o hope, though,
that you won't make any difficulty about our letting down and giving
our men a couple of hundred hours' liberty. They've been in
hyperspace for three thousand hours."

"See!" Spasso clamored. "He wants to trick us into letting him land--"

[Illustration]

"Captain Spasso," Trask cut in. "Will you please stop insulting
everybody's intelligence, your own included." Spasso glared at him,
belligerently but hopefully. "I understand what you thought you were
going to do here. You expected Captain Harkaman here to establish a
base for the Duke of Wardshaven, and you thought, if you were here
ahead of him and in a posture of defense, that he'd take you into
the Duke's service rather than waste ammunition and risk damage and
casualties wiping you out. Well, I'm very sorry, gentlemen. Captain
Harkaman is in my service, and I'm not in the least interested in
establishing a base on Tanith."

Valkanhayn and Spasso looked at each other. At least, in the two
side-by-side screens, their eyes shifted, each to the other's screen
on his own ship.

"I get it!" Spasso cried suddenly. "There's two ships, the
_Enterprise_ and this one. The Duke of Wardshaven fitted out the
_Enterprise_, and somebody else fitted out this one. They both want
to put in a base here!"

That opened a glorious vista. Instead of merely capitalizing on
their nuisance-value, they might find themselves holding the balance
of power in a struggle for the planet. All sorts of profitable
perfidies were possible.

"Why, sure you can land, Otto," Valkanhayn said. "I know what it's
like to be three thousand hours in hyper, myself."

"You're at this old city with the two tall tower-buildings, aren't
you?" Harkaman asked. He looked up at the viewscreen. "Ought to be
about midnight there now. How's the spaceport? When I was here, it
was pretty bad."

"Oh, we've been fixing it up. We got a big gang of locals working for us--"

* * * * *

The city was familiar, from Otto Harkaman's descriptions and from
the pictures Vann Larch had painted during the long jump from Gram.
As they came in, it looked impressive, spreading for miles around
the twin buildings that spired almost three thousand feet above it,
with a great spaceport like an eight-pointed star at one side.
Whoever had built it, in the sunset splendor of the old Terran
Federation, must have done so confident that it would become the
metropolis of a populous and pr