alryman wiped them all out with his machine guns.

"They don't have a chance," he'd said, half-sick. "But they keep on
fighting."

"Yes; stupid of them, isn't it?" Harkaman, beside him, had said.

"What would you do in their place?"

"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."

* * * * *

If the taking of the city had been a massacre, the sack that had
followed had been a man-made Hell. He had gone down, along with
Harkaman, while the fighting, if it could be so called, was still
going on. Harkaman had suggested that the men ought to see him
moving about among them; for his own part, he had felt a compulsion
to share their guilt.

He and Sir Paytrik Morland had been on foot together in one of the
big hollow buildings that had stood since Khepera had been a Member
Republic of the Terran Federation. The air was acrid with smoke,
powder smoke and the smoke of burning. It was surprising, how much
would burn, in this city of concrete and vitrified stone. It was
surprising, too, how well-kept everything was, at least on the
ground level. These people had taken pride in their city.

They found themselves alone, in a great empty hallway; the noise and
horror of the sack had moved away from them, or they from it, and
then, when they entered a side hall, they saw a man, one of the
locals, squatting on the floor with the body of a woman cradled on
his lap. She was dead, half her head had been blown off, but he was
clasping her tightly, her blood staining his shirt, and sobbing
heartbrokenly. A carbine lay forgotten on the floor beside him.

"Poor devil," Morland said, and started forward.

"No."

Trask stopped him with his left hand. With his right, he drew his
pistol and shot the man dead. Morland was horrified.

"Great Satan, Lucas! Why did you do that?"

"I wish Andray Dunnan had done that for me." He thumbed the safety
on and holstered the pistol. "None of this would be happening if
he had. How many more happinesses do you think we've smashed here
today? And we don't even have Dunnan's excuse of madness."

The next morning, with everything of value collected and sent
aboard, they had started cross-country for five hundred miles to
another city, the first hundred over a countryside asmoke from
burning villages Valkanhayn's men had pillaged the night before.
There was no warning; Khepera h