VIII
He glanced quickly at the showback over the screen, to assurehimself that his face was not betraying him. Beside him, OttoHarkaman was laughing.
"Why, Captain Valkanhayn; this is an unexpected pleasure. That'sthe _Space Scourge_ you're in, I take it? What are you doing hereon Tanith?"
A voice from one of the speakers shouted that a second ship hadbeen detected coming over the north pole. The dark-faced man inthe screen smirked quite complacently.
"That's Garvan Spasso, in the _Lamia_," he said. "And what we'redoing here, we've taken this planet over. We intend keeping it, too."
"Well! So you and Garvan have teamed up. You two were just made forone another. And you have a little planet, all your very own. I'm sohappy for both of you. What are you getting out of it--beside poultry?"
The other's self-assurance started to slip. He slapped it back into place.
"Don't kid me; we know why you're here. Well, we got here first.Tanith is our planet. You think you can take it away from us?"
"I know we could, and so do you," Harkaman told him. "We outgun youand Spasso together; why, a couple of our pinnaces could knock the_Lamia_ apart. The only question is, do we want to bother?"
By now, he had recovered from his surprise, but not from hisdisappointment. If this fellow thought the _Nemesis_ was the_Enterprise_--Before he could check himself, he had finishedthe thought aloud.
"Then the _Enterprise_ didn't come here at all!"
The man in the screen started. "Isn't that the _Enterprise_ you're in?"
"Oh, no. Pardon my remissness, Captain Valkanhayn," Harkamanapologized. "This is the _Nemesis_. The gentleman with me, LordLucas Trask, is owner-aboard, for whom I am commanding. Lord Trask,Captain Boake Valkanhayn, of the _Space Scourge_. Captain Valkanhaynis a Space Viking." He said that as though expecting it to bedisputed. "So, I am told, is his associate, Captain Spasso, whoseship is approaching. You mean to tell me that the _Enterprise_hasn't been here?"
Valkanhayn was puzzled, slightly apprehensive.
"You mean the Duke of Wardshaven has two ships?"
"As far as I know, the Duke of Wardshaven hasn't any ships,"Harkaman replied. "This ship is the property and private adventureof Lord Trask. The _Enterprise_, for which we are looking, is ownedand commanded by one Andray Dunnan."
The man with the scarred face and hairy chest had picked up his cigarand was puffing on it mechanically. Now he took it out of his mouthas though he wondered how it had gotten there in the first place.
"But isn't the Duke of Wardshaven sending a ship here to establisha base? That was what we'd heard. We heard you'd gone from Flambergeto Gram to command for him."
"Where did you hear this? And when?"
"On Hoth. That'd be about two thousand hours ago; a Gilgamesherbrought the news from Xochitl."
"Well, considering it was fifth or sixth hand, your information wasgood 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 clucked sadly at that.
"Pity you wasted all that time. Well, it was nice talking to you,Boake. Say hello to Garvan for me when he comes up."
"You mean you're not staying?" Valkanhayn was horrified, an oddreaction for a man who had just been expecting a bitter battleto drive them away. "You're just spacing right out again?"
Harkaman shrugged. "Do we want to waste time here, Lord Trask? The_Enterprise_ has obviously gone somewhere else. She was still inhyperspace when Captain Valkanhayn and his accomplice arrived here."
"Is there anything worth staying for?" That seemed to be the replyHarkaman was expecting. "Beside poultry, that is?"
Harkaman shook his head. "This is Captain Valkanhayn's planet; hisand Captain Spasso's. Let them be stuck with it."
"But, look; this is a good planet. There's a big local city, maybeten or twenty thousand people; temples and palaces and everything.Then, there are a couple of old Federation cities. The one we're atis in good shape, and there's a big spaceport. We've been doinga lot of work on it. And the locals won't give you any trouble.All they have is spears and a few crossbows and matchlocks--"
"I know. I've been here."
"Well, couldn't we make some kind of a deal?" Valkanhayn asked.A mendicant whine was beginning to creep into his voice. "I canget Garvan on screen and switch him over to your ship--"
"Well, we have a lot of Sword-World merchandise aboard," Harkamansaid. "We could make you good prices on some of it. How are youfixed for robotic equipment?"
"But aren't you going to stay here?" Valkanhayn was almost in apanic. "Listen, suppose I talk to Garvan, and we all get togetheron this. Just excuse me for a minute--"
As soon as he had blanked out, Harkaman threw back his head andguffawed 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 came here on a fools' errand."
"I'm sorry, Lucas." Harkaman was still shaking with mirth. "I knowit's a letdown, but that pair of chiseling chicken thieves! I couldalmost pity them, if it weren't so funny." He laughed again. "Youknow what their idea was?"
Trask shook his head. "Who are they?"
"What I called them, a couple of chicken thieves. They raid planetslike Set and Hertha and Melkarth, where the locals haven't anythingto fight with--or anything worth fighting for. I didn't know they'dteamed up, but that figures. Nobody else would team up with eitherof them. What must have happened, this story of Duke Angus' Tanithadventure must have filtered out to them, and they thought that ifthey got here first, I'd think it was cheaper to take them in thanrun them out. I probably would have, too. They do have ships, of asort, and they do raid, after a fashion. But now, there isn't goingto 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 no equipment, and they haveno men. Not for a job like that. The only thing they can do is spaceout and forget it."
"We could sell them equipment."
"We could if they had anything to use for money. They haven't. Onething, we do want to let down and give the men a chance to walk onground and look at a sky for a while. The girls here aren't too bad,either," Harkaman said. "As I remember, some of them even take abath, now and then."
"That's the kind of news of Dunnan we're going to get. By the timewe'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 givethe men a chance to get off the ship, here. We can stall this pairalong for a while and we won't have any trouble with them."
* * * * *
The three ships were slowly converging toward a point fifteenthousand miles off-planet and over the sunset line. The _SpaceScourge_ bore the device of a mailed fist clutching a comet by thehead; it looked more like a whisk broom than a scourge. The _Lamia_bore a coiled snake with the head, arms and bust of a woman.Valkanhayn and Spasso were taking their time about screening back,and he began to wonder if they weren't maneuvering the _Nemesis_into a cross-fire position. He mentioned this to Harkaman and AlvynKarffard; they both laughed.
"Just holding ship's meetings," Karffard said. "They'll be yakkingback and forth for a couple of hours, yet."
"Yes; Valkanhayn and Spasso don't own their ships," Harkamanexplained. "They've gone in debt to their crews for supplies andmaintenance till everybody owns everything in common. The shipslook like it, too. They don't even command, really; they justpreside over elected command-councils."
Finally, they had both of the more or less commanders on screen.Valkanhayn had zipped up his shirt and put on a jacket. GarvanSpasso was a small man, partly bald. His eyes were a shade too closetogether, and his thin mouth had a bitterly crafty twist. He beganspeaking at once:
"Captain, Boake tells me you say you're not here in the service ofthe Duke
of Wardshaven at all." He said it aggrievedly.
"That's correct," Harkaman said. "We came here because Lord Traskthought 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 any difficulty about our letting down and givingour men a couple of hundred hours' liberty. They've been inhyperspace for three thousand hours."
"See!" Spasso clamored. "He wants to trick us into letting him land--"
"Captain Spasso," Trask cut in. "Will you please stop insultingeverybody's intelligence, your own included." Spasso glared at him,belligerently but hopefully. "I understand what you thought you weregoing to do here. You expected Captain Harkaman here to establish abase for the Duke of Wardshaven, and you thought, if you were hereahead of him and in a posture of defense, that he'd take you intothe Duke's service rather than waste ammunition and risk damage andcasualties wiping you out. Well, I'm very sorry, gentlemen. CaptainHarkaman is in my service, and I'm not in the least interested inestablishing a base on Tanith."
Valkanhayn and Spasso looked at each other. At least, in the twoside-by-side screens, their eyes shifted, each to the other's screenon his own ship.
"I get it!" Spasso cried suddenly. "There's two ships, the_Enterprise_ and this one. The Duke of Wardshaven fitted out the_Enterprise_, and somebody else fitted out this one. They both wantto put in a base here!"
That opened a glorious vista. Instead of merely capitalizing ontheir nuisance-value, they might find themselves holding the balanceof power in a struggle for the planet. All sorts of profitableperfidies were possible.
"Why, sure you can land, Otto," Valkanhayn said. "I know what it'slike to be three thousand hours in hyper, myself."
"You're at this old city with the two tall tower-buildings, aren'tyou?" Harkaman asked. He looked up at the viewscreen. "Ought to beabout midnight there now. How's the spaceport? When I was here, itwas pretty bad."
"Oh, we've been fixing it up. We got a big gang of locals working for us--"
* * * * *
The city was familiar, from Otto Harkaman's descriptions and fromthe pictures Vann Larch had painted during the long jump from Gram.As they came in, it looked impressive, spreading for miles aroundthe twin buildings that spired almost three thousand feet above it,with a great spaceport like an eight-pointed star at one side.Whoever had built it, in the sunset splendor of the old TerranFederation, must have done so confident that it would become themetropolis of a populous and prospering world. Then the sun of theFederation had gone down. Nobody knew what had happened on Tanithafter that, but evidently none of it had been good.
At first, the two towers seemed as sound as when they had beenbuilt; gradually it became apparent that one was broken at the top.For the most part, the smaller buildings scattered widely aroundthem were standing, though here and there mounds of brush-grownrubble showed where some had fallen in. The spaceport looked good--acentral octagon mass of buildings, the landing-berths, and, beyond,the triangular areas of airship docks and warehouses. The centralbuilding was outwardly intact, and the ship-berths seemed clear ofwreckage and rubble.
By the time the _Nemesis_ was following the _Space Scourge_ and the_Lamia_ down, towed by her own pinnaces, the illusion that they wereapproaching a living city had vanished. The interspaces between thebuildings were choked with forest-growth, broken by a few smallfields and garden-plots. At one time, there had been three of thehigh buildings, literally vertical cities in themselves. Where thethird had stood was a glazed crater, with a ridge of fallen rubblelying away from it. Somebody must have landed a medium missile,about twenty kilotons, against its base. Something of the same sorthad scored on the far edge of the spaceport, and one of the eightarrowheads of docks and warehouses was an indistinguishable slag-pile.
The rest of the city seemed to have died of neglect rather thanviolence. It certainly hadn't been bombed out. Harkaman thought mostof the fighting had been done with subneutron bombs or Omega-raybombs, that killed the people without damaging the real estate. Orbio-weapons; a man-made plague that had gotten out of control andall but depopulated the planet.
"It takes an awful lot of people, working together at an awful lotof jobs, to keep a civilization running. Smash the installations andkill the top technicians and scientists, and the masses don't knowhow to rebuild and go back to stone hatchets. Kill off enough of themasses and even if the planet and the know-how is left, there'snobody to do the work. I've seen planets that decivilized both ways.Tanith, I think, is one of the latter."
That had been during one of the long after-dinner bull sessions on theway out from Gram. Somebody, one of the noble gentlemen-adventurers whohad joined the company after the piracy of the _Enterprise_ and themurder, had asked:
"But some of them survived. Don't they know what happened?"
"_'In the old times, there were sorcerers. They built the oldbuildings 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 explanation out of that.
As the pinnaces pulled and nudged the _Nemesis_ down to her berth,he could see people, far down on the spaceport floor, at work.Either Valkanhayn and Spasso had more men than the size of theirships indicated, or they had gotten a lot of locals to work forthem. More than the population of the moribund city, at least asHarkaman remembered it.
There had been about five hundred in all; they lived by mining theold buildings for metal, and trading metalwork for food and textilesand powder and other things made elsewhere. It was accessible onlyby oxcarts traveling a hundred miles across the plains; it had beenbuilt by a contragravity-using people with utter disregard fornatural travel and transportation routes.
"I don't envy the poor buggers," Harkaman said, looking down at theantlike figures on the spaceport floor. "Boake Valkanhayn and GarvanSpasso have probably made slaves of the lot of them. If I was reallygoing to put in a base here, I wouldn't thank that pair for thekind of public-relations work they've been doing among the locals."