People's Welfare Party at Drepplin,
now," he said. "May I put it on, to show you what I mean?"

When the Crown Prince assented, he snapped on the screen and
twiddled at the selector.

* * * * *

A face looked out of it. The features weren't Andray Dunnan's--the
mouth was wider, the cheekbones broader, the chin more rounded. But
his eyes were Dunnan's, as Trask had seen them on the terrace of
Karvall House. Mad eyes. His high-pitched voice screamed:

"Our beloved sovereign is a prisoner! He is surrounded by traitors!
The Ministries are full of them! They are all traitors! The
bloodthirsty reactionaries of the falsely so-called Crown Loyalist
Party! The grasping conspiracy of the interstellar bankers! The
dirty Gilgameshers! They are all leagued together in an unholy
conspiracy! And now this Space Viking, this bloody-handed monster
from the Sword-Worlds...."

"Shut the horrible man off," somebody was yelling, in competition
with the hypnotic scream of the speaker.

The trouble was, they couldn't. They could turn off the screen, but
Zaspar Makann would go on screaming, and millions all over the
planet would still hear him. Bentrik twiddled the selector. The
voice stuttered briefly, and then came echoing out of the speaker,
but this time the pickup was somewhere several hundred feet above
a great open park. It was densely packed with people, most of them
wearing clothes a farm tramp on Gram wouldn't be found dead in,
but here and there among them were blocks of men in what was
almost but not quite military uniform, each with a short and thick
swagger-stick with a knobbed head. Across the park, in the distance,
the head and shoulders of Zaspar Makann loomed a hundred feet high
in a huge screen. Whenever he stopped for breath, a shout would go
up, beginning with the blocks of uniformed men:

"_Makann! Makann! Makann the Leader! Makann to Power!_"

"You even let him have a private army?" he asked the Crown Prince.

"Oh, those silly buffoons and their musical-comedy uniforms,"
the Crown Prince shrugged. "They aren't armed."

"Not visibly," he granted. "Not yet."

"I don't know where they'd get arms."

"No, Your Highness," Prince Bentrik said. "Neither do I.
That's what I'm worried about."

XXII

He succeeded, the next morning, in convincing everybody that he
wanted to be alone for a while, and was sitting in a garden,
watching the rainbows in the midst of a big waterfal