Labor trouble?" The mate was surprised. "You mean with the
farm-tramps? Ten of them for every job, if you call that trouble."

"Well, I noticed you have steel gratings over the gangway heads to the
lower deck, and all your crewmen are armed. Not just pistols, either."

"Oh. That's on account of pirates."

"Pirates?" Conn echoed.

"Well, I guess you'd call them that. A gang'll come aboard, dressed
like farm-tramps; they'll have tommy guns and sawed-off shotguns in
their bindles. When the ship's airborne and out of reach of help,
they'll break out their guns and take her. Usually kill all the crew
and passengers. They don't like to leave live witnesses," the mate
said. "You heard about the _Harriet Barne_, didn't you?"

She was Transcontinent & Overseas, the biggest contragravity ship on
the planet.

"They didn't pirate her, did they?"

The mate nodded. "Six months ago; Blackie Perales' gang. There was
just a tag end of a radio call, that ended in a shot. Time the Air
Patrol got to her estimated position it was too late. Nobody's ever
seen ship, officers, crew or passengers since."

"Well, great Ghu; isn't the Government doing anything about it?"

"Sure. They offered a big reward for the pirates, dead or alive. And
there hasn't been a single case of piracy inside the city limits of
Storisende," he added solemnly.

The Calder Range had grown to a sharp blue line on the horizon ahead,
and he could see the late afternoon sun on granite peaks. Below, the
fields were bare and brown, and the woods were autumn-tinted. They had
been green with new foliage when he had last seen them, and the
wine-melon fields had been in pink blossom. Must have gotten the crop
in early, on this side of the mountains. Maybe they were still
harvesting, over in the Gordon Valley. Or maybe this gang below was
going to the wine-pressing. Now that he thought of it, he'd seen a lot
of cask staves going aboard at Storisende.

Yet there seemed to be less land under cultivation now than six years
ago. He could see squares of bracken and low brush that had been melon
fields recently, among the new forests that had grown up in the past
forty years. The few stands of original timber towered above the
second growth like hills; those trees had been there when the planet
had been colonized.

That had been two hundred years ago, at the beginning of the Seventh
Century, Atomic Era. The name "Poictesme" told that--Surromanticist
Movement, when they we