edvardwas simple baron cragdale lay at the head

of a sharply-sloping mountain valley downwhich a river tumbled. mountains rose on either side in high scarps, some topped with perpetualsnow, glaciers curling down from them. the lower ranges were forested, as was the valleybetween, and there was a red-mauve alpenglow on the great peak that rose from the headof the valley. for the first time in over a year, elaine was with him, silently clingingto him to see the beauty of it through his eyes. he had thought that she had gone fromhim forever. the hunting lodge itself was not quite whata sword-worlder would expect a hunting lodge to be. at first sight, from the air, it lookedlike a sundial, a slender tower rising like a gnomen above a circle of low buildings andformal gardens. the boat landed at the foot

of it, and he and prince and princess bentrikand the young count of ravary and his tutor descended. immediately, they were beset bya flurry of servants; the second boat, with the bentrik servants and their luggage, wascircling in to land. elaine, he discovered, wasn't with him any more, and then he wasseparated 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 eventried to help him take it, and fussed over him while he dressed. there were over a score for dinner. bentrikhad 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, acouple of representatives and a member of the chamber of delegates, and a couple ofsocial workers, whatever that meant. his own table companion was a lady valeriealvarath. she was beautiful—black hair, and almost startlingly blue eyes, a combinationunusual 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 askedwhere the daughter was, she laughed. "she won't be helping entertain visiting spacevikings for a long time, prince trask. she is precisely eight years old; i saw her gettingready for bed before i came down here. i'll look in on her after dinner."

then the crown princess melanie, on his otherhand, 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 studentdays. these people had a monarchy since before gram had been colonized; he wasn't going toadmit that gram's had been established since he went off-planet. the table was small enoughfor everybody to hear what he was saying and to feed questions to him. it lasted all throughthe meal, and continued when they adjourned for coffee in the library. "but what about your form of government, yoursocial structure, that sort of thing?" somebody, impatient with the artificialities of thecourt, wanted to know.

"well, we don't use the word government verymuch," he replied. "we talk a lot about authority and sovereignty, and i'm afraid we burn entirelytoo much powder over it, but government always seems to us like sovereignty interfering inmatters that don't concern it. as long as sovereignty maintains a reasonable semblanceof 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 governmentdo anything positive for the people?" he tried to explain the sword-world feudalsystem to them. it was hard, he found, to explain something you have taken for grantedall your life to somebody who is quite unfamiliar with it.

"but the government—the sovereignty, sinceyou don't like the other word—doesn't do anything for the people!" one of the professorsobjected. "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 avery distinct and commanding voice, and that barons and lords who wanted to stay alivelistened attentively to it. the assemblyman changed his mind; that wasn't tyranny, itwas anarchy. and the professor was still insistent about who performed the social services. "if you mean schools and hospitals and keepingthe city clean, the people do that for themselves.

the government, if you want to think of itas 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'swhooping for." he'd heard about that, on the voyage fromaudhumla. every person on marduk would be retired on an adequate pension after thirtyyears regular employment or at the age of sixty. when he had wanted to know where themoney would come from, he had been told that there would be a sales tax, and that the pensionsmust all be spent within thirty days, which would stimulate business, and the increasedbusiness would provide tax money to pay the

pensions. "we have a joke about three gilgameshers space-wreckedon an uninhabited planet," he said. "ten years later, when they were rescued, all three wereimmensely wealthy, from trading hats with each other. that's about the way this thingwill work." one of the lady social workers bristled; itwasn'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 shipsto loot marduk. just infiltrate it with about

a hundred smart confidence men and insidea 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 caseby extremism. one of the wealthier nobles said that he was a reproach to the rulingclass; it was their fault that people like makann could gain a following. one old gentlemansaid that maybe the gilgameshers were to blame, themselves, for some of the animosity towardthem. he was immediately set upon by all the others and verbally torn to pieces on thespot. trask didn't feel it proper to quote goodmanmikhyl to this crowd. he took the responsibility upon himself for saying:

"from what i've heard of him, i think he'sthe most serious threat to civilized society on marduk." they didn't call him crazy, after all he wasa guest, but they didn't ask him what he meant, either. they merely told him that makann wasa crackpot with a contemptible following of half-wits, and just wait till the electionand 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, notto makann." he hadn't talked that way on the ship. maybehe'd been looking around and doing some thinking, since he got back. he might have been talkingto goodman mikhyl, too. there was a screen

in the room. he nodded toward it. "he's speaking at a rally of the people'swelfare party at drepplin, now," he said. "may i put it on, to show you what i mean?" when the crown prince assented, he snappedon the screen and twiddled at the selector. a face looked out of it. the features weren'tandray 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. madeyes. his high-pitched voice screamed: "our beloved sovereign is a prisoner! he issurrounded by traitors! the ministries are full of them! they are all traitors! the bloodthirstyreactionaries of the falsely so-called crown

loyalist party! the grasping conspiracy ofthe interstellar bankers! the dirty gilgameshers! they are all leagued together in an unholyconspiracy! and now this space viking, this bloody-handed monster from the sword-worlds...." "shut the horrible man off," somebody wasyelling, in competition with the hypnotic scream of the speaker. the trouble was, they couldn't. they couldturn off the screen, but zaspar makann would go on screaming, and millions all over theplanet 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 severalhundred feet above a great open park. it was

densely packed with people, most of them wearingclothes a farm tramp on gram wouldn't be found dead in, but here and there among them wereblocks of men in what was almost but not quite military uniform, each with a short and thickswagger-stick with a knobbed head. across the park, in the distance, the head and shouldersof zaspar makann loomed a hundred feet high in a huge screen. whenever he stopped forbreath, a shout would go up, beginning with the blocks of uniformed men: "makann! makann! makann the leader! makannto power!" "you even let him have a private army?" heasked the crown prince. "oh, those silly buffoons and their musical-comedyuniforms," 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 convincingeverybody that he wanted to be alone for a while, and was sitting in a garden, watchingthe rainbows in the midst of a big waterfall across the valley. elaine would have likedthat, but she wasn't with him, now. then he realized that somebody was speakingto him, in a small, bashful voice. he turned,

and saw a little girl in shorts and a sleevelessjacket, 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'sface. "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 againand dropped from the child's arms; after a brief hesitation, he came over and jumpedonto trask's lap, licking his face. while he petted the dog, the girl came over andsat on the bench beside him. "mopsy likes you," she said. after a moment,she added: "i like you, too." "and i like you," he said. "would you wantto be my girl? you know, a space viking has to have a girl on every planet. how wouldyou like to be my girl on marduk?" myrna thought that over carefully. "i'd liketo, 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 throughbeing king, pappa will have to be king, and then when he's through being king, i can'tbe king because i'm a girl, so i'll have to be queen. and i can't be anybody's girl, becausei'm going to have to marry somebody i don't know, for reasons of state." she thought somemore, 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 faithfulsubject." "is your majesty absolute ruler of these domains?"

"no," she said disgustedly. "we must at alltimes defer to our royal ministers, just like grandpa has to. that means, i have to do justwhat 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 spacevikings were princes." "well, my king says i am. and i am ruler ofmy 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 bigand strong. i'll bet you've slain just hundreds of cruel and wicked enemies." "thousands, your majesty."

he wished that weren't literally true; hedidn'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 feelbad about it." these children must be telepaths! "a space viking who is also a prince mustdo many things he doesn't want to do." "i know. so does a queen. i hope grandpa andpappa 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 beenhis dinner companion was approaching; she wore a wide sunshade hat, and a gown thattrailed filmy gauze like sunset-colored mist.

there was another woman, in the garb of anupper 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 botheringyou?" lady valerie asked. "oh, far from it." he rose, still holdingthe funny little dog. "but you should say, her majesty. she has informed me that sheis sovereign of three princely domains. and of one dear loving subject." he gave the subjectback to the sovereign. "you should not have told prince trask that,"lady valerie chided. "when your majesty is outside her domains, your majesty must remainincognito. now, your majesty must go with

the minister of the bedchamber; the ministerof education awaits an audience." "arithmetic, i bet. well, good-by, princetrask. i hope i can see you again. say good-by, mopsy." she went away with her nurse, the little doglooking back over her shoulder. "i came out to enjoy the gardens alone," hesaid, "and now i find i'd rather enjoy them in company. if your ministerial duties donot forbid, could you be the company?" "but gladly, prince trask. her majesty willbe occupied with serious affairs of state. square root. have you seen the grottoes? they'redown this way." that afternoon, one of the gentlemen-attendantscaught up with him; baron cragdale would be

gratified if prince trask could find timeto talk with him privately. before they had talked more than a few minutes, however, baroncragdale abruptly became crown prince edvard. "prince trask, admiral shefter tells me thatyou and he are having informal discussions about co-operation against this mutual enemyof ours, dunnan. this is fine; it has my approval, and the approval of prince vandarvant, theprime 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 ofboth." "i'd be inclined to think so, prince edvard.but aren't you proposing marriage on rather short acquaintance? it's only been fifty hourssince the nemesis orbited in here."

"well, we know a bit about you and your planetbeforehand. 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 withnaval intelligence." that would be why andray dunnan was havingno dealings with gilgameshers. it would also be what zaspar makann meant when he rantedabout the gilgamesh interstellar conspiracy. "i can see where an arrangement like thatwould 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 tradebetween marduk and tanith. and beowulf and amaterasu would come into it, too. does thisalso have the approval of the prime minister

and the king?" "goodman mikhyl's in favor of it; there'sa distinction between him and the king, as you'll have noticed. the king can't be infavor of anything till the assembly or the chancellor express an opinion. prince vandarvantfavors it personally; as prime minister, he is reserving his opinion. we'll have to getthe support of the crown loyalist party before he can take an unequivocal position." "well, baron cragdale; speaking as baron traskof traskon, suppose we just work out a rough outline of what this treaty ought to be, andthen consult, unofficially, with a few people whom you can trust, and see what can be doneabout 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 anythingcould be called on marduk. it would alienate the labor vote; they'd think increased importswould threaten employment in mardukan industries. some of the interstellar trading companieswould like a chance at the tanith planets; others would resent tanith ships being givenaccess to theirs. and zaspar makann's party were already shrieking protests about thenemesis being repaired by the royal navy.

and a couple of professors who inclined towardmakann had introduced a resolution calling for the court-martial of prince bentrik andan investigation of the loyalty of admiral shefter. and somebody else, probably a stoogeof makann's, was claiming that bentrik had sold the victrix to the space vikings andthat the films of the battle of audhumla were fakes, photographed in miniature at the navymoon base. admiral shefter, when trask flew in to seehim the next day, was contemptuous about this last. "ignore the whole bloody thing; we get somethinglike that before every general election. on this planet, you can always kick the gilgameshersand the armed forces with impunity, neither

have votes and neither can kick back. thewhole 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. theycan't any of them get along without the navy, and they bloody well know it." trask wanted to know if intelligence had beengetting anything. "not on how dunnan found out the victrix hadbeen ordered to audhumla, no," shefter said. "there wasn't any secrecy about it; at leasta thousand people, from myself down to the shoeshine boys, could have known about itas 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 yearsago, 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 abase on skathi about a hundred or so years ago. naturally, the ship had no papers. tramptrading among the neobarbs, it might be years before you'd put in on a planet where they'dever 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 wasin here twice, according to the commercial shipping records, and the second time shewas 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 boughther and fixed her up a little; they went bankrupt in a year or so, and she was bought by anothersmall 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 mightfind out if anybody there knows anything about

her. you may discover that she hasn't beengoing there at all." "we might, at that," shefter agreed. "we'lljust find out." everybody at cragdale knew about the projectedtreaty with tanith by the morning after trask's first conversation with prince edvard on thesubject. the queen of the royal bedroom, the royal playroom and the royal bathroom wasinsisting that her domains should have a treaty with tanith, too. it was beginning to look to trask as thoughthat would be the only treaty he'd sign on marduk, and he was having his doubts aboutthat. "do you think it would be wise?" he askedlady valerie alvarath. the queen of three

rooms and one four-footed subject had alreadydecreed 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 evidenceof some kind of a sinister plot." "oh, i believe her majesty could sign a treatywith prince trask," her majesty's prime minister decided. "but it would have to be kept verysecret." "gee!" myrna's eyes widened. "a real secrettreaty; just like the wicked rulers of the old dictatorship!" she hugged her subjectecstatically. "i'll bet grandpa doesn't even have any secret treaties!" in a few days, everybody on marduk knew thata treaty with tanith was being discussed.

if they didn't, it was no fault of zasparmakann's party, who seemed to command a disconcertingly large number of telecast stations, and whodrenched the ether with horror stories of space viking atrocities and denunciationsof carefully unnamed traitors surrounding the king and the crown prince who were aboutto 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. atleast, 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 wideparks surrounding it. they were packed almost

solid with people, surging forward towardthe thin cordon of police. the front of the mob looked like a checkerboard—a block incivilian dress, then a block in the curiously effeminate-looking uniforms of zaspar makann'speople's watchmen, then more in ordinary garb, and more people's watchmen. over the headsof the crowds, at intervals, floated small contragravity lifters on which were mountedthe amplifiers that were bellowing: "space vi-king—go home! space vi-king—gohome!" the police stood motionless, at parade rest;the mob surged closer. when they were fifty yards away, the blocks of people's watchmenran forward, then spread out until they formed a line six deep across the entire front; otherblocks, 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. "fire!" he heard himself yelling. "don't letthem get any closer, fire now!" they had nothing to fire with; they had onlytruncheons, no better weapons than the knobbed swagger-sticks of the people's watchmen. theysimply disappeared, after a brief flurry of blows, and the makann storm-troopers continuedtheir advance. and that was that. the gates of the palacewere 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. "theywere murdered by the man who ordered them out there unarmed." "that would be count naydnayr, the ministerof security," somebody said. "then he's the one you want to hang for it." "what else would you have done?" crown princeedvard 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 thesurvivors turned tail and ran. then sent out

more cars, and shot everybody wearing a people'swatchmen 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 maybe the way you do things in the sword-worlds, prince trask. it's not the way we do thingshere on marduk. our government does not propose to be guilty of shedding the blood of itspeople." he had it on the tip of his tongue to retortthat if they didn't, the people would end by shedding theirs. instead, he said softly: "i'm sorry, prince edvard. you had a wonderfulcivilization here on marduk. you could have made almost anything of it. but it's too latenow. you've torn down the gates; the barbarians

are in." xxiii the colored turbulence faded into the grayof 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, andalvyn karffard to the working model of whatever it was he had left unfinished when the nemesishad emerged at the end of the jump from audhumla. trask went to the index of the ship's libraryand 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 ahuman 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 yellowsun of tanith in the middle of the screen, he knew a great deal about hitler, occasionallyreferred to as schicklgruber, and he understood, with sorrow, how the lights of civilizationon marduk were going out. beside the lamia, stripped of her dillinghamsand crammed with heavy armament and detection instruments, the space scourge and the queenflavia were on off-planet watch. there were half a dozen other ships on orbit just aboveatmosphere; 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 thatshe was the sun goddess, amaterasu. that was,

by almost a year, better than he had expectedof 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'tanything to do with traskon, any more. traskon is now the personal property of our well loved—verywell 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 stayedon gram, i'd have helped put angus on the throne, and it would have been about the samein 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'smy planet, now. but i will renounce my allegiance to angus. i can trade on morglay or joyeuseor flamberge just as easily." "you won't have to; you can trade with newhavenand bigglersport. count lionel and duke joris are both defying angus; they've refused tofurnish him men, they've driven out his tax collectors, those they haven't hanged, andthey're building ships of their own. angus is building ships, too. i don't know whetherhe's going to use them to fight bigglersport and newhaven, or attack you, but there's goingto 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 courtof king angus recently. the black star and the queen flavia—whose captain had contemptuouslyignored an order from gram to re-christen her queen evita—had remained. they werehis ships, not king angus'. the captain of the merchantman from wardshaven now on orbitrefused to take a cargo to newhaven; he had been chartered by king angus, and would takeorders from no one else. "all right," trask told him. "this is yourlast voyage here. you bring that ship back under angus of wardshaven's charter and we'llfire on her." then he had the regalia he had worn in hislast audiovisual to angus dusted off. at first, he had decided to proclaim himself king oftanith. lord valpry, baron rathmore and his

cousin all advised against it. "just call yourself prince of tanith," valprysaid. "the title won't make any difference in your authority here, and if you do layclaim to the throne of gram, nobody can say you're a foreign king trying to annex theplanet." he had no intention of doing anything of thekind, but valpry was quite in earnest. so he sat on his throne, as sovereign princeof tanith, and renounced his allegiance to "angus, duke of wardshaven, self-styled kingof gram." they sent it back on the otherwise empty freighter. another copy went to thecount of newhaven, along with a cargo in the sun goddess, the first non-space-viking shipinto gram from the old federation.

seven hundred and fifty hours after the returnof the nemesis, the corisande ii emerged from her last microjump, and immediately harkamanbegan 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 bringingrich 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, occupiedby a character named fedrig barragon. a number of ships operated from it, including a couplecommanded by barragon's half-breed sons. "barragon's ships were raiding one of ourplanets," harkaman said. "ganpat. they looted

a couple of cities, destroyed one, killeda lot of the locals. i found out about it from captain ravallo of the black star, onindra; he'd just been from ganpat. beowulf wasn't too far out of the way, so we put inthere, and found the grendelsbane just ready to space out." the grendelsbane was the secondof beowulf's ships, sister to the viking's gift. "so she joined us, and the three ofus 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'lltell what we did, and why." "that should furnish prince viktor of xochitlsomething to ponder," trask said. "where are the other ships, now?"

"the grendelsbane went back to beowulf; she'llstop at amaterasu to do a little trading on the way. the black star went to xochitl. justa friendly visit, to say hello to prince viktor for you. ravallo has a lot of audiovisualswe made during the dagon operation. then she's going to jagannath to visit nikky gratham." harkaman approved his attitude and actionswith regard to king angus. "we don't need to do business with the sword-worldsat all. we have our own industries, we can produce what we need, and we can trade withbeowulf and amaterasu, and with xochitl and jagannath and hoth, if we can make any sortof 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 regrettedthat for a few seconds, and then shrugged. "our grandchildren, if any, will probablybe raiding marduk." "you think it'll be like that?" "don't you? you were there; you saw what'shappening. the barbarians are rising; they have a leader, and they're uniting. everysociety rests on a barbarian base. the people who don't understand civilization, and wouldn'tlike it if they did. the hitchhikers. the people who create nothing, and who don't appreciatewhat others have created for them, and who think civilization is something that justexists 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 dothey have a government for?" trask nodded. "and now, the hitchhikers thinkthey know more about the car than the people who designed it, so they're going to grabthe controls. zaspar makann says they can, and he's the leader." he poured a drink froma decanter that had been looted on pushan; there was a planet where a republic had beenoverthrown in favor of a dictatorship four centuries ago, and the planetary dictatorshiphad fissioned into a dozen regional dictatorships, and now they were down to the peasant-villageand handcraft-industry level. "i don't understand it, though. i was reading about hitler, onthe 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 beenimpoverished 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 theirresponsibilities for them. what they have on marduk is a ruling class that has beendiscrediting 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, whichthey 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 themselvesbehind democratic safeguards." "we don't have any of this democracy in thesword-worlds, if that's the word for it," he said. "and our ruling class aren't ashamedof their power, and our people aren't hitchhikers, and as long as they get decent treatment theydon't try to run things. and we're not doing so well." the morglay dynastic war of a couple of centuriesago, still sputtering and smoking. the oskarsan-elmersan war on durendal, into which flamberge andnow joyeuse had intruded. and the situation on gram, fast approaching critical mass. harkamannodded agreement. "you know why? our rulers are the barbariansamong us. there isn't one of them—napolyon

of flamberge, rodolf of excalibur, or angusof 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 anothermark of the barbarian." before he had left marduk, admiral shefterhad ordered a ship to gimli to check on the honest horris; a few men and a pinnace wouldbe left behind to contact any ship from tanith. he sent boake valkanhayn off in the spacescourge. lionel of newhaven's blue comet came in fromgram 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 layingclaim to the throne of gram, in the right of his great-grandmother's sister, who hadbeen married to the great-grandfather of duke angus. it was a completely trivial and irrelevantclaim, but the story was that it would be supported by king konrad of haulteclere. immediately, baron rathmore, lord valpry,lothar ffayle and the other gram people began clamoring that he should go back with a fleetand seize the throne for himself. harkaman, valkanhayn, karffard and the other space vikingswere as vehement against it. harkaman had the loss of the other corisande on durendalto remember, and the others wanted no part in sword-world squabbles, and there was renewedagitation that he should start calling himself

king of tanith. he refused to do either, which left both partiesdissatisfied. so partisan politics had finally come to tanith. maybe that was another milestoneof progress. and there was the treaty of khepera, betweenthe 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 studentsto school on all three planets. tanith, beowulf and amaterasu obligated themselves to jointdefense of khepera, to free trade among themselves, and to render one another armed assistance. that was a milestone of progress, and no argumentabout it.

the space scourge returned from gimli, andvalkanhayn 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 ofthem navy intelligence. according to them, the investigation into the activities of thatship 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 questioninghim, he was rescued by the atonian ambassador, who lodged a vehement protest with the mardukanforeign ministry. immediately, the people's welfare party had leaped into the incidentand branded the investigation as an unwarranted

persecution of a national of a friendly powerat the instigation of corrupt tools of the gilgamesh interstellar conspiracy. "so that's it," valkanhayn finished. "it seemsthey'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 beenany more raids on marduk trade-planets since the battle of audhumla?" "a couple. the bolide was on audhumla a whileago. there were a couple of mardukan ships

there, and they had the victrix fixed up enoughto do some fighting. they ran the bolide out." a study of the time between the destructionof the enterprise and yo-yo and the appearance of the bolide could give them a limiting radiusaround audhumla. it did; seven hundred light-years, which also included tanith. so he sent harkaman in the corisande and ravalloin the black star to visit the planets marduk traded with, looking for dunnan ships andexchanging information and assistance with the royal mardukan navy. almost at once, heregretted it; the next gilgamesher into orbit on tanith brought a story that prince viktorwas collecting a fleet on xochitl. he sent warnings off to amaterasu and beowulf andkhepera.

a ship came in from bigglersport, a heavilyarmed chartered freighter. there was sporadic fighting in a dozen places on gram, now—resistanceto efforts on the part of king angus to collect taxes, and raids by unidentified persons onestates confiscated from alleged traitors and given to garvan spasso, who had now beenpromoted from baron to count. and rovard grauffis was dead; poisoned, everybody said, eitherby spasso or queen evita or both. even with the threat from xochitl, some of the formerwardshaven 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 fiftyhours before a mardukan navy ship came in.

they were glad to see me; it saved them sendingoff a pinnace for tanith. they had news for you, and a couple of passengers." "passengers?" "yes. you'll see who they are when they comedown. 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 wasalso present. "i didn't want to leave my husband, and ididn'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?" heasked. "and prince bentrik doesn't want to risk you and steven being used as hostages?" "that's it," she said. "he didn't really winthe election, but he might as well have. nobody has a majority of seats in the chamber ofrepresentatives but he's formed a coalition with several of the splinter parties, andi'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 'waveof the future,' whatever that means."

"if you can't lick them, join them," trasksaid. "if you can't lick them, lick their boots,"the count of ravary put in. "my son is a trifle bitter," princess bentriksaid. "i must confess to a trace of bitterness, too." "well, that's the representatives," trasksaid. "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 andtwenty are his supporters. makann, of course, is chancellor."

"and who is prime minister?" he asked. "andraydunnan?" she looked slightly baffled for an instantthen said, "oh. no. the prime minister is crown prince edvard. no; baron cragdale. thatisn't a royal title, so by some kind of a fiction i can't pretend to understand he isnot prime minister as a member of the royal family." "if you can't ..." the boy started. "steven! i forbid you to say that about ... baroncragdale. he believes, very sincerely, that the election was an expression of the willof the people, and that it is his duty to bow to it."

he wished otto harkaman were there. he couldprobably name, without stopping for breath, a hundred great nations that went down intorubble because their rulers believed that they should bow instead of rule, and couldn'tbring themselves to shed the blood of their people. edvard would have been a fine andadmirable man, as a little country baron. where he was, he was a disaster. he asked if the people's watchman had draggedtheir guns out from under the bed and started carrying them in public yet. "oh, yes. you were quite right; they werearmed, all the time. not just small arms; combat vehicles and heavy weapons. as soonas the new government was formed, they were

given status as a part of the planetary armedforces. they have taken over every police station on the planet." "and the king?" "oh, he carries on, and shrugs and says, 'ijust reign here.' what else can he do? we've been whittling down and filching away thepowers of the throne for the last three centuries." "what is prince bentrik doing, and why didhe think there was danger that you two would be used as hostages?" "he's going to fight," she said. "don't askme how, or what with. maybe as a guerrilla in the mountains, i don't know. but if hecan't lick them, he won't join them. i wanted

to stay with him and help him; he told mei could help him best by placing myself and steven where he wouldn't worry about us." "i wanted to stay," the boy said. "i couldhave 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 youthat once before." he hesitated, then turned again to princess bentrik. "how is littleprincess myrna?" he asked, and then, trying to be casual, added, "and lady valerie?" she seemed so clearly real and present tohim, 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 tanithof prince bentrik's wife and son was pushing caution beyond necessity. admitted that thenews would leak back to marduk via gilgamesh, it was over seven hundred light-years to thelatter and almost a thousand from there to the former. better that princess lucile shouldenjoy rivington society, such as it was, and escape, for a moment now and then, from anxietyabout her husband. at ten—no, almost twelve; it had been a year and a half since traskhad left marduk—the boy count of ravary was more easily diverted. at last, he wasamong real space vikings, on a space viking

planet, and he was trying to be everywhereand see everything at once. no doubt he would be imagining himself a space viking, returningto marduk with a vast armada to rescue his father and the king from zaspar makann. trask was satisfied with that; as a host heleft much to be desired. he had his worries, too, and all of them bore the same name: princeviktor of xochitl. he went over with manfred ravallo everything the captain of the blackstar could tell him. he had talked once with viktor; the lord of xochitl had been coldlypolite and noncommittal. his subordinates had been frankly hostile. there had been fiveships on orbit or landed at viktor's spaceport beside the usual gilgameshers and itineranttraders, two of them viktor's own, and a big

armed freighter had come in from haulteclereas 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 reachxochitl to find it undefended, and then return to find tanith devastated. things like thathad happened in space-war. the only thing to do was sit tight, defend tanith when viktorattacked, and then counterattack if he had any ships left by that time. prince viktorwas 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 thecorisande home. he needed that ship on tanith, and the wits and courage of her commander. more news—gilgamesh sources—came in fromxochitl. there were only two ships, both armed merchantmen, on the planet. prince viktorhad spaced out with the rest an estimated two thousand hours before the story reachedhim. that was twice as long as it would take the xochitl armada to reach tanith. he hadn'tgone to beowulf; that was only sixty-five hours from tanith and they would have heardabout it long ago. or amaterasu, or khepera. how many ships he had was a question; notfewer than five, and possibly more. he could have slipped into the tanith system and hiddenhis ships on one of the outer uninhabitable

planets. he sent valkanhayn and ravallo microjumpingtheir ships from one to another to check. they returned to report in the negative. atleast, viktor of xochitl wasn't camped inside their own system, waiting for them to leavetanith open to attack. but he was somewhere, and up to nothing evenresembling good, and there was no possible way of guessing when his ships would be emergingon tanith. the only thing to do was wait for him. when he did, trask was confident thathe 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 spaceviking ships, among them the damnthing of his friend roger-fan-morvill esthersan, whohad volunteered to stay and help in the defense.

this, of course, was not pure altruism. ifviktor attacked and had his fleet blown to em-see-square, xochitl would lie open andunprotected, and there was enough loot on xochitl to cram everybody's ships. everybody'sships 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'sfrying pan into prince viktor's fire," he began. she laughed at that. "i'll take my chanceson the fire. i seem to see a lot of good firemen around. if there is a battle you will seethat 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 whichship he would serve on when the attack came. "well, you won't be on any ship, count. you'llbe on my staff." two days later, the corisande came out ofhyperspace. harkaman was guardedly noncommittal by screen. trask took a landing craft andwent out to meet the ship. "marduk doesn't like us, any more," harkamantold him. "they have ships on all their trade-planets, and they all have orders to fire on any, repeatany, space vikings, including the ships of the self-styled prince of tanith. i got thisfrom captain garravay of the vindex. after we were through talking, we fought a nicelittle ship-to-ship action for him to make

films of. i don't think anybody could seeanything wrong with it." "this order came from makann?" "from the admiral commanding. he isn't yourfriend shefter; shefter retired on account of quote ill-health unquote. he is now ina quote hospital unquote." "where's prince bentrik?" "nobody knows. charges of high treason werebrought against him, and he just vanished. gone underground, or secretly arrested andexecuted; take your choice." he wondered just what he'd tell princess lucileand count steven. "they have ships on all the planets they tradewith. fourteen of them. that isn't to catch

dunnan. that's to disperse the navy away frommarduk. they don't trust the navy. is prince edvard still prime minister?" "yes, as of garravay's last information. itseems makann is behaving in a scrupulously legal manner, outside of making his people'swatchmen part of the armed forces. protesting his devotion to the king every time he openshis 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 husbandhad 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, afteranother 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 fromamaterasu 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 thatthe attack would come in a matter of hours. it didn't. three thousand hours had passed since thefirst warning had reached tanith, that made five thousand since viktor's ships were supposedto have left xochitl. there were those, boake

valkanhayn among them, who doubted, now, ifhe ever had. "the whole thing's just a big gilgamesherlie," he was declaring. "somebody—nikky gratham, or the everrards, or maybe viktorhimself—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 outthe whole gang," somebody else took up. "anything one of them's in, they're all in together." "nifflheim with that; let's all space outfor 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 coursesof action—what was he, anyhow; sovereign

prince of tanith, or the non-ruling king ofmarduk, or just the chieftain of a disciplineless gang of barbarians? one of the independentsspaced out in disgust. the next day, two others came in, loaded with booty from a raid onbraggi, and decided to stay around for a while and see what happened. and four days after that, a five-hundred-foothyperspace yacht, bearing the daggers and chevrons of bigglersport, came in. as soonas 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 soonas possible," he began, almost stuttering. whatever the urgency of his mission, one wouldhave 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 reasonablysecure. and if it's of the first importance, the sooner you tell me about it...." "prince trask, you must come to gram, withevery 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 landingon wardshaven. he has a fleet of eight ships, furnished to him by his wife's kinsman, theking of haulteclere. they are commanded by

king konrad's space viking cousin, the princeof xochitl." then a look of shocked surprise came intothe face of the man in the screen, and trask wondered why, until he realized that he hadleaned back in his chair and was laughing uproariously. before he could apologize, theman in the screen had found his voice. "i know, prince trask; you have no reasonto 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 confidentialsecretary of the duke of bigglersport the humor of the situation.

there were others at rivington to whom itwas not immediately evident. the professional space vikings, men like valkanhayn and ravalloand 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 taintof the mad baron of blackcliffe, and queen evita and her rapacious family, but even hewas preferable to a murderous villain—some even called him a fiend in human shape—likeomfray of glaspyth. both parties, of course, were positive asto where their prince's duty lay. the former insisted that everything on tanith that couldbe put into hyperspace should be dispatched

at once to xochitl, to haul back from it everythingexcept 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 shouldbe embarked at once on a crusade for the deliverance "you don't want to do either, do you?" harkamanasked him, when they were alone after the second day of acrimony. "nifflheim, no! this crowd that wants an attackon xochitl; you know what would happen if we did that?" harkaman was silent, waitingfor him to continue. "inside a year, four or five of these small planet-holders likegratham and the everrards would combine against us and make a slag-pile out of tanith."

harkaman nodded agreement. "since we warnedhim the first time, viktor's kept his ships away from our planets. if we attacked xochitlnow, without provocation, nobody'd know what to expect from us. people like nikky grathamand 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 valkanhaynand 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'veseen what's been happening on gram since we came out here. otto, the sword-worlds arefinished; they're half decivilized now. civilization

is alive and growing here on tanith. i wantto stay here and help it grow." "look, lucas," harkaman said. "you're princeof 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 theback-to-gram party would go along, or you can decide on this crusade against omfrayof glaspyth and the raid-xochitl-now party would go along. but if you let this go onmuch longer, you won't have any influence over either party." "and then i will be finished. and in a fewyears, tanith will be finished." he rose and paced across the room and back. "well, i won'traid xochitl; i told you why, and you agreed.

and i won't spend the men and ships and wealthof tanith in any sword-world dynastic squabble. great satan, otto; you were in the durendalwar. 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'ti?" he asked. "i'm afraid ravallo and valpry, or even valkanhaynand 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. sucha 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 ofthem, with what we have here. our real enemy is on marduk, not xochitl; his name's zasparmakann. zaspar makann, and andray dunnan, the man i came out from gram to hunt; they'rein alliance, and i believe dunnan is on marduk, himself, now." the delegation who had come out from gramin 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. zasparmakann wasn't even that. and so much had happened

on gram since the murder of elaine karvalland the piracy of the enterprise that they had completely forgotten andray dunnan. thatput them at a disadvantage. all the people whom they were trying to convince, the half-hundredmembers of the new nobility of tanith, spoke a language they didn't understand. they didn'teven understand the proposition, and couldn't argue against it. paytrik morland, who was gram-born and hadbeen 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; hehad made friends with the royal navy officers, and had been shocked to hear that they werenow enemies. manfred ravallo and boake valkanhayn,

among the more articulate of the raid-xochitl-nowparty, 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 broughtprincess bentrik to tanith and heard her stories on the voyage. they began adducing argumentsin support of trask's thesis. of course dunnan and makann were in collusion. who tipped dunnanoff 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? whywas admiral shefter retired as soon as makann got into power? "well, here; we don't know anything aboutthis zaspar makann," the confidential secretary

and spokesman of the duke of bigglersportbegan. "no, you don't," otto harkaman told him. "isuggest you keep quiet and listen, till you find out a little about him." "why, i wouldn't be surprised if dunnan wason marduk all the time we were hunting for him," valkanhayn said. trask began to wonder. what would hitler havedone if he'd told one of his big lies, and then found it turning into the truth? maybemakann had been on marduk.... no; he couldn't have hidden half a dozen ships on a civilizedplanet. not even at the bottom of an ocean. "i wouldn't be surprised," alvyn karffardwas 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 trifletoo big. zaspar makann was six inches shorter than dunnan; there are some things no plasticsurgery 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 weakena case he had completely accepted. "as far as i can find out, nobody even heardof makann till about five years ago. that would be about the time dunnan would havearrived on marduk," he said. by this time, the big room in which they weremeeting had become a babel of voices, everybody

trying to convince everybody else that they'dknown 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'vebuilt up from nothing, and all the time and money we've invested in it, to go back togram and pull your chestnuts out of the fire? gehenna with you! we're staying here and defendingour 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 gilgamesherto transport them to gram, when the big lie

turned into something like the truth. the observation post on the moon of tanithpicked 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 twolight-seconds, and this was detectable by radar and microray as a ship's pinnace. hewondered if something had happened on amaterasu or beowulf; somebody like gratham or the everrardsmight have decided to take advantage of the defensive mobilization on tanith. then theyswitched the call from the pinnace over to his screen, and prince simon bentrik was lookingout of it. "i'm glad to see you! your wife and son arehere, worried about you, but safe and well."

he turned to shout to somebody to find youngcount 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 withme. for all i know, she's queen of marduk, now." he gulped slightly. "prince trask, we'vecome as beggars. we're begging help for our "you've come as honored guests, and you'llget all the help we can give you." he blessed the xochitl invasion scare, and the big liewhich 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 hadstarted even before the election. the people's watchmen had possessed weapons that had beenmade openly and legally on marduk for trade to the neobarbarian planets and then clandestinelydiverted 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-classdistricts of all the cities as pretexts for further terrorization. the election had beena farce of bribery and intimidation. even so, makann's party had failed of a completemajority in the chamber of representatives, and had been compelled to patch up a shadycoalition 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 representativeshave been arrested, on all kinds of ridiculous charges—sex-crimes, receiving bribes, beingin the pay of foreign powers, nothing too absurd. then they rammed through a law empoweringthe chancellor to fill vacancies in the chamber of representatives by appointment." "why did the crown prince lend himself toa 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 pretendloyalty to the king and the crown prince...." "it didn't work; he played right into makann'shands. what happened?"

the crown prince had been assassinated. theassassin, an unknown man believed to be a gilgamesher, had been shot to death by people'swatchmen guarding prince edvard at once. immediately makann had seized the royal palace to protectthe king, and immediately there had been massacres by people's watchmen everywhere. the mardukanplanetary army had ceased to exist; makann's story was that there had been a military plotagainst the king and the government. scattered over the planet in small detachments, thearmy 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, wereyou?" "oh, no," bentrik replied. "i was doing somethingi wouldn't have thought myself capable of,

a few years ago. organizing a mutineeringconspiracy in the royal mardukan navy. after admiral shefter was forcibly retired and shutup in an insane asylum, i disappeared and turned into a civilian contragravity-lifteroperator at the malverton navy yard. finally, when i was suspected, one of the officers—hewas 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 hada mutiny of our own. we killed everybody we even suspected of being a makannist. the moonbasehas been under attack from the planet ever since." there was a stir behind him; turning, he sawprincess bentrik and the boy enter the room.

he rose. "we'll talk about this later. there are somepeople here...." he motioned them forward and turned away,shoo-ing everybody else out of the room. the news was all over rivington, and thenall 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 screenpickups. he met prince bentrik, a little in advance of the others, and managed to whisperto him hastily: "while you're talking to anybody here, alwaysremember that andray dunnan is working with

zaspar makann, and as soon as makann consolidateshis 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 valkanhaynand lothar ffayle and the others were crowding up behind, and more people were coming offthe pinnace, and prince bentrik was trying to embrace both his wife and his son at thesame time. "prince trask." he started at the voice, andwas looking into deep blue eyes under coal-black hair. his pulse gave a sudden jump, and hesaid, "valerie!" and then, "lady alvarath; i'm most happy to see you here." then he sawwho 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 waswhen i was just a play-queen. and now i know what they meant when they talked about whengrandpa and pappa would be through being king. pappa didn't even get to be king!"

something big and warm and soft was tryingto 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 collarand straightened. "lady valerie, will you come with us?" heasked. "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'tknow 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, parrotingthings makann wanted him to say. under hypnosis. that was probably the very least of what theydid to him. they've turned him into a zombi." "well, how did myrna get to moonbase?" "that was lady valerie, as much as anybodyelse. she and sir thomas kobbly, and captain rainer. they armed the servants at cragdalewith hunting rifles and everything else they could scrape up, captured prince edvard'sspace-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 addedfuriously. the pinnace in which they had made the tripto tanith had taken a few hits, too, running

the blockade. not many; her captain had thrownher into hyperspace almost at once. "they sent the yacht off to gimli," bentriksaid. "from there, they'll try to rally as many of the royal navy units as haven't goneover to makann. they're to assemble on gimli and await my return. if i don't return infifteen 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 hundredyears ago, when marduk was fighting a combination

of six other planets. it held out againstcontinuous attack, once, for almost a year. it's been constantly strengthened ever since." "and what have they to throw at it?" harkamanpersisted. "when i left, six ships of the former royalnavy, 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 wonderinghow you'd found out. yes: fortuna, bolide, and two armed merchantmen, a baldurbuilt shipcalled 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 kindof a story, to talk those people out of that crusade against omfray of glaspyth." he leftunmentioned valkanhayn's own insistence on a plundering expedition against xochitl. "nowthat it turns out to be true, i'm not surprised. we decided, long ago, that dunnan was planningto 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 civilizationcan be conquered—by subversion." "yes," harkaman put in. "five years ago, whendunnan started this programme, who was this makann, anyhow?"

"nobody," bentrik said. "a crackpot agitatorin drepplin; he had a coven of fellow-crackpots, who met in the back room of a saloon and hadtheir office in a cigar box. the next year, he had a suite of offices and was buying timeon 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 behindhim, the same way makann moved in behind the king. and dunnan will have him shot the wayhe 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 havethe mardukan navy coming out of hyperspace

on tanith," valkanhayn added. "so we go tomarduk and smash him now, while he's still little enough to smash." there had been a few who had wanted to dothat about hitler, and a great many, later, who had regretted that it hadn't been done. "the nemesis, the corisande, and the spacescourge for sure?" he asked. harkaman and valkanhayn agreed; valkanhaynthought the viking's gift of beowulf would go along, and harkaman was almost sure ofthe 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, butwe don't want them wasted in detail-attacks. tell whoever's in command there that shipsfrom tanith are on the way, and to wait for fifteen hundred hours, less the five hundredbentrik was in space from marduk. he hadn't time to estimate voyage-time to gimli fromthe other mardukan trade-planets, and nobody could estimate how many ships would respond. "it may take us a little time to get an effectivefleet 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 myrnawould have to be taken along; king mikhyl

would be either dead or brainwashed into imbecilityby 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. princebentrik was equally firm, with less success, on leaving his wife and son on tanith. inthe end, it was agreed that the entire mardukan party would space out on the nemesis. the leader of the bigglersport delegationattempted an impassioned tirade about going to the aid of strangers while their own planetwas being enslaved. he was booed down by everybody else and informed that tanith was being defendedwhere a planet ought to be, on somebody else's real estate. when the bigglersporters emergedfrom the meeting, they found that their own

space-yacht had been commandeered and sentoff to amaterasu and beowulf for assistance, that the regiment of local infantry they hadenlisted from the king of tradetown had been taken over by the rivington authorities, andthat the gilgamesh freighter they had chartered to transport them to gram would now take themto marduk. the problem broke into two halves: the purelynaval 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 wipingout makann's supporters and restoring the mardukan monarchy. a great many of the peopleof marduk would be glad of a chance to turn on makann, once they had arms and were properlysupported. combat weapons were almost unknown

among the people, however, and even sportingarms uncommon. all the small arms and light artillery and auto-weapons available weregathered up. the grendelsbane came in from beowulf, andthe sun goddess from amaterasu. three independent space viking ships were still in orbit ontanith; they joined the expedition. there would be trouble with them on marduk; they'dwant to loot. let the mardukans worry about that. they could charge it off as part ofthe price for letting zaspar makann get into power in the first place. there were twelve spacecraft in line outsidethe 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 karffardsaid as much while they were checking the formation by screen. "it isn't a space viking fleet," prince bentrikdiffered. "there are only three space vikings in it. the rest are the ships of three civilizedplanets. tanith, beowulf and amaterasu." karffard was surprised. "you mean we're civilizedplanets? like marduk, or baldur or odin, or...?" "well, aren't you?" trask smiled. he'd begun to suspect somethingof the sort a couple of years ago. he hadn't really been sure until now. his most juniorstaff officer, count steven of ravary, didn't seem to appreciate the compliment.

"we are space vikings!" he insisted. "andwe 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 civilizedand who isn't?" guatt kirbey asked. "then give the signal. all the other ships are readyto jump." trask pressed the button on the desk in frontof 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 shovedit in. four hundred and fifty hours, in the privateuniverse that was the nemesis; outside, nothing

else existed, and inside there was nothingto 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 beforelong he found that there was nothing exciting going on; it was just a spaceship, and he'dbeen on ships before. her highness the crown princess, or maybe her majesty the queen ofmarduk, stopped being excited about the same time, and she and steven and mopsy playedtogether. of course, myrna was only a girl, and two years younger than steven, but shewas, 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 beingshot at without being able to shoot back an

action, and relentless ravary, the interstellarterror, 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 thomaskobbly fancied himself as a landscape-painter and spent most of his time arguing techniqueswith vann larch, and steven's tutor, captain rainer was a normal-space astrogator and founda kindred spirit in sharll renner. this left lady valerie alvarath at a loose end. therewere 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 approachedhim, during the cocktail hour before dinner,

some hundred hours short of emergence. "we think we've figured out where dunnan'sbase is," renner said. "oh, good!" everybody else had, on a differentplanet. "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, planetof the marduk system." he said it disgustedly. "yes; remember how you had boake and manfredout with their ships, checking our outside planets to see if prince viktor might be hidingon one of them? well, what with the time element, and the way the honest horris was shuttlingback and forth from marduk to some place that wasn't gimli, and the way dunnan was ableto bring his ships in as soon as the shooting

started on marduk, we thought he must be onan 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 halfbillion miles from primary. it's frozen solid. it would take almost a year to get to it onabbot drive, and if your ship has dillinghams, why not take a little longer and go to a goodplanet? 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 guattkirbey, the ship's pessimist, could find no objection to it. trask and bentrik began atonce making battle plans. karffard wondered if they hadn't better wait till they got togimli 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?" captainrainer 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 wheni 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 aprisoner, 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 withfleet admiral bargham. commodores didn't give orders to fleet admirals. well, maybe regentsdid, but who gave prince bentrik authority to call himself regent? regents were electedby the chamber of delegates, on nomination of the chancellor. "that's zaspar makann and his stooges you'retalking about?" bentrik laughed.

"well, the constitution...." he thought betterof 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 thereare going to be many more elections, at least for the present. not till we make sure thepeople of marduk can be trusted with the control of the government." "well, the pinnace from moonbase reportedthat there were six royal navy battleships and four other craft attacking them," barghamobjected. "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, fifteenand one gilgamesher we're using for a troopship. i think that's enough. you'll remain hereon gimli, in any case, admiral; as soon as the other ships come in, you'll follow tomarduk with them. i am now holding a meeting aboard the tanith flagship nemesis. i wantyour four ship-commanders aboard immediately. i am not including you because you're remaininghere to bring up the late comers and as soon as this meeting is over we are spacing out." actually, they spaced out sooner; the meetinglasted the whole three hundred and fifty hours to abaddon. a ship's captain, if he has agood exec, as all of them had, needs only

sit at his command-desk and look importantwhile the ship is going into and emerging from a long jump; the rest of the time hecan study ancient history or whatever his shipboard hobby is. rather than waste threehundred and fifty hours of precious time, each captain turned his ship over to his execand remained aboard the nemesis; even on so spacious a craft the officers' country northof the engine rooms was crowded like a tourist hotel in mid-season. one of the four mardukanswas the captain garravay who had smuggled bentrik's wife and son off marduk, and theother 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 remainedin his command after zaspar makann came to

power. so, as soon as they spaced out, there wasa 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 andthe other in dim twilight from the little speck of a sun three and a half billion milesaway, jagged mountains rising out of the snow that covered it from pole to pole. the snowon top would be frozen co2; according to the thermocouples, the surface temperature waswell below minus-100 centigrade. no ships on orbit circled it; there was a little faintradiation, which could have been from naturally

radioactive minerals; there was no electricaldischarge detectable. there was considerable bad language in thecommand room of the nemesis. the captains of the other ships were screening in, wantingto know what to do. "go on in," trask told them. "englobe theplanet, and go down to within a mile if necessary. they could be hiding somewhere on it." "well, they're not hiding at the bottom ofany ocean, that's for sure," somebody said. it was one of those feeble jokes at whicheverybody 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 sortthat would come from a closed-down nuclear power plant. then a modicum of electricaldischarge. finally the telescopic screens picked up the spaceport, a huge oval amphitheaterexcavated out of a valley between two jagged mountain ranges. the language in the command room was justas bad, but the tone had changed. it was surprising what a wide range of emotions could be expressedby a few simple blasphemies and obscenities. everybody who had been deriding sharll rennerwere now acclaiming him. but it was lifeless. the ships came crowdingin; air-locked landing-craft full of space-armored ground-fighters went down. screens in thecommand room lit as they transmitted in views.

depressions in the carbon-dioxide snow wherethe hundred-foot pad-feet of ships' landing-legs had pressed down. ranks of cargo-lightersthat 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—hadconstructed this base. andray dunnan. they found his badge, the crescent,blue on black, on things. they found equipment that harkaman recognized as having been partof the original cargo stolen with the enterprise. they even found, in his living quarters, ablown-up photoprint picture of nevil ormm, draped in black. but what they did not findwas a single vehicle small enough to be taken

aboard a ship, or a single scrap of combatequipment, not even a pistol or a hand grenade. dunnan had gone, but they knew whither, andwhere to find him. the conquest of marduk had moved into its final phase. marduk was on the other side of the sun fromabaddon with ninety-five million miles—close, but not inconveniently so, trask thought—tospare. 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 themoon of marduk, which was plainly visible in the telescopic screen. they came out withina light-second and a half, which kirbey admitted was reasonably close. as soon as the screenscleared, they saw that they weren't too late.

the moon of marduk was under fire and firingback. they'd have detection, and he knew what theywere detecting—a clump of sixteen rending distortions of the fabric of space-time, assixteen ships came into sudden existence in the normal continuum. beside him, bentrikhad 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 startagain, when the screen flickered. the man who appeared in it wore the insignia of amardukan navy commodore. he needed a shave,

but he was grinning happily. bentrik greetedhim 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 stillalive?" the grin slid off the commodore's face, startingwith his eyes. "we don't know. at first, makann had him speakingby screen—you know what it was like—urging everybody to obey and co-operate with 'ourtrusted chancellor.' makann always appeared on the screen with him." bentrik nodded. "i remember." "before you left, makann kept quiet, and letthe king make the speech. after a while, the

king wasn't able to speak coherently; he'dstammer, and repeat. so then makann did all the talking; they couldn't even depend onhim to parrot what they were giving him with an earplug phone. then he stopped appearingentirely. i suppose there were physical symptoms they couldn't allow to be seen." bentrik wascursing horribly under his breath; the officer at moonbase nodded. "i hope for his sake thathe is dead." poor goodman mikhyl. bentrik was saying, "sodo i." trask agreed, mentally. the commodore at moonbase was still talking: "we got two more renegade rmn ships, withina 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 navalbase, but we've knocked out a good deal of that. we got the honest horris. they madetwo attempts to land on us and lost a couple of ships. eight hundred hours ago, they werejoined by the rest of dunnan's fleet, five ships. they made a landing on malverton whileit was turned away from us. makann announced that they were rmn units from the trade-planetsthat had joined him. i suppose the planet-side public swallowed that. he also announced thattheir commander, admiral dunnan, was in command of the people's armed forces." dunnan's ground-fighters would be in controlof malverton. by now, the odds were that makann was as much his prisoner as king mikhyl viiihad been makann's.

"so dunnan has conquered marduk. all he hasto do, now, is make it stick," he said. "i see four ships off moonbase; how many morehave they?" "these are bolide and eclipse, dunnan's ships,and former royal mardukan navy ships champion and guardian. there are five orbiting offthe 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 brokeorbit and started toward the relieving fleet; one took a hit from a moonbase missile, whichstaggered her but did no evident damage. two ships which had been orbiting the planet alsochanged course and started out. the command

room was silent except for a subdued chucklingfrom 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 themcatch up. he wanted to be able to engage the four from off the satellite before the fivefrom the planet joined them, but karffard's computers said it couldn't be done. "all right, we have to take all our bad eggsin one basket," he said. "try to hit them as soon after they join as possible." the computers began chuckling again. the serving-robotswere 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 officergoing into his first space battle, more scared and at the same time happier than he had everbeen in his short life. captain garravay of the vindex was making signal to the otherships 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 madea quick sealed-beam call to harkaman to be prepared to plug any holes they left in formationif they broke away in search of vengeance. he also ordered the black star and the sungoddess 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 wasscreaming into a phone to somebody to get

more speed. at a thousand miles, the missiles startedgoing out, and the two groups of ships, four and five, were equidistant from each otherand from the allied fleet, at the points of a triangle that was growing smaller by thesecond. the first fire-globes of intercepted missiles spread from their seeds of briefwhite light. a red light flashed on the damage-board. an enemy ship took a hit. the captain of thequeen flavia was on a screen, saying that his ship was heavily damaged. three shipsbearing the mardukan dragon-and-planet circled madly around each other at what looked, inthe screen, like just over pistol-range, two of them firing into the third, which was replyingdesperately. the third one blew up, and somebody

was yelling out of a screenspeaker, "scratchone traitor!" another ship blew up somewhere, and then another.he heard somebody say, "there went one of ours," and wondered which one it was. notthe corisande, he hoped; no, it wasn't, he could see her rushing after two other shipswhich 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 ofgyrating, fire-spitting ships that went rolling toward the planet, which was swinging in andout of the main viewscreen and growing rapidly larger. by the time they were down to theinner edge of the exosphere, the ball had

started to unwind, ship after ship droppingout 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 approachingcorisande, 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 beenmonitoring 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 eachother and parried with counter-missiles, and then, quite unexpectedly, the starhopper wentto em-see-square. there was an awful lot of em being convertedto ee off marduk, today. including manfred ravallo; that grieved him. manfred was a goodman, and a good friend. he had a girl in rivington.... nifflheim, there were eight hundred good menaboard 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 notbeing a usual cause of death among space vikings,

wasn't it? then he remembered that gompertz of the grendelsbanewas trying to get him. he told young count steven to switch him over. "we just lost one of our mardukans," gompertztold him, in his staccato beowulf accent. "i think she was the challenger. the shipthat got her looks like the banshee; i'm turning to engage her." "which way; west around the planet? be rightwith you, captain." xxvii it was like finishing a word puzzle. you sitstaring at it, looking for more spaces to

print letters into, and suddenly you realizethat 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 andfading, no more missiles coming, no more enemy ships to throw missiles at. now it was timeto 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—thethree independent space vikings, harpy, curse

of cagn, and roger-fan-morvill esthersan'sdamnthing. prince bentrik frowned over that. "i can'tthink that all three of those ships would have been destroyed, without anybody seeingit happen." "neither can i. but i can think that all thoseships broke out of the battle together and headed in for the planet. they didn't comehere to help liberate marduk, they came here to fill their cargo holds. i only hope thepeople they're robbing all voted the makann ticket in the last election." a crumb of comfortoccurred to him, and he passed it on. "the only people who are armed to resist them willbe 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 princeedvard," he said. "he didn't want bloodshed, either, and look whose blood was shed. ifthey're doing what you think they are, i'm afraid we'll have to kill a few of your spacevikings, too." "they aren't my space vikings." he was a littlesurprised to find that, after almost eight years of bearing the name himself, he wasusing it as an other-people label. well, why not? he was the ruler of the civilized planetof tanith, wasn't he? "but let's not start fighting them till the main war's over. thosethree 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 tapedon the voyage from gimli. the prince-protector simon bentrik spoke: the illegal rule of thetraitor makann was ended. his deluded followers were advised to return to their allegianceto the crown. the people's watchmen were ordered to surrender their arms and disband; in localitieswhere they refused, the loyal people were called upon to co-operate with the legitimatearmed forces of the crown in exterminating them, and would be furnished arms as soonas possible. little princess myrna spoke: "if my grandfatheris still alive, he is your king; if he is not, i am your queen, and until i am old enoughto rule in my own right, i accept prince simon

as regent and protector of the realm, andi call on all of you to obey him as i will." "you didn't say anything about representativegovernment, or democracy, or the constitution," trask mentioned. "and i noticed the use ofthe word 'rule,' instead of 'reign.'" "that's right," the self-proclaimed prince-protectorsaid. "there's something wrong with democracy. if there weren't, it couldn't be overthrownby people like makann, attacking it from within by democratic procedures. i don't think it'sfundamentally unworkable. i think it just has a few of what engineers call bugs. it'snot safe to run a defective machine till you learn the defects and remedy them." "well, i hope you don't think our sword-worldfeudalism doesn't have bugs." he gave examples,

and then quoted otto harkaman about barbarismspreading downward from the top instead of upward from the bottom. "it may just be," he added, "that there issomething fundamentally unworkable about government itself. as long as homo sapiens terra is awild animal, which he has always been and always will be until he evolves into somethingdifferent in a million or so years, maybe a workable system of government is a politicalscience impossibility, just as transmutation of elements was a physical-science impossibilityas long as they tried to do it by chemical means." "then we'll just have to make it work thebest 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 asthey 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 slaggedby 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 spacevikings. the royal palace was the center of one of half a dozen swirls of battle thathad condensed out of the general skirmishing. paytrik morland started for it with the firstwave of ground-fighters from the nemesis. the gilgamesh freighter, like most of herilk, had huge cargo ports all around; these

began opening and disgorging a swarm of everythingfrom landing-craft and hundred-foot airboats to one man air-cavalry single-mounts. thetop landing-stages and terraces of the palace were almost obscured by the flashes of auto-cannonshells and the smoke and dust of projectiles. then the first vehicles landed, the firingfrom the air stopped, and men fanned out as skirmishers, occasionally firing with smallarms. trask and bentrik were in the armory off thevehicle-bay, putting on combat equipment, when the twelve-year-old count of ravary joinedthem and began rummaging for weapons and a helmet. "you're not going," his father told him. "i'llhave enough to worry about taking care of

myself...." that was the wrong approach. trask interrupted: "you're to stay aboard, count," he said. "assoon as things stabilize, princess myrna will have to come down. you'll act as her personalescort. 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 thefoundation of your naval career. there isn't a young officer in the royal navy who wouldn'ttrade 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 stoppedfor a moment, to play with an idea that had just struck him. "you know, the girl willbe queen in a few years, if she isn't now. queens need prince consorts. your son's agood 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 "oh, that's out of the question. not the matterof consanguinity, they're about a sixteenth cousin. but people would say i was abusingthe protectorship to marry my son onto the throne." "simon, speaking as one sovereign prince toanother, you have a lot to learn. you've learned one important lesson already, that a rulermust 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 helmetup and down experimentally, checked the chambers of his pistol and carbine. "all that matters to me is the peace and well-beingof marduk. i'll have to talk it over with ... with my only judge. well, let's go." the top terraces were secure when their carlanded. more vehicles were coming down and discharging men; a swarm of landing craftwere sinking past the building toward the

ground two thousand feet below. auto-weaponsand 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 heavyfire from below, at the limit of the advance, and then turned into a broad hallway, floatinghigh enough to clear the heads of the men on foot. it looked like the part of the palacewhere he had lodged when he had been a guest there but it probably wasn't. they came to hastily constructed barricadesof furniture and statuary and furnishings, behind which makann's people's watchmen andandray dunnan's space vikings were making resistance. they entered rooms dusty withpowdered plaster and acrid with powder fumes,

littered with corpses. they passed lifter-skidsbeing towed out with wounded. they went through rooms crowded with their own men—"keep yourfingers off things; this isn't a looting expedition!" "you stupid cretin, how did you know therewasn'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 polyencephalographicveridicators, sturdy chairs with wires and adjustable helmets and translucent globesmounted over them. a couple of morland's men were hustling a people's watchman to one andstrapping him into a chair. "you know what this is, don't you?" one ofthem was saying. "this is a veridicator. that globe'll light blue; the moment you try tolie to us, it'll turn red. and the moment

it turns red, i'm going to hammer your teethdown 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 sofar knows anything later than a month ago about him. he just disappeared." he was goingto say something else, saw bentrik's face, and changed his mind. "he's dead," bentrik said dully. "they torturedhim and brainwashed him and used him as a ventriloquist's dummy on the screen as longas they could; when they couldn't let the people see him any more, they stuffed himinto 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 hisfanatical followers had barricaded themselves in the throne room and died trying to defendit. they found makann on the throne, the top of his head blown away, a pistol death-grippedin his hand, and the great crown lying on the floor, the velvet inner cap bullet-piercedand splattered with blood and brain tissue. prince bentrik picked it up and looked atit 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 severalcorpses that had to be dragged out, the ministerial council room was intact. they set up headquartersthere. boake valkanhayn and several other

ship-captains joined them. there was fightinggoing on in several places inside the palace, and the city was still in a turmoil. somebodymanaged to get in touch with the captains of the damnthing, the harpy and the curseof cagn and bring them to the palace. trask attempted to reason with them, to no avail. "prince trask, you're my friend, and you'vealways dealt fairly with me," roger-fan-morvill esthersan said. "but you know just how farany space viking captain can control his crew. these men didn't come here to correct thepolitical mistakes of marduk. they came here for what they could haul away. i could getmyself killed trying to stop them now...." "i wouldn't even try," the captain of thecurse 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 captainof the harpy. "you'll find it even harder than what you're doing now." trask looked at some of the reports that hadcome in from elsewhere on the planet. harkaman had landed on one of the big cities to theeast, and the people had risen against makann's local bosses and were helping wipe out thepeople's watchmen with arms they had been furnished. valkanhayn's exec had landed ona large concentration camp where close to ten thousand of makann's political enemieshad 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 therehad risen in support of the makann regime, and he wanted authorization to use nuclearweapons against them. "could you talk your people into going tosome other city?" trask asked. "we have a city for you; big industrial center. it oughtto 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 anythingyou 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 armyof tanith men—brought in the old woman, dirty, in rags, almost exhausted. "she wants to talk to prince bentrik; won'ttalk 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 crownprincess melanie and i ... i'm sorry, your highness; dowager crown princess ... havebeen taking care of him, the best way we could. if you'll only come quickly...." mikhyl viii, planetary king of marduk, layon a pallet of filthy bedding on the floor

of a narrow room behind a mass-energy converterwhich disposed of the rubbish and sewage and generated power for some of the fixed equipmenton 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. thecrown 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 oftanith!" she cried. "just hurry; get him out of here and to where he can be taken careof. please." then she sat down again on the floor and fell over, unconscious.

they couldn't get the story. the princessmelanie had collapsed completely. her companion, another noblewoman of the court, could onlyramble disconnectedly. and the king merely lay, bathed and fed in a clean bed, and lookedup 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-bornbaby. we can keep him alive, i don't know how long. that's our professional duty. butit's no kindness to his majesty." the little pockets of resistance in the palacewere wiped out, through the next morning and afternoon. all but one, far underground, belowthe main power plant. they tried sleep-gas; the defenders had blowers and sent it backat them. they tried blasting; there was a

limit to what the fabric of the building wouldstand. and nobody knew how long it would take to starve them out. on the third day, a man crawled out, pushinga white shirt tied to the barrel of a carbine ahead of him. "is prince lucas trask of tanith here?" heasked. "i won't speak to anybody else." they brought trask quickly. all that was visibleof 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 overto you, will you let us go?" "if you all come out unarmed, and bring dunnanwith you, i promise you, the rest of you will be let outside this building and allowed togo 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. somewore the uniforms of high officers of the people's watchmen or of people's welfare partyfunctionaries; a few wore the heavily braided short jackets of space viking officers. amongthem, they propelled a thin-faced man with a pointed beard, and trask had to look twiceat him before he recognized the face of andray

dunnan. it looked more like the face of dukeangus of wardshaven as he last remembered it. dunnan looked at him in incurious contempt. "your dotard king couldn't rule without zasparmakann, and makann couldn't rule without me, and neither can you," he said. "shoot thisgang 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 namebefore," he said. "stand away from behind him, you people." "oh, yes; the poor fool who thought he wasgoing 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'seyes widened in momentary incredulity; then his knees gave way, and he fell forward onhis face. trask thumbed on the safety and holstered the pistol, and looked at the bodyon the concrete. it hadn't made the least difference. it hadbeen like shooting a snake, or one of the nasty scorpion-things that infested the oldbuildings in rivington. just no more andray dunnan. "take that carrion and stuff it in a mass-energyconverter," he said. "and i don't want anybody to mention the name of andray dunnan to meagain."

he didn't look at them haul dunnan's bodyaway on a lifter-skid; he watched the fifty-odd leaders of the overthrown misgovernment ofmarduk shamble away to freedom, guarded by paytrik morland's riflemen. now there wassomething to reproach himself for; he'd committed a separate and distinct crime against mardukby letting each one of them live. unless recognized and killed by somebody outside, every oneof them would be at some villainy before next sunrise. well, king simon i could cope withthat. he started when he realized how he had thoughtof his friend. well, why not? mikhyl's mind was dead; his body would not survive it morethan 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 bymarrying steven and myrna. myrna had accepted, at eight, that she must some day marry forreasons 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 adjustto 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; justexpose 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, theidea of a league of civilized worlds began to take shape in his mind.

be a good idea if he adopted the title ofking of tanith for himself. and cut loose from the sword-worlds; especially cut loosefrom gram. let viktor of xochitl have it. or garvan spasso. viktor wouldn't be the lastspace viking to take his ships back against the sword-worlds. sooner or later, civilizationin the old federation would drive them all home to loot the planets that had sent themout. well, if he was going to be a king, shouldn'the have a queen? kings usually did. he climbed into the little hall-car and started up along 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 wouldnever return. good-by, elaine.

Thus articles standard furniture windsor

A few standard furniture windsor, hopefully can provide benefits to all of you. Okay, so this time the post furniture stands..

You're reading an article standard furniture windsor and this article is a url permalink https://furniturestands.blogspot.com/2018/05/standard-furniture-windsor.html Hopefully this article This could be useful.

Tweet