is head slightly; Trask bowed a little
more deeply, from the waist.

"I am very happy, Prince Trask, first, I confess, at the safe return
of my kinsman Prince Bentrik, and then at the honor of meeting one
in the confidence of my fellow sovereign King Angus of Gram. I will
never be ungrateful for what you did for my cousin and for his
officers and men. You must stay at the Palace while you are on this
planet; I am giving orders for your reception, and I wish you to be
formally presented to me this evening." He hesitated briefly. "Gram;
that is one of the Sword-Worlds, is it not?" Another brief
hesitation. "Are you really a Space Viking, Prince Trask?"

Maybe he'd expected Space Vikings to have three horns and a spiked
tail and stand twelve feet tall, himself.

It took several hours for the _Nemesis_ to get into orbit. Bentrik
spent most of them in a screen-booth, and emerged visibly relieved.

"Nobody's going to be sticky about what happened on Audhumla," he
told Trask. "There will be a Board of Inquiry. I'm afraid I had to
mix you up in that. It's not only about the action on Audhumla;
everybody from the Space Minister down wants to hear what you know
about this fellow Dunnan. Like yourself, we all hope he went to
Em-See-Square along with his flagship, but we can't take it for
granted. We have over a dozen trade-planets to protect, and he's
hit more than half of them already."

The process of getting into orbit took them around the planet
several times, and it was a more impressive spectacle at each
circuit. Of course, Marduk had a population of almost two billion,
and had been civilized, with no hiatus of Neobarbarism, since it
had first been colonized in the Fourth Century. Even so, the Space
Vikings were amazed--and stubbornly refusing to show it--at what
they saw in the telescopic screens.

"Look at that city!" Paytrik Morland whispered. "We talk about the
civilized planets, but I never realized they were anything like
this. Why, this makes Excalibur look like Tanith!"

* * * * *

The city was Malverton, the capital; like any city of a
contragravity-using people, it lay in a rough circle of buildings
towering out of green interspaces, surrounded by the smaller circles
of spaceports and industrial suburbs. The difference was that any of
these were as large as Camelot on Excalibur or four Wardshavens on
Gram, and Malverton itself was almost half the size of the whole
barony of