XV

As soon as the _Space Scourge_ was unloaded, she was put on

off-planet watch; Harkaman immediately spaced out in the _Nemesis_,

while Trask remained behind. They began unloading the _Rozinante_,

after setting her down at Rivington Spaceport. After that was done,

her officers and crew took a holiday which lasted a month, until the

_Nemesis_ returned. Harkaman must have made quick raids on half a

dozen planets. None of the cargo he brought back was spectacularly

valuable, and he dismissed the whole thing as chicken-stealing, but

he had lost some men and the ship showed a few fresh scars. A good

deal of what was transshipped to the _Rozinante_ was manufactured

goods which would compete with merchandise produced on Gram.

"That load will be a come-down, after what the _Space Scourge_ took

back, but we didn't want to send the _Rozinante_ back empty," he

said. "One thing, I had time to do a little reading, between stops."

"The books from the Eglonsby library?"

"Yes. I learned a curious thing about Amaterasu. Do you know why that

planet was so extensively colonized by the Federation, when there

don't seem to be any fissionable ores? The planet produced gadolinium."

Gadolinium was essential to hyperdrive engines; the engines of a

ship the size of the _Nemesis_ required fifty pounds of it. On the

Sword-Worlds, it was worth several times its weight in gold. If they

still mined it, Amaterasu would repay a second visit.

When he mentioned it, Harkaman shrugged. "Why should they mine it?

There's only one thing it's good for, and you can't run a spaceship

on Diesel oil. I suppose the mines could be reopened, and new

refineries built, but...."

"We could trade plutonium for gadolinium. They have none of their

own. We could charge our own prices for it, and we wouldn't need to

tell them what gadolinium sells for on the Sword-Worlds."

"We could, if we could do business with anybody there, after what

we did to Eglonsby and Stolgoland. Where would we get plutonium?"

"Why do you think the Beowulfers don't have hyperships, when they

have everything else?"

Harkaman snapped his fingers. "By Satan, that's it!" Then he looked

at Trask in alarm. "Hey, you're not thinking of selling Amaterasu

plutonium and Beowulf gadolinium, are you?"

"Why not? We could make a big profit on both ends of the deal."

"You know what would happen next, don't you? There'd be ships from

both planets all over the place in a few years. We want that like

we want a hole in the head."

He couldn't see the objection. Tanith and Amaterasu and Beowulf

could work up a very good triangular trade; all three would profit.

It wouldn't cost men and ship-damage and ammunition, either. Maybe

a mutual defense alliance, too. Think about it later; there was too

much to do here on Tanith at present.

There had been mines on the Moon of Tanith before the collapse of

the Federation; they had been stripped of their equipment afterward,

while Tanith was still fighting a rearguard battle against barbarism,

but the underground chambers and man-made caverns could still be used,

and in time the mines were reopened and the steel mill put in, and

eventually ingots of finished steel were coming down by shuttle-craft.

In the meantime, the shipyard had been laid out and was taking shape.

The Gram ship _Queen Flavia_--she had been the one found unfinished

at Glaspyth--came in three months after the _Rozinante_ started

back; she must have been finished while Valkanhayn was still in

hyperspace. She carried considerable cargo, some of it superfluous

but all of it useful; everybody was investing in the Tanith Adventure

now, and the money had to be spent for something. Better, she brought

close to a thousand men and women; the leakage of brains and ability

from the Sword-Worlds was turning into a flood. Among them was Basil

Gorram. Trask remembered him as an insufferable young twerp, but he

seemed to be a good shipyard man. He very frankly predicted that

in a few years his father's yards at Wardshaven would be idle and

all the Tanith ships would be Tanith-built. A junior partner of

Lothar Ffayle's also came out, to establish a branch of the Bank of

Wardshaven at Rivington.

As soon as the _Queen Flavia_ had discharged her cargo and

passengers, she took on five hundred ground-fighters from the

_Lamia_, _Nemesis_ and _Space Scourge_ companies and spaced out on

a raiding voyage. While she was gone, the second ship, the one Duke

Angus had started at Wardshaven and King Angus had finished, the

_Black Star_, came in.

Trask was slightly incredulous at realizing that she had spaced out

from Gram almost exactly two years after the _Nemesis_ had departed.

He still hadn't any idea where Andray Dunnan was, or what he was

doing, or how to find him.

The news of the Gram base on Tanith spread slowly, first by the

scheduled liners and tramp freighters that linked the Sword-Worlds,

and then by trading ships and outbound Space Vikings to the Old

Federation. Two years and six months after the _Nemesis_ had come

out of hyperspace to find Boake Valkanhayn and Garvan Spasso on

Tanith, the first independent Space Viking came in, to sell a cargo

and get repairs. They bought his loot--he had been raiding some

planet rather above the level of Khepera and below that of

Amaterasu--and healed the wounds his ship had taken getting it. He

had been dealing with the Everrard family on Hoth, and professed

himself much more satisfied with the bargains he had gotten on

Tanith and swore to return.

He had never even heard of Andray Dunnan or the _Enterprise_.

It was a Gilgamesher that brought the first news.

He had first heard of Gilgameshers--the word was used

indiscriminately for a native of or a ship from Gilgamesh--on Gram,

from Harkaman and Karffard and Vann Larch and the others. Since

coming to Tanith, he had heard about them from every Space Viking,

never in complimentary and rarely in printable terms.

Gilgamesh was rated, with reservations, as a civilized planet though

not on a level with Odin or Isis or Baldur or Marduk or Aton or any

of the other worlds which had maintained the culture of the Terran

Federation uninterruptedly. Perhaps Gilgamesh deserved more credit;

its people had undergone two centuries of darkness and pulled

themselves out of it by their bootstraps. They had recovered all

the old techniques, up to and including the hyperdrive.

They didn't raid; they traded. They had religious objections to

violence, though they kept these within sensible limits, and were

able and willing to fight with fanatical ferocity in defense of

their home planet. About a century before, there had been a

five-ship Viking raid on Gilgamesh; one ship had returned and had

been sold for scrap after reaching a friendly base. Their ships went

everywhere to trade, and wherever they traded a few of them usually

settled, and where they settled they made money, sending most of it

home. Their society seemed to be a loose theo-socialism, and their

religion an absurd potpourri of most of the major monotheisms of the

Federation period, plus doctrinal and ritualistic innovations of

their own. Aside from their propensity for sharp trading, their

bigoted refusal to regard anybody not of their creed as more than

half human, and the maze of dietary and other taboos in which they

hid from social contact with others, made them generally disliked.

After their ship had gotten into orbit, three of them came down to

do business. The captain and his exec wore long coats, almost

knee-length, buttoned to the throat, and small white caps like

forage caps; the third, one of their priests, wore a robe with a

cowl, and the symbol of their religion, a blue triangle in a white

circle, on his breast. They all wore beards that hung down from

their cheeks, with their chins and upper lips shaved. They all had

the same righteous, disapproving faces, they all refused

refreshments of any sort, and they sat uneasily as though fearing

contamination from the heathens who had sat in their chairs before

them. They had a mixed cargo of general merchandise picked up here

and there on subcivilized planets, in which nobody on Tanith was

interested. They also had some good stuff--vegetable-amber and

flame-bird plumes from Irminsul; ivory or something very like it

from somewhere else; diamonds and Uller organic opals and

Zarathustra sunstones. They also had some platinum. They wanted

machinery, especially contragravity engines and robots.

[Illustration]

The trouble was, they wanted to haggle. Haggling, it seemed, was

the Gilgamesh planetary sport.

"Have you ever heard of a Space Viking ship named the _Enterprise_?"

he asked them, at the seventh or eighth impasse in the bargaining.

"She bears a crescent, light blue on black. Her captain's name is

Andray Dunnan."

"A ship so named, with such a device, raided Chermosh more than a

year ago," the priest-supercargo said. "Some of our people tarry on

Chermosh to trade. This ship sacked the city in which they were;

some of them lost heavily in world's goods."

"That's a pity."

The Gilgamesh priest shrugged. "It is as Yah the Almighty wills,"

he said, then brightened slightly. "The Chermoshers are heathens

and worshipers of false gods. The Space Vikings looted their temple

and destroyed it utterly; they carried away the graven images and

abominations. Our people bore witness that there was much wailing

and lamentation among the idolators."

* * * * *

So that was the first entry on the Big Board. It covered,

optimistically, the whole of one wall in his office, and for some

time that one chalked note about the raid on Chermosh, and the date,

as nearly as it could be approximated, looked very lonely on it. The

captain of the _Black Star_ brought back material for a couple more.

He had put in on several planets known to be temporarily occupied by

Space Vikings, to barter loot, give his men some time off-ship, and

make inquiries, and he had names for a couple of planets raided by

the blue crescent ship. One was only six months old.

The way news filtered about in the Old Federation, that was

practically hot off the stove.

The owner-captain of the _Alborak_ had something to add, when he

brought his ship in six months later. He sipped his drink slowly,

as though he had limited himself to one and wanted to make it last

as long as possible.

"Almost two years ago, on Jagannath," he said. "The _Enterprise_ was

on orbit there, getting some light repairs. I met the man a few

times. Looks just like those pictures, but he's wearing a small

pointed beard, now. He'd sold a lot of loot. General merchandise,

precious and semiprecious stones, a lot of carved and inlaid

furniture that looked as though it had come from some Neobarb king's

palace, and some temple stuff. Buddhist; there were a couple of big

gold Dai-Butsus. His crew were standing drinks for all comers. Some

of them were pretty dark above the collar, as though they'd been on

a hot-star planet not too long before. And he had a lot of Imhotep

furs to sell, simply fabulous stuff."

"What kind of repairs? Combat damage?"

"That was my impression. He spaced out a little over a hundred hours

after I came in, in company with another ship. The _Starhopper_,

Captain Teodor Vaghn. The talk was that they were making a two-ship

raid somewhere." The captain of the _Alborak_ thought for a moment.

"One other thing. He was buying ammunition, everything from pistol

cartridges to hellburners. And he was buying all the air-and-water

recycling equipment, and all the carniculture and hydroponic

equipment, he could get."

That was something to know. He thanked the Space Viking, and then asked:

"Did he know, at the time, that I'm out here hunting for him?"

"If he did, nobody else on Jagannath did. I didn't hear about it,

myself, till six months afterward."

That evening, he played off the recording he had made of the

conversation for Harkaman and Valkanhayn and Karffard and some

of the others. Somebody instantly said:

"That temple stuff came from Chermosh. They're Buddhists, there.

That checks with the Gilgamesher's story."

"He got the furs on Imhotep; he traded for them," Harkaman said.

"Nobody gets anything off Imhotep by raiding. The planet's in the

middle of a glaciation, the land surface down to the fiftieth

parallel is iced over solid. There is one city, ten or fifteen

thousand, and the rest of the population is scattered around in

settlements of a couple of hundred all along the face of the

glaciers. They're all hunters and trappers. They have some

contragravity, and when a ship comes in, they spread the news by

radio and everybody brings his furs to town. They use telescope

sights, and everybody over ten years old can hit a man in the head

at five hundred yards. And big weapons are no good; they're too well

dispersed. So the only way to get anything out of them is to trade

for it."

"I think I know where he was," Alvyn Karffard said. "On Imhotep,

silver is a monetary metal. On Agni, they use silver for sewer-pipe.

Agni is a hot-star planet, class B-3 sun. And on Agni they are

tough, and they have good weapons. That could be where the

_Enterprise_ took that combat damage."

That started an argument as to whether he'd gone to Chermosh first.

It was sure that he had gone to Agni and then Imhotep. Guatt Kirbey

tried to figure both courses.

"It doesn't tell us anything, either way," he said at length. "Chermosh

is away off to the side from Agni and Imhotep in either case."

"Well, he does have a base, somewhere, and it's not on any

Terra-type planet," Valkanhayn said. "Otherwise, what would he want

with all that air-and-water and hydroponic and carniculture stuff?"

The Old Federation area was full of non-Terra-type planets, and why

should anybody bother going to any of them? Any planet that wasn't

oxygen-atmosphere, six to eight thousand miles in diameter, and

within a narrow surface-temperature range, wasn't worth wasting time

on. But a planet like that, if one had the survival equipment, would

make a wonderful hideout.

"What sort of a captain is this Teodor Vaghn?" he asked. "A good

one," Harkaman said promptly. "He has a nasty streak--sadistic--but

he knows his business and he has a good ship and a well-trained

crew. You think he and Dunnan have teamed up?"

"Don't you? I think, now that he has a base, Dunnan is getting

a fleet together."

"He'll know we're after him by now," Vann Larch said. "And he knows

where we are, and that puts him one up on us."