ted 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