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Updated: May 17, 2025
"You'll find it even harder than what you're doing now." Trask looked at some of the reports that had come in from elsewhere on the planet. Harkaman had landed on one of the big cities to the east, and the people had risen against Makann's local bosses and were helping wipe out the People's Watchmen with arms they had been furnished.
Harkaman regretted that for a few seconds, and then shrugged. "Our grandchildren, if any, will probably be raiding Marduk." "You think it'll be like that?" "Don't you? You were there; you saw what's happening. The barbarians are rising; they have a leader, and they're uniting. Every society rests on a barbarian base. The people who don't understand civilization, and wouldn't like it if they did.
"You don't want to do either, do you?" Harkaman asked him, when they were alone after the second day of acrimony. "Nifflheim, no! This crowd that wants an attack on Xochitl; you know what would happen if we did that?" Harkaman was silent, waiting for him to continue.
That brought Harkaman to his feet with a roar of approval. Grauffis looked at him, his mouth slightly open. "Lucas Trask Space Viking," he said. "Now I've heard everything." Well, why not?
Grauffis excused himself to make a screen call and then returned to excuse himself again. Evidently Duke Angus had dropped whatever he was doing as soon as he heard what his henchman had to tell him. Harkaman was silent until after he was out of the room, then said: "Lord Trask, this is a wonderful thing for me. It's not been pleasant to be a shipless captain living on strangers' bounty.
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.
One air-cavalryman wiped them all out with his machine guns. "They don't have a chance," he'd said, half-sick. "But they keep on fighting." "Yes; stupid of them, isn't it?" Harkaman, beside him, had said. "What would you do in their place?" "Fight. Try to kill as many Space Vikings as I could before they got me. Terro-humans are all stupid like that. That's why we're human."
He wasn't planning any raid; he was planning conquest, in the only way a great civilization can be conquered by subversion." "Yes," Harkaman put in. "Five years ago, when Dunnan started this programme, who was this Makann, anyhow?" "Nobody," Bentrik said. "A crackpot agitator in Drepplin; he had a coven of fellow-crackpots, who met in the back room of a saloon and had their office in a cigar box.
That seemed to be the reply Harkaman was expecting. "Beside poultry, that is?" Harkaman shook his head. "This is Captain Valkanhayn's planet; his and Captain Spasso's. Let them be stuck with it." "But, look; this is a good planet. There's a big local city, maybe ten or twenty thousand people; temples and palaces and everything. Then, there are a couple of old Federation cities.
"That's what we've been telling you, all along," Spasso broke in eagerly. "This is a wonderful planet " "It could be. All it has now is possibilities. We'd need a spaceport, for one thing." "Well, what's this, here?" Valkanhayn wanted to know. "It was a spaceport," Harkaman told him. "It could be one again. And we'd need a shipyard, capable of any kind of heavy repair work.
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