"Well, Baron Cragdale; speaking as Baron Trask of Traskon, suppose we just work out a rough outline of what this treaty ought to be, and then consult, unofficially, with a few people whom you can trust, and see what can be done about presenting it to the proper government officials...."
The Prime Minister came to Cragdale that evening, heavily incognito and accompanied by several leaders of the Crown Loyalist Party. In principle, they all favored a treaty with Tanith. Politically, they had doubts. Not before the election; too controversial a subject. "Controversial," it appeared, was the dirtiest dirty-name anything could be called on Marduk. It would alienate the labor vote; they'd think increased imports would threaten employment in Mardukan industries. Some of the interstellar trading companies would like a chance at the Tanith planets; others would resent Tanith ships being given access to theirs. And Zaspar Makann's party were already shrieking protests about the Nemesis being repaired by the Royal Navy.
And a couple of professors who inclined toward Makann had introduced a resolution calling for the court-martial of Prince Bentrik and an investigation of the loyalty of Admiral Shefter. And somebody else, probably a stooge of Makann's, was claiming that Bentrik had sold the Victrix to the Space Vikings and that the films of the battle of Audhumla were fakes, photographed in miniature at the Navy Moon Base.
Admiral Shefter, when Trask flew in to see him the next day, was contemptuous about this last.
"Ignore the whole bloody thing; we get something like that before every general election. On this planet, you can always kick the Gilgameshers and the Armed Forces with impunity, neither have votes and neither can kick back. The whole thing'll be forgotten the day after the election. It always is."
"That's if Makann doesn't win the election," Trask qualified.
"That's no matter who wins the election. They can't any of them get along without the Navy, and they bloody well know it."
Trask wanted to know if Intelligence had been getting anything.
"Not on how Dunnan found out the Victrix had been ordered to Audhumla, no," Shefter said. "There wasn't any secrecy about it; at least a thousand people, from myself down to the shoeshine boys, could have known about it as soon as the order was taped.
"As for the list of ships you gave me, yes. One of them puts in to this planet regularly; she spaced out from here only yesterday morning. The Honest Horris."
"Well, great Satan, haven't you done anything?"
"I don't know if there's anything we can do. Oh, we're investigating, but.... You see, this ship first showed up here four years ago, commanded by some kind of a Neobarb, not a Gilgamesher, named Horris Sasstroff. He claimed to be from Skathi; the locals there have a few ships, the Space Vikings had a base on Skathi about a hundred or so years ago. Naturally, the ship had no papers. Tramp trading among the Neobarbs, it might be years before you'd put in on a planet where they'd ever heard of ship's papers.
"The ship seems to have been in bad shape, probably abandoned on Skathi as junk a century ago and tinkered up by the locals. She was in here twice, according to the commercial shipping records, and the second time she was in too bad shape to be moved out, and Sasstroff couldn't pay to have her rebuilt, so she was libeled for spaceport charges and sold. Some one-lung trading company bought her and fixed her up a little; they went bankrupt in a year or so, and she was bought by another small company, Startraders, Ltd., and they've been using her on a milk-run to and from Gimli. They seem to be a legitimate outfit, but we're looking into them. We're looking for Sasstroff, too, but we haven't been able to find him."
"If you have a ship out Gimli way, you might find out if anybody there knows anything about her. You may discover that she hasn't been going there at all."
"We might, at that," Shefter agreed. "We'll just find out."
Everybody at Cragdale knew about the projected treaty with Tanith by the morning after Trask's first conversation with Prince Edvard on the subject. The Queen of the Royal Bedroom, the Royal Playroom and the Royal Bathroom was insisting that her domains should have a treaty with Tanith, too.
It was beginning to look to Trask as though that would be the only treaty he'd sign on Marduk, and he was having his doubts about that.
"Do you think it would be wise?" he asked Lady Valerie Alvarath. The Queen of three rooms and one four-footed subject had already decreed that Lady Valerie should be the Space Viking Prince's girl on the planet of Marduk. "If it got out, these People's Welfare lunatics would pick it up and twist it into evidence of some kind of a sinister plot."
"Oh, I believe Her Majesty could sign a treaty with Prince Trask," Her Majesty's Prime Minister decided. "But it would have to be kept very secret."
"Gee!" Myrna's eyes widened. "A real secret treaty; just like the wicked rulers of the old dictatorship!" She hugged her subject ecstatically. "I'll bet Grandpa doesn't even have any secret treaties!"
In a few days, everybody on Marduk knew that a treaty with Tanith was being discussed. If they didn't, it was no fault of Zaspar Makann's party, who seemed to command a disconcertingly large number of telecast stations, and who drenched the ether with horror stories of Space Viking atrocities and denunciations of carefully unnamed traitors surrounding the King and the Crown Prince who were about to betray Marduk to rapine and plunder. The leak evidently did not come from Cragdale, for it was generally believed that Trask was still at the Royal Palace in Malverton. At least, that was where the Makannists were demonstrating against him.
He watched such a demonstration by screen; the pickup was evidently on one of the landing stages of the palace, overlooking the wide parks surrounding it. They were packed almost solid with people, surging forward toward the thin cordon of police. The front of the mob looked like a checkerboard—a block in civilian dress, then a block in the curiously effeminate-looking uniforms of Zaspar Makann's People's Watchmen, then more in ordinary garb, and more People's Watchmen. Over the heads of the crowds, at intervals, floated small contragravity lifters on which were mounted the amplifiers that were bellowing:
"SPACE VI-KING—GO HOME! SPACE VI-KING—GO HOME!"
The police stood motionless, at parade rest; the mob surged closer. When they were fifty yards away, the blocks of People's Watchmen ran forward, then spread out until they formed a line six deep across the entire front; other blocks, from the rear, pushed the ordinary demonstrators aside and took their place. Hating them more every second, Trask grudged approval of a smart and disciplined maneuver. How long, he wondered, had they been drilling in that sort of tactics? Without stopping, they continued their advance on the police, who had now shifted their stance.
"SPACE VI-KING—GO HOME! SPACE VI-KING—GO HOME!"
"Fire!" he heard himself yelling. "Don't let them get any closer, fire now!"
They had nothing to fire with; they had only truncheons, no better weapons than the knobbed swagger-sticks of the People's Watchmen. They simply disappeared, after a brief flurry of blows, and the Makann storm-troopers continued their advance.
And that was that. The gates of the Palace were shut; the mob, behind a front of Makann People's Watchmen, surged up to them and stopped. The loud-speakers bellowed on, reiterating their four-word chant.