year." He gave his
coffee cup back to the robot and got to his feet. "Get a little
rest, for a couple of hours. 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.

XII

They came straight down on Eglonsby, on Amaterasu, the _Nemesis_
and the _Space Scourge_ side by side. The radar had picked them up
at point-five light-seconds; by this time the whole planet knew
they were coming, and nobody was wondering why. Paul Koreff was
monitoring at least twenty radio stations, assigning somebody to
each one as it was identified. What was coming in was uniformly
excited, some panicky, and all in fairly standard Lingua Terra.

Garvan Spasso was perturbed. So, in the communication screen from
the _Space Scourge_, was Boake Valkanhayn.

"They got radio, and they got radar," he clamored.

"Well, so what?" Harkaman asked. "They had radio and radar twenty
years ago, when Rock Morgan was here in the _Coalsack_. But they
don't have nuclear energy, do they?"

"Well, no. I'm picking up a lot of industrial electrical discharge,
but nothing nuclear."

"All right. A man with a club can lick a man with his fists. A man
with a gun can lick half a dozen with clubs. And two ships with
nuclear weapons can lick a whole planet without them. Think it's
time, Lucas?"

He nodded. "Paul, can you cut in on that Eglonsby station yet?"

"What are you going to do?" Valkanhayn wanted to know, against it
in advance.

"Summon them to surrender. If they don't, we will drop a hellburner,
and then we will pick out another city and summon it to surrender.
I don't think the second one will refuse. If we are going to be
murderers, we'll do it right, this time."

Valkanhayn was aghast, probably at the idea of burning an unlooted
city. Spasso was sputtering something about, "... Teach the dirty
Neobarbs a lesson--" Koreff told him he was switched on. He picked
up a hand-phone.

"Space Vikings _Nemesis_ and _Space Scourge_, calling the city of
Eglonsby. Space Vikings...."

He repeated it for over a minute; there was no reply.

"Vann," he called Guns-and-Missil