II

A dozen men clustered around the bartending robot--his cousin

and family lawyer, Nikkolay Trask; Lothar Ffayle, the banker;

Alex Gorram, the shipbuilder, and his son Basil; Baron Rathmore;

more of the Wardshaven nobles whom he knew only distantly.

And Otto Harkaman.

Harkaman was a Space Viking. That would have set him apart, even

if he hadn't topped the tallest of them by a head. He wore a short

black jacket, heavily gold-braided, and black trousers inside

ankle-boots; the dagger on his belt was no mere dress-ornament. His

tousled red-brown hair was long enough to furnish extra padding in

a combat-helmet, and his beard was cut square at the bottom.

He had been fighting on Durendal, for one of the branches of the

royal house contesting fratricidally for the throne. The wrong one;

he had lost his ship, and most of his men and, almost, his own life.

He had been a penniless refugee on Flamberge, owning only the

clothes he stood in and his personal weapons and the loyalty of

half a dozen adventurers as penniless as himself, when Duke Angus

had invited him to Gram to command the _Enterprise_.

"A pleasure, Lord Trask. I've met your lovely bride-to-be, and

now that I meet you, let me congratulate both." Then, as they

were having a drink together, he put his foot in it by asking:

"You're not an investor in the Tanith Adventure, are you?"

He said he wasn't, and would have let it go at that. Young Basil

Gorram had to get his foot in, too.

"Lord Trask does not approve of the Tanith Adventure," he said

scornfully. "He thinks we should stay home and produce wealth,

instead of exporting robbery and murder to the Old Federation

for it."

The smile remained on Otto Harkaman's face; only the friendliness

was gone. He unobtrusively shifted his drink to his left hand.

"Well, our operations are definable as robbery and murder," he

agreed. "Space Vikings are professional robbers and murderers.

And you object? Perhaps you find me personally objectionable?"

"I wouldn't have shaken your hand or had a drink with you if I did.

I don't care how many planets you raid or cities you sack, or how

many innocents, if that's what they are, you massacre in the Old

Federation. You couldn't possibly do anything worse than those

people have been doing to one another for the past ten centuries.

What I object to is the way you're raiding the Sword-Worlds."

"You're crazy!" Basil Gorram exploded.

"Young man," Harkaman reproved, "the conversation was between Lord

Trask and myself. And when somebody makes a statement you don't

understand, don't tell him he's crazy. Ask him what he means.

What _do_ you mean, Lord Trask?"

"You should know; you've just raided Gram for eight hundred of our

best men. You raided me for close to forty vaqueros, farm-workers,

lumbermen, machine-operators, and I doubt I'll be able to replace

them with as good." He turned to the elder Gorram. "Alex, how many

have you lost to Captain Harkaman?"

Gorram tried to make it a dozen; pressed, he admitted to a score and

a half. Roboticians, machine-supervisors, programmers, a couple of

engineers, a foreman. There was grudging agreement from the others.

Burt Sandrasan's engine-works had lost almost as many, of the same

kind. Even Lothar Ffayle admitted to losing a computerman and

a guard-sergeant.

And after they were gone, the farms and ranches and factories would

go on, almost but not quite as before. Nothing on Gram, nothing on

any of the Sword-Worlds, was done as efficiently as three centuries

ago. The whole level of Sword-World life was sinking, like the east

coastline of this continent, so slowly as to be evident only from

the records and monuments of the past. He said as much, and added:

"And the genetic loss. The best Sword-World genes are literally

escaping to space, like the atmosphere of a low-gravity planet,

each generation begotten by fathers slightly inferior to the last.

It wasn't so bad when the Space Vikings raided directly from the

Sword-Worlds; they got home once in a while. Now they're conquering

planets in the Old Federation for bases, and staying there."

* * * * *

Everybody had begun to relax; this wouldn't be a quarrel. Harkaman,

who had shifted his drink back to his right hand, chuckled.

"That's right. I've fathered my share of brats in the Old

Federation, and I know Space Vikings whose fathers were born on

Old Federation planets." He turned to Basil Gorram. "You see, the

gentleman isn't crazy, at all. That's what happened to the Terran

Federation, by the way. The good men all left to colonize, and the

stuffed shirts and yes-men and herd-followers and safety-firsters

stayed on Terra and tried to govern the galaxy."

"Well, maybe this is all new to you, captain," Rovard Grauffis

said sourly, "but Lucas Trask's dirge for the Decline and Fall

of the Sword-Worlds is an old song to the rest of us. I have

too much to do to stay here and argue."

Lothar Ffayle evidently did intend to stay and argue.

"All you're saying, Lucas, is that we're expanding. You want us

to sit here and build up population pressure like Terra in the

First Century?"

"With three and a half billion people spread out on twelve planets?

They had that many on Terra alone. And it took us eight centuries

to reach that."

That had been since the Ninth Century, Atomic Era, at the end of

the Big War. Ten thousand men and women on Abigor, refusing to

surrender, had taken the remnant of the System States Alliance navy

to space, seeking a world the Federation had never heard of and

wouldn't find for a long time. That had been the world they had

called Excalibur. From it, their grandchildren had colonized Joyeuse

and Durendal and Flamberge; Haulteclere had been colonized in the

next generation from Joyeuse, and Gram from Haulteclere.

"We're not expanding, Lothar; we're contracting. We stopped

expanding three hundred and fifty years ago, when that ship came

back to Morglay from the Old Federation and reported what had

been happening out there since the Big War. Before that, we were

discovering new planets and colonizing them. Since then, we've

been picking the bones of the dead Terran Federation."

* * * * *

Something was going on by the escalators to the landing stage.

People were moving excitedly in that direction, and the news cars

were circling like vultures over a sick cow. Harkaman wondered,

hopefully, if it mightn't be a fight.

"Some drunk being bounced." Nikkolay, Lucas' cousin, commented.

"Sesar's let all Wardshaven in here, today. But, Lucas, this Tanith

adventure; we're not making any hit-and-run raid. We're taking over

a whole planet; it'll be another Sword-World in forty or fifty

years."

[Illustration]

"Inside another century, we'll conquer the whole Federation," Baron

Rathmore declared. He was a politician and never let exaggeration

worry him.

"What I don't understand," Harkaman said, "is why you support Duke

Angus, Lord Trask, if you think the Tanith adventure is doing Gram

so much harm."

[Illustration]

"If Angus didn't do it, somebody else would. But Angus is going to

make himself King of Gram, and I don't think anybody else could do

that. This planet needs a single sovereignty. I don't know how much

you've seen of it outside this duchy, but don't take Wardshaven as

typical. Some of these duchies, like Glaspyth or Didreksburg, are

literal snake pits. All the major barons are at each other's

throats, and they can't even keep their own knights and petty-barons

in order. Why, there's a miserable little war down in Southmain

Continent that's been going on for over two centuries."

"That's probably where Dunnan's going to take that army of his,"

a robot-manufacturing baron said. "I hope it gets wiped out, and

Dunnan with it."

"You don't have to go to Southmain; just go to Glaspyth," somebody

else said.

"Well, if we don't get a planetary monarchy to keep order, this

planet will decivilize like anything in the Old Federation."

"Oh, _come_, Lucas!" Alex Gorram protested. "That's pulling it out

too far."

"Yes, for one thing, we don't have the Neobarbarians," somebody

said. "And if they ever came out here, we'd blow them to

Em-See-Square in nothing flat. Might be a good thing if they

did, too; it would stop us squabbling among ourselves."

Harkaman looked at him in surprise. "Just who do you think the

Neobarbarians are, anyhow?" he asked. "Some race of invading nomads;

Attila's Huns in spaceships?"

"Well, isn't that who they are?" Gorram asked.

"Nifflheim, no! There aren't a dozen and a half planets in the Old

Federation that still have hyperdrive, and they're all civilized.

That's if 'civilized' is what Gilgamesh is," he added. "These are

homemade barbarians. Workers and peasants who revolted to seize and

divide the wealth and then found they'd smashed the means of

production and killed off all the technical brains. Survivors on

planets hit during the Interstellar Wars, from the Eleventh to

the Thirteenth Centuries, who lost the machinery of civilization.

Followers of political leaders on local-dictatorship planets.

Companies of mercenaries thrown out of employment and living by

pillage. Religious fanatics following self-anointed prophets."

"You think we don't have plenty of Neobarbarian material here on

Gram?" Trask demanded. "If you do, take a look around."

Glaspyth, somebody said.

"That collection of over-ripe gallows-fruit Andray Dunnan's

recruited," Rathmore mentioned.

Alex Gorram was grumbling that his shipyard was full of them;

agitators stirring up trouble, trying to organize a strike to

get rid of the robots.

"Yes," Harkaman pounced on that last. "I know of at least forty

instances, on a dozen and a half planets, in the last eight

centuries, of anti-technological movements. They had them on Terra,

back as far as the Second Century Pre-Atomic. And after Venus

seceded from the First Federation, before the Second Federation

was organized."

"You're interested in history?" Rathmore asked.

"A hobby. All spacemen have hobbies. There's very little work

aboard ship in hyperspace; boredom is the worst enemy. My

guns-and-missiles officer, Vann Larch, is a painter. Most of his

work was lost with the _Corisande_ on Durendal, but he kept us from

starving a few times on Flamberge by painting pictures and selling

them. My hyperspatial astrogator, Guatt Kirbey, composes music; he

tries to express the mathematics of hyperspatial theory in musical

terms. I don't care much for it, myself," he admitted. "I study

history. You know, it's odd; practically everything that's happened

on any of the inhabited planets happened on Terra before the first

spaceship."

The garden immediately around them was quiet, now; everybody was

over by the landing-stage escalators. Harkaman would have said more,

but at that moment he saw half a dozen of Sesar Karvall's uniformed

guardsmen run past. They were helmeted and in bullet-proofs; one of

them had an auto-rifle, and the rest carried knobbed plastic

truncheons. The Space Viking set down his drink.

"Let's go," he said. "Our host is calling up his troops; I think

the guests ought to find battle-stations, too."