rength. They would awe Walden
thoroughly. And then they'd go on, faithfully leaving similar letters
and similar impressions on Krim, and Lohala, and Tralee, and Famagusta,
and throughout the Coalsack stars until the stock of addressed missives
ran out. They would perform this kindly act out of gratitude to Hoddan.

And every planet they visited would be left with the impression that the
fleet overhead was that of bloodthirsty space-marauders who would
presently send single ships to collect loot--which must be yielded
without resistance. Such looting expeditions were to be looked for
regularly and must be submitted to under penalty of unthinkable
retribution from the monster fleet of space.

Now, as the yacht descended on Walden, it represented that mythical but
impressive piratical empire of Hoddan's contrivance. He listened with
genuine pleasure to the broadcasts. When low enough, he even picked up
the pictures of highways thronged with fugitives from the to-be-looted
town. He saw Waldenian police directing the traffic of flight. He saw
other traffic heading toward the city. Walden was the most highly
civilized planet in the Nurmi Cluster, and its citizens had had no
worries at all except about tranquilizers to enable them to stand it.
When something genuinely exciting turned up, they wanted to be there to
see it.

The yacht descended below the clouds. Hoddan turned on an emergency
flare to make a landing by. Sitting in the control room he saw his own
ship as the broadcast cameras picked it up and relayed it to millions of
homes. He was impressed. It was a glaring eye of fierce light,
descending deliberately with a dark and mysterious spacecraft behind it.
He heard the chattered on-the-spot news accounts of the happening. He
saw the people who had not left Ensfield joined by avid visitors. He saw
all of them held back by police, who frantically shepherded them away
from the area in which the pirates should begin their horrid work.

Hoddan even watched pleasurably from his control room as the broadcast
cameras daringly showed the actual touch-down of the ship; the dramatic
slow opening of its entrance port: the appearance of authentic pirates
in the opening, armed to the teeth, bristling ferociously, glaring about
them at the here-silent, here-deserted streets of the city left to their
mercy.

It was a splendid broadcast. Hoddan would have liked to stay and watch
all of it. But he had work to do. He had to supervis