Space Viking quotes

we’re contracting. We stopped expanding three hundred and fifty years ago, when that ship came back to Morglay from the Old Federation and reported what had been happening out there since the Big War. Before that, we were discovering new planets and colonizing them.

Since then, we’ve been picking the bones of the dead Terran Federation.

”

“I’d put him under treatment,” Harkaman said, drawing a finger across under his beard. “

Crazy men who pretend to thrones are bombs that ought to be deactivated, before they blow things up.

”

Now the little point on which all of it had rested was gone.

“That was another Lucas Trask, Rovard. He’s dead, now.”

The Space Viking snapped his lighter and puffed. “You know, of course, how big the Old Federation is. You know the figures, that is, but do they mean anything to you? I know they don’t to a good many spacemen, even.

We talk glibly about ten to the hundredth power, but emotionally we still count, ‘One, Two, Three, Many.’

A ship in hyperspace logs about a light-year an hour. You can go from here to Excalibur in thirty hours. But you could send a radio message announcing the birth of a son, and he’d be a father before it was received.

And Duke Angus would tax his new subjects of Glaspyth to redeem the pledges on his new barony of Traskon. Some old Pre-Atomic writer Harkaman was fond of quoting had said,

“Gold will not always get you good soldiers, but good soldiers can get you gold.”

The Nemesis came back to the Gorram yards and settled onto her curved landing legs like a monstrous spider. The Enterprise had borne the Ward sword and atom-symbol;

“I never expected it,” Harkaman said. “I thought he’d take the ship out to the Old Federation at once.” He poured wine for himself. “Of course, Dunnan’s crazy.

A crazy man has an advantage, sometimes, like a left-handed knife-fighter. He does unexpected things.

”

Seconds ago, fifty-odd million. And now, a quarter of a million, and looking close enough to touch in the screen, it would take them eight hours to reach it. Why, on hyperdrive you could go forty-eight trillion miles in that time.

Well, it took a man just as long to walk across a room today as it had taken Pharaoh the First, or Homo Sap.

In the telescopic screen Tanith looked like any picture of any Terra-type planet from space, with cloud-blurred contours of seas and continents and a vague mottling of gray and brown and green, topped at the pole by an icecap.

Organize work-gangs, and promote the best and most intelligent to foremen. And those guards could be taken in hand by some ground-fighter sergeant and given Sword-World weapons and tactical training; use them to train others; they’d need a sepoy army of some sort.

Even the best of good will is no substitute for armed force, conspicuously displayed and unhesitatingly used when necessary.

“And there’ll be no more of this raiding villages for food or anything else. We will pay for anything we get from any of the locals.”

There was a time when he wouldn’t have spoken to the fellow, or anybody else, like that.

Gresham’s law, extended: Bad manners drive out good manners.

Spasso turned on him indignantly.

“Fight. Try to kill as many Space Vikings as I could before they got me.

Terro-humans are all stupid like that. That’s why we’re human.

”

Harkaman nodded. “

Robbery and murder always are.

You don’t have to ask me who said that Space Vikings are professional robbers and murderers, but who was it said that he didn’t care how many planets were raided and how many innocents massacred in the Old Federation?”

Then draw some alcodote-vitamin pills from the medic. As soon as things are secured, there’ll be parties all over the ship, and we’ll be expected to look in on every one of them, have a drink, and say ‘Well done, boys.’ ”

Elaine came to him, while he was resting. She looked at him in horror, and he tried to hide his face from her, and then realized that he was trying to hide it from himself.

The four seaports from whence the Stolgonian invasion of Eglonsby was to have been launched were neutralized by nuclear bombing.

Neutralized was a nice word, Trask thought; there was no echo in it of the screams of the still-living, maimed and burned and blinded, around the fringes of ground-zero.

The Nemesis and the Space Scourge, from landing craft and from the ships themselves, landed Eglonsby troops on Stolgonopolis.

There was so much to do, and only a trifle under twenty-five Galactic Standard hours in a day to do it.

There were whole days in which he never thought once of Andray Dunnan.

A hundred and twenty-five days to Gram, and a hundred and twenty-five days back. They had long ago passed.

“No. I don’t think so.

Everybody will be so amazed that Space Vikings aren’t twelve feet tall, with three horns like a Zarathustra damnthing and a spiked tail like a Fafnir mantichore that they won’t even notice anything less.

Might do some good, in the long run. Crown Prince Edvard will like your Space Vikings. He’s much opposed to class distinctions and caste prejudices. Says they have to be eliminated before we can make democracy really work.”

So he could come here and put it off. Trask felt that some gesture should be made on his own part. He unfastened the dress-dagger from his belt and laid it on the table. The King nodded.

“Now, we can be a couple of honest tradesmen, our shops closed for the evening, relaxing over our wine and tobacco,” he said. “Eh, Goodman Lucas?”

It seemed like an initiation into a secret society whose ritual he must guess at step by step.

She nodded.

“We are Queen, in our own right, of our Royal Bedroom, our Royal Playroom, and our Royal Bathroom. And Mopsy is our faithful subject.”

“Is Your Majesty absolute ruler of these domains?”

“What are you devoted to, Otto?”

“You. You are my chieftain. That’s another mark of the barbarian.”

Before he had left Marduk, Admiral Shefter had ordered a ship to Gimli to check on the Honest Horris; a few men and a pinnace would be left behind to contact any ship from Tanith. He sent Boake Valkanhayn off in the Space Scourge.

“If you can’t lick them, join them,” Trask said.

“If you can’t lick them, lick their boots,” the Count of Ravary put in.

“My son is a trifle bitter,” Princess Bentrik said. “I must confess to a trace of bitterness, too.”

He wished Otto Harkaman were there. He could probably name, without stopping for breath, a hundred great nations that went down into rubble because their rulers believed that they should bow instead of rule, and couldn’t bring themselves to shed the blood of their people.

Edvard would have been a fine and admirable man, as a little country baron. Where he was, he was a disaster.

He asked if the People’s Watchman had dragged their guns out from under the bed and started carrying them in public yet.

Nemesis and Starhopper sledgehammered each other and parried with counter-missiles, and then, quite unexpectedly, the Starhopper went to Em-See-Square.

There was an awful lot of Em being converted to Ee off Marduk, today.

Including Manfred Ravallo; that grieved him. Manfred was a good man, and a good friend. He had a girl in Rivington.