"What I called them, a couple of chicken thieves. They raid planets
like Set and Hertha and Melkarth, where the locals haven't anything
to fight with--or anything worth fighting for. I didn't know they'd
teamed up, but that figures. Nobody else would team up with either
of them. What must have happened, this story of Duke Angus' Tanith
adventure must have filtered out to them, and they thought that if
they got here first, I'd think it was cheaper to take them in than
run them out. I probably would have, too. They do have ships, of a
sort, and they do raid, after a fashion. But now, there isn't going
to be any Tanith base, and they have a no-good planet and they're
stuck with it."
"Can't they make anything out of it themselves?"
"Like what?" Harkaman hooted. "They have no equipment, and they have
no men. Not for a job like that. The only thing they can do is space
out and forget it."
"We could sell them equipment."
"We could if they had anything to use for money. They haven't. One
thing, we do want to let down and give the men a chance to walk on
ground and look at a sky for a while. The girls here aren't too bad,
either," Harkaman said. "As I remember, some of them even take a
bath, now and then."
"That's the kind of news of Dunnan we're going to get. By the time
we'd get to where he's been reported, he'd be a couple of thousand
light-years away," he said disgustedly. "I agree; we ought to give
the men a chance to get off the ship, here. We can stall this pair
along for a while and we won't have any trouble with them."
* * * * *
The three ships were slowly converging toward a point fifteen
thousand miles off-planet and over the sunset line. The _Space
Scourge_ bore the device of a mailed fist clutching a comet by the
head; it looked more like a whisk broom than a scourge. The _Lamia_
bore a coiled snake with the head, arms and bust of a woman.
Valkanhayn and Spasso were taking their time about screening back,
and he began to wonder if they weren't maneuvering the _Nemesis_
into a cross-fire position. He mentioned this to Harkaman and Alvyn
Karffard; they both laughed.
[Illustration]
"Just holding ship's meetings," Karffard said. "They'll be yakking
back and forth for a couple of hours, yet."
"Yes; Valkanhayn and Spasso don't own their ships," Harkaman
explained. "They've gone in debt to their crews for supplies and
maintenance till everybody owns everything in common. The ships
look like it, too. They don't even command, really; they just
preside over elected command-councils."
Finally, they had both of the more or less commanders on screen.
Valkanhayn had zipped up his shirt and put on a jacket. Garvan
Spasso was a small man, partly bald. His eyes were a shade too close
together, and his thin mouth had a bitterly crafty twist. He began
speaking at once:
"Captain, Boake tells me you say you're not here in the service of
the Duke of Wardshaven at all." He said it aggrievedly.
"That's correct," Harkaman said. "We came here because Lord Trask
thought another Gram ship, the _Enterprise_, would be here. Since
she isn't, there's no point in our being here. We do hope, though,
that you won't make any difficulty about our letting down and giving
our men a couple of hundred hours' liberty. They've been in
hyperspace for three thousand hours."
"See!" Spasso clamored. "He wants to trick us into letting him land--"
[Illustration]
"Captain Spasso," Trask cut in. "Will you please stop insulting
everybody's intelligence, your own included." Spasso glared at him,
belligerently but hopefully. "I understand what you thought you were
going to do here. You expected Captain Harkaman here to establish a
base for the Duke of Wardshaven, and you thought, if you were here
ahead of him and in a posture of defense, that he'd take you into
the Duke's service rather than waste ammunition and risk damage and
casualties wiping you out. Well, I'm very sorry, gentlemen. Captain
Harkaman is in my service, and I'm not in the least interested in
establishing a base on Tanith."
Valkanhayn and Spasso looked at each other. At least, in the two
side-by-side screens, their eyes shifted, each to the other's screen
on his own ship.
"I get it!" Spasso cried suddenly. "There's two ships, the
_Enterprise_ and this one. The Duke of Wardshaven fitted out the
_Enterprise_, and somebody else fitted out this one. They both want
to put in a base here!"
That opened a glorious vista. Instead of merely capitalizing on
their nuisance-value, they might find themselves holding the balance
of power in a struggle for the planet. All sorts of profitable
perfidies were possible.
"Why, sure you can land, Otto," Valkanhayn said. "I know what it's
like to be three thousand hours in hyper, myself."
"You're at this old city with the two tall tower-buildings, aren't
you?" Harkaman asked. He looked up at the viewscreen. "Ought to be
about midnight there now. How's the spaceport? When I was here, it
was pretty bad."
"Oh, we've been fixing it up. We got a big gang of locals working for us--"
* * * * *
The city was familiar, from Otto Harkaman's descriptions and from
the pictures Vann Larch had painted during the long jump from Gram.
As they came in, it looked impressive, spreading for miles around
the twin buildings that spired almost three thousand feet above it,
with a great spaceport like an eight-pointed star at one side.
Whoever had built it, in the sunset splendor of the old Terran
Federation, must have done so confident that it would become the
metropolis of a populous and prospering world. Then the sun of the
Federation had gone down. Nobody knew what had happened on Tanith
after that, but evidently none of it had been good.
At first, the two towers seemed as sound as when they had been
built; gradually it became apparent that one was broken at the top.
For the most part, the smaller buildings scattered widely around
them were standing, though here and there mounds of brush-grown
rubble showed where some had fallen in. The spaceport looked good--a
central octagon mass of buildings, the landing-berths, and, beyond,
the triangular areas of airship docks and warehouses. The central
building was outwardly intact, and the ship-berths seemed clear of
wreckage and rubble.
By the time the _Nemesis_ was following the _Space Scourge_ and the
_Lamia_ down, towed by her own pinnaces, the illusion that they were
approaching a living city had vanished. The interspaces between the
buildings were choked with forest-growth, broken by a few small
fields and garden-plots. At one time, there had been three of the
high buildings, literally vertical cities in themselves. Where the
third had stood was a glazed crater, with a ridge of fallen rubble
lying away from it. Somebody must have landed a medium missile,
about twenty kilotons, against its base. Something of the same sort
had scored on the far edge of the spaceport, and one of the eight
arrowheads of docks and warehouses was an indistinguishable slag-pile.
The rest of the city seemed to have died of neglect rather than
violence. It certainly hadn't been bombed out. Harkaman thought most
of the fighting had been done with subneutron bombs or Omega-ray
bombs, that killed the people without damaging the real estate. Or
bio-weapons; a man-made plague that had gotten out of control and
all but depopulated the planet.
"It takes an awful lot of people, working together at an awful lot
of jobs, to keep a civilization running. Smash the installations and
kill the top technicians and scientists, and the masses don't know
how to rebuild and go back to stone hatchets. Kill off enough of the
masses and even if the planet and the know-how is left, there's
nobody to do the work. I've seen planets that decivilized both ways.
Tanith, I think, is one of the latter."
That had been during one of the long after-dinner bull sessions on the
way out from Gram. Somebody, one of the noble gentlemen-adventurers who
had joined the company after the piracy of the _Enterprise_ and the
murder, had asked:
"But some of them survived. Don't they know what happened?"
"_'In the old times, there were sorcerers. They built the old
buildings by wizard arts. Then the sorcerers fought among themselves
and went away,'_" Harkaman said. "That's all they know about it."
You could make any kind of an explanation out of that.
As the pinnaces pulled and nudged the _Nemesis_ down to her berth,
he could see people, far down on the spaceport floor, at work.
Either Valkanhayn and Spasso had more men than the size of their
ships indicated, or they had gotten a lot of locals to work for
them. More than the population of the moribund city, at least as
Harkaman remembered it.
There had been about five hundred in all; they lived by mining the
old buildings for metal, and trading metalwork for food and textiles
and powder and other things made elsewhere. It was accessible only
by oxcarts traveling a hundred miles across the plains; it had been
built by a contragravity-using people with utter disregard for
natural travel and transportation routes.
"I don't envy the poor buggers," Harkaman said, looking down at the
antlike figures on the spaceport floor. "Boake Valkanhayn and Garvan
Spasso have probably made slaves of the lot of them. If I was really
going to put in a base here, I wouldn't thank that pair for the
kind of public-relations work they've been doing among the locals."