sed it, and kept on firing
till the survivors turned tail and ran. Then sent out more cars, and
shot everybody wearing a People's Watchmen uniform, all over town.
Inside forty-eight hours, there'd be no People's Welfare party, and
no Zaspar Makann either."

The Crown Prince's face stiffened. "That may be the way you do
things in the Sword-Worlds, Prince Trask. It's not the way we do
things here on Marduk. Our government does not propose to be guilty
of shedding the blood of its people."

He had it on the tip of his tongue to retort that if they didn't,
the people would end by shedding theirs. Instead, he said softly:

"I'm sorry, Prince Edvard. You had a wonderful civilization here on
Marduk. You could have made almost anything of it. But it's too late
now. You've torn down the gates; the barbarians are in."

[Illustration][Illustration]

XXIII

The colored turbulence faded into the gray of hyperspace;
five hundred hours to Tanith. Guatt Kirbey was securing his
control-panel, happy to return to his music. And Vann Larch would go
back to his paints and brushes, and Alvyn Karffard to the working
model of whatever it was he had left unfinished when the _Nemesis_
had emerged at the end of the jump from Audhumla.

Trask went to the index of the ship's library and punched for
_History, Old Terran_. There was plenty of that, thanks to Otto
Harkaman. Then he punched for _Hitler, Adolf_. Harkaman was right;
anything that could happen in a human society had already happened,
in one form or another, somewhere and at some time. Hitler could
help him understand Zaspar Makann.

By the time the ship came out, with the yellow sun of Tanith
in the middle of the screen, he knew a great deal about Hitler,
occasionally referred to as Schicklgruber, and he understood, with
sorrow, how the lights of civilization on Marduk were going out.

Beside the _Lamia_, stripped of her Dillinghams and crammed with
heavy armament and detection instruments, the _Space Scourge_ and
the _Queen Flavia_ were on off-planet watch. There were half a dozen
other ships on orbit just above atmosphere; a Gilgamesher, one of
the Gram-Tanith freighters, a couple of free-lance Space Vikings,
and a new and unfamiliar ship. When he asked the moonbase who she
was, he was told that she was the _Sun Goddess_, Amaterasu. That
was, by almost a year, better than he had expected of them. Otto
Harkaman was out in the _Corisande_, raiding and visiting the
tra