"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 n.o.body'd see the ship."

"Is that a regular s.p.a.ce 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 winegla.s.s 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 winegla.s.s. "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 s.p.a.ceworthy, 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 pa.s.sed pleasantly enough. The Mardukan officers were good company, and found their s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce 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. "n.o.body does much bowing and sc.r.a.ping to the cla.s.s above him; he's too busy trying to shove himself up into it. And the men who ship out as s.p.a.ce Vikings are the least cla.s.s-conscious of the lot. Think my men may have trouble on Marduk about that? They'll all insist on doing their drinking in the sw.a.n.kiest places in town."

[Ill.u.s.tration]

"No. I don't think so. Everybody will be so amazed that s.p.a.ce Vikings aren't twelve feet tall, with three horns like a Zarathustra d.a.m.nthing and a spiked tail like a Fafnir mantich.o.r.e that they won't even notice anything less. Might do some good, in the long run. Crown Prince Edvard will like your s.p.a.ce Vikings. He's much opposed to cla.s.s 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 n.o.bles; 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 va.s.sals 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 n.o.bles; they have to get them from their va.s.sal 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 a.s.sembly; 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 compet.i.tive examination for the bottom jobs and promoted up the bureaucratic ladder from there.

This left Trask wondering if the Mardukan const.i.tution 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 n.o.bles 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 a.s.signed 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 hypers.p.a.ce 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 n.o.bleman declared.

"It could if Zaspar Makann's party wins control of the a.s.sembly 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 s.p.a.ceman 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 a.s.sembly, but that was doubtful--not enough of them in any representative district to elect an a.s.semblyman. 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.