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Updated: May 13, 2025
There were trees, and birds, and various other commonplace living things whose forebears had been dumped on Darth some centuries before. The ecological system had worked itself out strictly by hit-or-miss, but the result was not unfamiliar.
He drove the little yacht well out, until Darth was only a spotted ball with visible clouds and ice caps. Then he lined up for Walden, direct, and went into overdrive. Within hours he noted the disturbing feel of things. His followers were not happy. They moped. They sat in corners and submerged themselves in misery.
The boat port opened. The two from Walden would have thought everything safe because it was under guard. On Walden that protection would have been enough. On Darth, the spaceboat had not been looted simply because locks, there, were not made with separate vibration-checks to keep vibration from loosening them. On spaceboats such a precaution was usual.
There was a wonderful change in him; he felt little or no reluctance to pay the visits now. The pleasurable excitement of answering Mr. Darth had put him in a fine aggressive frame of mind for asserting himself in the neighborhood. "Whatever else they may say of me, they shan't say I was afraid to face them."
If a girl asked a man if he would fight for her, and he agreed, then within a day and a night he had to fight the man she sent him to fight, or else he was disgraced. And disgrace on Darth meant that the shamed man could be plundered or killed by anybody who chose to do so, but he would be hanged by indignant authority if he resisted. It was a great deal worse than outlawry.
He had to return his crew, and there was something else. Several something elses. He arrived in that solar-system and put his yacht in a search-orbit, listening for the call-signal the spaceboat should give for him to home on. He found it, deep within the gravity-field of Darth. He maneuvered to come alongside, and there was blinding light everywhere. Alarms rang. Lights went out.
Nine spaceships at one time traveling in orbit around a primitive planet like Darth a fleet of spaceships. It couldn't happen! Hoddan couldn't conceive of such a thing. But a recently developed pessimism suggested that since everything else, to date, had been to his disadvantage, this was probably a catastrophe also. He groaned and lay down to sleep again.
Hoddan paced up and down the ancient flooring of this compartment in an ancient ship. Presently he said jerkily: "With all the good will in the world.... Darth is poverty-stricken. It has no industries. It has no technology. It has not even roads! It is a planet of little villages and tiny towns. A ship from elsewhere stops here only once a month. Ground communications are almost nonexistent.
To spread the word of your need over Darth would require months. But to collect what might be given, without roads or even wheeled vehicles No. It's impossible! And I have the only space vessel on the planet, and it's not fit for a journey between suns." The bearded man waited with a sort of implacable despair. "But," said Hoddan grimly, "I have an idea. I ... ah ... have contacts on Walden.
And there were innumerable castles on Darth, with quite as many shiftly noblemen, and certainly no fewer plunder-hungry Darthian gentlemen hanging around them. But Don Loris' castle had one real advantage and one which existed only in Hoddan's mind. Don Loris' retainers did know that Hoddan had led their companions to loot. Large loot.
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