Chapter 9

That was just about the situation. Spasso and Valkanhayn and some of their officers met them on the landing stage of the big building in the middle of the spaceport, where they had established quarters. Entering and going down a long hallway, they passed a dozen men and women gathering up rubbish from the floor with shovels and with their hands and putting it into a lifter-skid. Both sexes wore shapeless garments of coarse cloth, like ponchos, and flat-soled sandals. Watching them was another local in a kilt, buskins and a leather jerkin; he wore a short sword on his belt and carried a wickedly thonged whip. He also wore a Space Viking combat helmet, painted with the device of Spasso’s Lamia. He bowed as they approached, putting a hand to his forehead. After they had passed, they could hear him shouting at the others, and the sound of whip-blows.

You make slaves out of people, and some will always be slave-drivers; they will bow to you, and then take it out on the others. Harkaman’s nose was twitching as though he had a bit of rotten fish caught in his mustache.

“We have about eight hundred of them. There were only three hundred that were any good for work here; we gathered the rest up at villages along the big river,” Spasso was saying.

“How do you get food for them?” Harkaman asked. “Or don’t you bother?”

“Oh, we gather that up all over,” Valkanhayn told him. “We send parties out with landing craft. They’ll let down on a village, run the locals out, gather up what’s around and bring it here. Once in a while they put up a fight, but the best they have is a few crossbows and some muzzle-loading muskets. When they do, we burn the village and machine-gun everybody we see.”

“That’s the stuff,” Harkaman approved. “If the cow doesn’t want to be milked, just shoot her. Of course, you don’t get much milk out of her again, but--”

The room to which their hosts guided them was at the far end of the hall. It had probably been a conference room or something of the sort, and originally it had been paneled, but the paneling had long ago vanished. Holes had been dug here and there in the walls, and he remembered having noticed that the door was gone and the metal groove in which it had slid had been pried out.

There was a big table in the middle, and chairs and couches covered with colored spreads. All the furniture was handmade, cunningly pegged together and highly polished. On the walls hung trophies of weapons--thrusting-spears and throwing-spears, crossbows and quarrels, and a number of heavy guns, crude things, but carefully made.

“Pick all this stuff up off the locals?” Harkaman asked.

“Yes, we got most of it at a big town down at the forks of the river,” Valkanhayn said. “We shook it down a couple of times. That’s where we recruited the fellows we’re using to boss the workers.”

Then he picked up a stick with a leather-covered knob and beat on a gong, bawling for wine. A voice, somewhere, replied, “Yes, master; I come!” and in a few moments a woman entered carrying a jug in either hand. She was wearing a blue bathrobe several sizes too large for her, instead of the poncho things the slaves in the hallway wore. She had dark brown hair and gray eyes; if she had not been so obviously frightened she would have been beautiful. She set the jugs on the table and brought silver cups from a chest against the wall: when Spasso dismissed her, she went out hastily.

“I suppose it’s silly to ask if you’re paying these people anything for the work they do or for the things you take from them,” Harkaman said. From the way the Space Scourge and Lamia people laughed, it evidently was. Harkaman shrugged. “Well, it’s your planet. Make any kind of a mess out of it you want to.”

“You think we ought to pay them?” Spasso was incredulous. “Damn bunch of savages!”

“They aren’t as savage as the Xochitl locals were when Haulteclere took it over. You’ve been there; you’ve seen what Prince Viktor does with them now.”

“We haven’t got the men or equipment they have on Xochitl,” Valkanhayn said. “We can’t afford to coddle the locals.”

“You can’t afford not to,” Harkaman told him. “You have two ships, here. You can only use one for raiding; the other will have to stay here to hold the planet. If you take them both away, the locals, whom you have been studiously antagonizing, will swamp whoever you leave behind. And if you don’t leave anybody behind, what’s the use of having a planetary base?”

“Well, why don’t you join us,” Spasso finally came out with it. “With our three ships we could have a real thing, here.”

Harkaman looked at him inquiringly. “The gentlemen,” Trask said, “are putting this wrongly. They mean, why don’t we let them join us?”

“Well, if you want to put it like that,” Valkanhayn conceded. “We’ll admit, your Nemesis would be the big end of it. But why not? Three ships, we could have a real base here. Nikky Gratham’s father only had two when he started on Jagannath, and look what the Grathams got there now.”

“Are we interested?” Harkaman asked.

“Not very, I’m afraid. Of course, we’ve just landed; Tanith may have great possibilities. Suppose we reserve decision for a while and look around a little.”

There were stars in the sky, and, for good measure, a sliver of moon on the western horizon. It was only a small moon, but it was close. He walked to the edge of the landing stage, and Elaine was walking with him. The noise from inside, where the Nemesis crew were feasting with those of the Lamia and Space Scourge, grew fainter. To the south, a star moved; one of the pinnaces they had left on off-planet watch. There was firelight far below, and he could hear singing. Suddenly he realized that it was the poor devils of locals whom Valkanhayn and Spasso had enslaved. Elaine went away quickly.

“Have your fill of Space Viking glamour, Lucas?”

He turned. It was Baron Rathmore, who had come along to serve for a year or so and then hitch a ride home from some base planet and cash in politically on having been with Lucas Trask.

“For the moment. I’m told that this lot aren’t typical.”

“I hope not. They’re a pack of sadistic brutes, and piggish along with it.”

“Well, brutality and bad manners I can condone, but Spasso and Valkanhayn are a pair of ignominious little crooks, and stupid along with it. If Andray Dunnan had gotten here ahead of us, he might have done one good thing in his wretched life. I can’t understand why he didn’t come here.”

“I think he still will,” Rathmore said. “I knew him and I knew Nevil Ormm. Ormm’s ambitious, and Dunnan is insanely vindictive--” He broke off with a sour laugh. “I’m telling you that!”

“Why didn’t he come here directly, then?”

“Maybe he doesn’t want a base on Tanith. That would be something constructive; Dunnan’s a destroyer. I think he took that cargo of equipment somewhere and sold it. I think he’ll wait till he’s fairly sure the other ship is finished. Then he’ll come in and shoot the place up, the way--” He bit that off abruptly.

“The way he did my wedding; I think of it all the time.”

The next morning, he and Harkaman took an aircar and went to look at the city at the forks of the river. It was completely new, in the sense that it had been built since the collapse of Federation civilization and the loss of civilized technologies. It was huddled on a long, irregularly triangular mound, evidently to raise it above flood-level. Generations of labor must have gone into it. To the eyes of a civilization using contragravity and powered equipment it wasn’t at all impressive. Fifty to a hundred men with adequate equipment could have gotten the thing up in a summer. It was only by forcing himself to think in terms of spadeful after spadeful of earth, cartload after cartload creaking behind straining beasts, timber after timber cut with axes and dressed with adzes, stone after stone and brick after brick, that he could appreciate it. They even had it walled, with a palisade of tree-trunks behind which earth and rocks had been banked, and along the river were docks, at which boats were moored. The locals simply called it Tradetown.

As they approached, a big gong began booming, and a white puff of smoke was followed by the thud of a signal-gun. The boats, long canoe-like craft and round-bowed, many-oared barges, put out hastily into the river; through binoculars they could see people scattering from the surrounding fields, driving cattle ahead of them. By the time they were over the city, nobody was in sight. They seemed to have developed a pretty fair air-raid warning system in the nine-hundred-odd hours in which they had been exposed to the figurative mercies of Boake Valkanhayn and Garvan Spasso. It hadn’t saved them entirely; a section of the city had been burned, and there were evidences of shelling. Light chemical-explosive stuff; this city was too good a cow for even those two to kill before the milking was over.

They circled slowly over it at a thousand feet. When they turned away, black smoke began rising from what might have been pottery works or brick-kilns on the outskirts; something resinous had evidently been fed to the fires. Other columns of black smoke began rising across the countryside on both sides of the river.

“You know, these people are civilized, if you don’t limit the term to contragravity and nuclear energy,” Harkaman said. “They have gunpowder, for one thing, and I can think of some rather impressive Old Terran civilizations that didn’t have that much. They have an organized society, and anybody who has that is starting toward civilization.”