Space Viking, H. Beam Piper [best classic romance novels txt] 📗

powder over it, but government always seems to us like sovereignty interfering in matters that don’t concern it. As long as sovereignty maintains a reasonable semblance of good public order and makes the more serious forms of crime fairly hazardous for the criminals, we’re satisfied.”

“But that’s just negative. Doesn’t the government do anything positive for the people?”

He tried to explain the Sword-World feudal system to them. It was hard, he found, to explain something you have taken for granted all your life to somebody who is quite unfamiliar with it.

“But the government⁠—the sovereignty, since you don’t like the other word⁠—doesn’t do anything for the people!” one of the professors objected. “It leaves all the social services to the whim of the individual lord or baron.”

“And the people have no voice at all; why, that’s tyranny,” a professor Assemblyman added.

He tried to explain that the people had a very distinct and commanding voice, and that barons and lords who wanted to stay alive listened attentively to it. The Assemblyman changed his mind; that wasn’t tyranny, it was anarchy. And the professor was still insistent about who performed the social services.

“If you mean schools and hospitals and keeping the city clean, the people do that for themselves. The government, if you want to think of it as that, just sees to it that nobody’s shooting at them while they’re doing it.”

“That isn’t what Professor Pullwell means, Lucas. He means old-age pensions,” Prince Bentrik said. “Like this thing Zaspar Makann’s whooping for.”

He’d heard about that, on the voyage from Audhumla. Every person on Marduk would be retired on an adequate pension after thirty years regular employment or at the age of sixty. When he had wanted to know where the money would come from, he had been told that there would be a sales tax, and that the pensions must all be spent within thirty days, which would stimulate business, and the increased business would provide tax money to pay the pensions.

“We have a joke about three Gilgameshers space-wrecked on an uninhabited planet,” he said. “Ten years later, when they were rescued, all three were immensely wealthy, from trading hats with each other. That’s about the way this thing will work.”

One of the lady social workers bristled; it wasn’t right to make derogatory jokes about racial groups. One of the professors harrumphed; wasn’t a parallel at all, the Self-Sustaining Rotary Pension Plan was perfectly feasible. With a shock, Trask recalled that he was a professor of economics.

Alvyn Karffard wouldn’t need any twenty ships to loot Marduk. Just infiltrate it with about a hundred smart confidence men and inside a year they’d own everything on it.

That started them all off on Zaspar Makann, though. Some of them thought he had a few good ideas, but was damaging his own case by extremism. One of the wealthier nobles said that he was a reproach to the ruling class; it was their fault that people like Makann could gain a following. One old gentleman said that maybe the Gilgameshers were to blame, themselves, for some of the animosity toward them. He was immediately set upon by all the others and verbally torn to pieces on the spot.

Trask didn’t feel it proper to quote Goodman Mikhyl to this crowd. He took the responsibility upon himself for saying:

“From what I’ve heard of him, I think he’s the most serious threat to civilized society on Marduk.”

They didn’t call him crazy, after all he was a guest, but they didn’t ask him what he meant, either. They merely told him that Makann was a crackpot with a contemptible following of half-wits, and just wait till the election and see what happened.

“I’m inclined to agree with Prince Trask,” Bentrik said soberly. “And I’m afraid the election results will be a shock to us, not to Makann.”

He hadn’t talked that way on the ship. Maybe he’d been looking around and doing some thinking, since he got back. He might have been talking to Goodman Mikhyl, too. There was a screen in the room. He nodded toward it.

“He’s speaking at a rally of the People’s Welfare Party at Drepplin, now,” he said. “May I put it on, to show you what I mean?”

When the Crown Prince assented, he snapped on the screen and twiddled at the selector.

A face looked out of it. The features weren’t Andray Dunnan’s⁠—the mouth was wider, the cheekbones broader, the chin more rounded. But his eyes were Dunnan’s, as Trask had seen them on the terrace of Karvall House. Mad eyes. His high-pitched voice screamed:

“Our beloved sovereign is a prisoner! He is surrounded by traitors! The Ministries are full of them! They are all traitors! The bloodthirsty reactionaries of the falsely so-called Crown Loyalist Party! The grasping conspiracy of the interstellar bankers! The dirty Gilgameshers! They are all leagued together in an unholy conspiracy! And now this Space Viking, this bloody-handed monster from the Sword-Worlds.⁠ ⁠…”

“Shut the horrible man off,” somebody was yelling, in competition with the hypnotic scream of the speaker.

The trouble was, they couldn’t. They could turn off the screen, but Zaspar Makann would go on screaming, and millions all over the planet would still hear him. Bentrik twiddled the selector. The voice stuttered briefly, and then came echoing out of the speaker, but this time the pickup was somewhere several hundred feet above a great open park. It was densely packed with people, most of them wearing clothes a farm tramp on Gram wouldn’t be found dead in, but here and there among them were blocks of men in what was almost but not quite military uniform, each with a short and thick swagger-stick with a knobbed head. Across the park, in the distance, the head and shoulders of Zaspar Makann loomed a hundred feet high in a huge screen. Whenever he stopped for breath, a shout would go up, beginning with the blocks of uniformed men:

“Makann! Makann! Makann the Leader! Makann to Power!”

“You even let him have a private army?” he asked the Crown Prince.

“Oh, those