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cross-fire position. He mentioned this to Harkaman and Alvyn Karffard; they
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both laughed.
"Just holding ship's meetings," Karffard said. "They'll be yacking back and
forth for a-couple of hours yet."
"Yes, Valkanhayn and Spasso don't own their ships," Harkaman explained.
"They've gone in debt to their crews for supplies and maintenance till
everybody owns everything in common. The ships look like it, too. They don't
even command, really; they just preside over elected command councils."
Finally, they had both of the more or less commanders on screen. Valkanhayn
had zipped up his shirt and put on a jacket. Garvan Spasso was a small man,
partly bald. His eyes were a shade too close together, and his thin mouth had
a bitterly crafty twist. He began speaking at once:
"Captain, Boake tells me you say you're not here in the service of the Duke of
Wardshaven at all." He said it aggrievedly, almost accusingly.
"That's correct," Harkaman said. "We came here because Lord Trask thought
another -Gram ship, the Enterprise, would be here. Since she isn't, there's no
point in our being here. We do hope, though, that you won't make any
difficulty about our letting down and giving our men a couple of hundred
hours' liberty. They've been in hyperspace for three thousand hours."
46
"See!" Spasso clamored. "He wants to trick us into letting him land . . ."
"Captain Spasso," Trask cut in. "Will you please stop insulting everybody's
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intelligence, your own included." Spasso glared at him, beligerantly but
hopefully. "I understand what you thought you were going to do here. You
expected Captain Harkaman here to establish a base for the Duke of Wardshaven,
and you thought, if you were here ahead of him and in a posture of defense,
that he'd take you into the Duke's service rather than waste ammunition and
risk dam- 1 age and casualties wiping you out. Well, I'm very sorry,
gentlemen. Captain Harkaman is in my service and I'm not in the least
interested in establishing a base on Tanith."
Valkanhayn and Spasso looked at each other. At least, in the two side-by-side
screens, their eyes shifted, each to the other's screen on his own ship.
"I get it!" Spasso cried suddenly. "There's two ships, the Enterprise and this
one. The Duke of Wardshaven fitted out a the Enterprise, and somebody else
fitted out this one. They both want to put in a base here!"
That opened a glorious vista. Instead of merely capitalizing on their
nuisance-value, they might find themselves holding the balance of power in a
struggle for the planet. All sorts of profitable perfidies were possible.
"Why, sure you can land Otto," Valkanhayn said. "I know what it's like to be
three thousand hours in hyper, myself."
"You're at this old city with the two tall tower-buildings, aren't you?"
Harkaman asked. He looked up at the view screen. "Ought to be about midnight
there now. How's the spaceport? When I was here, it was pretty bad."
"Oh, we've been fixing it up. We got a big gang of locals working for us . .
."
The city was familiar, from Otto Harkaman's descriptions and from the pictures
Vann Larch had painted during the long jump from Gram. As they came in, it,
looked impressive, spreading for miles around the twin buildings that spired
almost three . thousand feet above it, with a great spaceport like an eight
pointed star at one side. Whoever had built it, in the sunset splendor of the
old Terran Fed-
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eration, must have done so confident that it would become the metropolis of a
populous and prospering world. Then the sun of the Federation had gone down.
Nobody knew ':a what had happened on Tanith after that, but evidently none of
it had been good.
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At first, the two towers seemed as sound as when they had been built;
gradually it became apparent that one was broken at the top. For the most
part, the smaller buildings scattered widely around them were standing, though
here and there mounds of brush-grown rubble showed where some had fallen in.
The spaceport looked good-a central octagon' mass of buildings, the
landing-berths, and, beyond, the triangular areas of airship docks and
warehouses. The central building was outwardly intact, and the ship-berths
seemed clear of wreckage and rubble.
By the time the Nemesis was following the Space-Scourge and the Lamia down,
towed by her own pinnaces, the illusion that they were approaching a living
city had vanished. The interspaces between the, buildings were choked with
forest growth, broken by a few small fields and garden plots. At one time,
there had been three of the high buildings, literally vertical cities in
themselves. Where the third had stood was a glazed crater, with a ridge of
fallen rubble lying away from it. Somebody must have landed a medium missile,
about twenty kilotons, against its base. Something of the same sort had scored
on the far edge of the spaceport, and one of the eight arrowheads of docks and
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warehouses was an indistinguishable slagpile.
The rest of the city seemed to have died of neglect rather than violence. It
certainly hadn't been bombed out. Harkaman thought most of the fighting had
been done with subneutron bombs or Omegaray bombs, that killed the people
without damaging the real estate. Or weapons; a manmade plague that had gotten
out of control and all but depopulated the planet.
"It takes an awful lot of people, working together at an awful lot of jobs, to
keep a civilization running. Smash the installations and kill the top
technicians and scientists, and the masses don't know how to rebuild. They go
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