Prince Trask of Tanith and Prince Simon Bentrik were dining together
on an upper terrace of what had originally been the mansion house of
a Federation period plantation. It had been a number of other things
since; now it was the municipal building of a town that had grown
around it, which had, somehow, escaped undamaged from the Dunnan
blitz. Normally about five or ten thousand, the place was now jammed
with almost fifty thousand homeless refugees from half a dozen other
towns that had been destroyed, overflowing the buildings and
crowding into a sprawling camp of hastily built 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 and reconstruction; this was the first meal the
two commanders had been able to share in any leisure at all. Prince
Bentrik's enjoyment of it was somewhat impaired by the fact that
from 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 Marduk in the _Nemesis_,
then." They were both speaking loudly, above the clank and clatter
of machinery below. "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
for bringing me back to stand trial," Bentrik said bitterly. "Why,
I'd have anybody shot who let his ship get caught as I did mine.
Those two were down in atmosphere before I knew they'd come out of
hyperspace."
"I think they were down on the planet before your ship arrived."
"Oh, that's ridiculous, Prince Trask!" the Mardukan cried. "You
can't hide a ship on a planet. Not from the kind of instruments we
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 to his mouth. He lowered it
slowly to his plate. That was a theory he'd like to accept, if he
could.
"But the locals. They didn't know about it."
"They wouldn't. They have no off-planet detection of 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 from Seshat. But if Dunnan
wanted to ambush your ship, he'd have thought of it, too. It's the
only 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 half the Royal Navy out now, patrolling our
trade-planets. Even if he wasn't aboard the _Enterprise_ when you
blew her up, you've put a name on him and can tell us a good deal
about him." He set down the wineglass. "Why, if it weren't so utterly
ridiculous, one might even think he was making war on Marduk."
From Trask's viewpoint, it wasn't ridiculous at 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 Marduk
could patch her hull and replace her Dillinghams and her Abbot
lift-and-drive engines and make her temporarily spaceworthy, until
she could be gotten to a shipyard. They concentrated on repairing
the _Nemesis_, and in another two weeks she was ready for the voyage.
The six hundred hour trip to Marduk passed pleasantly enough. The
Mardukan officers were good company, and found their Space Viking
opposite 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 listening avidly
to tales of each other's home planets. The Space Vikings were
surprised and disappointed at 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 belonged definitely
to the lower orders.
"There's still too much free land and free opportunity on the
Sword-Worlds," Trask explained. "Nobody does much bowing and
scraping to the class above him; he's too busy trying to shove
himself up into it. And the men who ship out as Space Vikings are
the least class-conscious of the lot. Think my men may have trouble
on Marduk about that? They'll all insist on doing their drinking in
the swankiest places in town."
[Illustration]
"No. I don't think so. Everybody will be so amazed that Space Vikings
aren't twelve feet tall, with three horns like a Zarathustra damnthing
and a spiked tail like a Fafnir mantichore that they won't even notice
anything less. 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 eliminated before 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 also a
hereditary monarchy, if that made any kind of sense. Trask's efforts
to explain the political and 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 owes his position to the
support of his great nobles; they owe theirs to their barons and
landholding knights; they owe theirs to their people. There are
limits beyond which none of them can go; after that, their vassals
turn on them."
"Well, suppose the people of some barony rebel? Won't the king send
troops to support the baron?"
"What troops? Outside a personal guard and enough men to police the
royal city and hold the crown lands, the king has no troops. If he
wants troops, he has to get them from his great nobles; they have to
get them from their vassal barons, who raise them by calling out
their people." That was another source of dissatisfaction with King
Angus of Gram; he had been augmenting his forces by hiring
off-planet mercenaries. "And the people won't help some other baron
oppress his people; it might be their turn next."
* * * * *
"You mean, the people are armed?" Prince Bentrik was incredulous.
"Great Satan, aren't yours?" Prince Trask was 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 the
Government, at all; the Government ruled in the King's name. There
was the Assembly; the Chamber 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 to appoint him from the party holding the
most seats in the Chamber of Representatives, and he appointed the
Ministers, who handled the executive work of the Government, only
their subordinates in the different Ministries were career-officials
who were selected by competitive examination for the bottom jobs and
promoted up the bureaucratic ladder from there.
This left Trask wondering if the Mardukan constitution hadn't been
devised by Goldberg, the legendary Old Terran inventor who always
did everything the hard way. It also left him wondering just how in
Gehenna the Government of Marduk ever got anything done.
Maybe it didn't. Maybe that was what saved Marduk from having a real
despotism.
"Well, what prevents the Government from enslaving the people?
The people can't; you just told me that they aren't armed, and
the Government is."
He continued, pausing now and then for breath, to catalogue every
tyranny he had ever heard of, from those practiced by the Terran
Federation before the Big War to those practiced at Eglonsby on
Amaterasu by Pedrosan Pedro. A few of the very mildest were pushing
the nobles and people of Gram to revolt against Angus I.
"And in the end," he finished, "the Government would be the only
property owner and the only employer on the planet, and everybody
else would be slaves, working at assigned tasks, wearing
Government-issued clothing and eating Government food, their
children educated as the Government prescribes and trained for jobs
selected for them by the Government, never reading a book or seeing
a play or thinking a 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 people would not
legislate themselves into slavery."
He wished Otto Harkaman were there. All he knew of history was the
little he had gotten from reading some of Harkaman's books, and the
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 planets and over ten
centuries of time, in which people had done exactly that and hadn't
known what they 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 and simple. That Planetary
Nationalist gang got into control fifty years ago, during the crisis
after 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 young nobleman declared.
"It could if Zaspar Makann's party wins control of the Assembly at
the next election," somebody else said.
"Oh, then Marduk's safe! The sun'll go nova first," one of the
junior Royal Navy officers said.
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 Zaspar Makann, and took
occasion to bring it up in conversation with his shipboard guests.
Every time he talked about Makann to two or more Mardukans, he heard
at least three or more opinions about the man. He was a political
demagogue; on that everybody agreed. After that, opinions diverged.
Makann was a raving lunatic, and all the followers he had were a
handful of lunatics like him. He might be a lunatic, but he had a
dangerously large 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 an Assemblyman. He
was just a smart crook, milking a lot of half-witted plebeians for
all he could get out of them. Not just plebes, either; a lot of
industrialists were secretly financing him, in hope that he would
help them break up the labor unions. You're nuts; everybody knew 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 Gilgameshers
off the planet.
Well, that was one thing you had to give him credit for. He wanted
to run out the Gilgameshers. Everybody was in favor of that.
Now, Trask could remember something he'd gotten from 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?