Space Viking | Page 3

objection. There were fewer and fewer men of that
sort on any of the Sword-Worlds.

II
A dozen men clustered around the bartending robot--his cousin and
family lawyer, Nikkolay Trask; Lothar Ffayle, the banker; Alex
Gorram, the shipbuilder, and his son Basil; Baron Rathmore; more of
the Wardshaven nobles whom he knew only distantly. And Otto
Harkaman.
Harkaman was a Space Viking. That would have set him apart, even if
he hadn't topped the tallest of them by a head. He wore a short black
jacket, heavily gold-braided, and black trousers inside ankle-boots; the
dagger on his belt was no mere dress-ornament. His tousled red-brown
hair was long enough to furnish extra padding in a combat-helmet, and

his beard was cut square at the bottom.
He had been fighting on Durendal, for one of the branches of the royal
house contesting fratricidally for the throne. The wrong one; he had lost
his ship, and most of his men and, almost, his own life. He had been a
penniless refugee on Flamberge, owning only the clothes he stood in
and his personal weapons and the loyalty of half a dozen adventurers as
penniless as himself, when Duke Angus had invited him to Gram to
command the Enterprise.
"A pleasure, Lord Trask. I've met your lovely bride-to-be, and now that
I meet you, let me congratulate both." Then, as they were having a
drink together, he put his foot in it by asking: "You're not an investor in
the Tanith Adventure, are you?"
He said he wasn't, and would have let it go at that. Young Basil Gorram
had to get his foot in, too.
"Lord Trask does not approve of the Tanith Adventure," he said
scornfully. "He thinks we should stay home and produce wealth,
instead of exporting robbery and murder to the Old Federation for it."
The smile remained on Otto Harkaman's face; only the friendliness was
gone. He unobtrusively shifted his drink to his left hand.
"Well, our operations are definable as robbery and murder," he agreed.
"Space Vikings are professional robbers and murderers. And you object?
Perhaps you find me personally objectionable?"
"I wouldn't have shaken your hand or had a drink with you if I did. I
don't care how many planets you raid or cities you sack, or how many
innocents, if that's what they are, you massacre in the Old Federation.
You couldn't possibly do anything worse than those people have been
doing to one another for the past ten centuries. What I object to is the
way you're raiding the Sword-Worlds."
"You're crazy!" Basil Gorram exploded.

"Young man," Harkaman reproved, "the conversation was between
Lord Trask and myself. And when somebody makes a statement you
don't understand, don't tell him he's crazy. Ask him what he means.
What do you mean, Lord Trask?"
"You should know; you've just raided Gram for eight hundred of our
best men. You raided me for close to forty vaqueros, farm-workers,
lumbermen, machine-operators, and I doubt I'll be able to replace them
with as good." He turned to the elder Gorram. "Alex, how many have
you lost to Captain Harkaman?"
Gorram tried to make it a dozen; pressed, he admitted to a score and a
half. Roboticians, machine-supervisors, programmers, a couple of
engineers, a foreman. There was grudging agreement from the others.
Burt Sandrasan's engine-works had lost almost as many, of the same
kind. Even Lothar Ffayle admitted to losing a computerman and a
guard-sergeant.
And after they were gone, the farms and ranches and factories would go
on, almost but not quite as before. Nothing on Gram, nothing on any of
the Sword-Worlds, was done as efficiently as three centuries ago. The
whole level of Sword-World life was sinking, like the east coastline of
this continent, so slowly as to be evident only from the records and
monuments of the past. He said as much, and added:
"And the genetic loss. The best Sword-World genes are literally
escaping to space, like the atmosphere of a low-gravity planet, each
generation begotten by fathers slightly inferior to the last. It wasn't so
bad when the Space Vikings raided directly from the Sword-Worlds;
they got home once in a while. Now they're conquering planets in the
Old Federation for bases, and staying there."
* * * * *
Everybody had begun to relax; this wouldn't be a quarrel. Harkaman,
who had shifted his drink back to his right hand, chuckled.
"That's right. I've fathered my share of brats in the Old Federation, and

I know Space Vikings whose fathers were born on Old Federation
planets." He turned to Basil Gorram. "You see, the gentleman isn't
crazy, at all. That's what happened to the Terran Federation, by the way.
The good men all left to colonize, and the stuffed shirts and yes-men
and herd-followers