ourge_ company, seemed
resentful. They felt the culprits had deserved what they'd gotten;
not for what they'd done to the locals, but for disobeying orders.

A few troops had been flown in from Stolgoland by the time they had
gotten their vehicles stowed and were lifting out. They didn't seem
to be making much headway. Harkaman, who had gotten his load of
microbooks stowed and was at the command desk, laughed heartily.

"I don't know what Pedrosan'll do. Gehenna, I don't even know what
I'd do, if I'd gotten myself into a mess like that. He'll probably
bring half his army back, leave the other half in Stolgoland, and
lose both. Suppose we drop in, in about three or four years, just
out of curiosity. If we make twenty per cent of what we did this
time, the trip would pay for itself."

After they went into hyperspace and had the ship secured, the
parties lasted three Galactic standard days, and nobody was at all
sober. Harkaman was drooling over the mass of historical material he
had found. Spasso was jubilant. Nobody could call this chicken-stealing.
He kept repeating that as long as he was able to say anything. Khepera,
he conceded, had been. Lousy two or three million stellars; poo!

XIII

Beowulf was bad.

Valkanhayn and Spasso had both been opposed to the raid. Nobody
raided Beowulf; Beowulf was too tough. Beowulf had nuclear energy
and nuclear weapons and contragravity and normal-space craft, they
even had colonies on a couple of other planets of their system. They
had everything but hyperdrive. Beowulf was a civilized planet, and
you didn't raid civilized planets, not and get away with it.

And beside, hadn't they gotten enough loot on Amaterasu?

"No, we did not," Trask told them. "If we're going to make anything
out of Tanith, we're going to need power, and I don't mean windmills
and waterwheels. As you've remarked, Beowulf has nuclear energy.
That's where we get our plutonium and our power units."

So they went to Beowulf. They came out of hyperspace eight light-hours
from the F-7 star of which Beowulf was the fourth planet, and twenty
light-minutes apart. Guatt Kirbey made a microjump that brought the
ships within practical communicating distance, and they began making
plans in an intership screen conference.

"There are, or were, three chief sources of fissionable ores,"
Harkaman said. "The last ship to raid here and get away was Stefan
Kintour's _Princess of Lyonesse_, sixty years ago. He h