_ and the
murder, had asked:

"But some of them survived. Don't they know what happened?"

"_'In the old times, there were sorcerers. They built the old
buildings by wizard arts. Then the sorcerers fought among themselves
and went away,'_" Harkaman said. "That's all they know about it."

You could make any kind of an explanation out of that.

As the pinnaces pulled and nudged the _Nemesis_ down to her berth,
he could see people, far down on the spaceport floor, at work.
Either Valkanhayn and Spasso had more men than the size of their
ships indicated, or they had gotten a lot of locals to work for
them. More than the population of the moribund city, at least as
Harkaman remembered it.

There had been about five hundred in all; they lived by mining the
old buildings for metal, and trading metalwork for food and textiles
and powder and other things made elsewhere. It was accessible only
by oxcarts traveling a hundred miles across the plains; it had been
built by a contragravity-using people with utter disregard for
natural travel and transportation routes.

"I don't envy the poor buggers," Harkaman said, looking down at the
antlike figures on the spaceport floor. "Boake Valkanhayn and Garvan
Spasso have probably made slaves of the lot of them. If I was really
going to put in a base here, I wouldn't thank that pair for the
kind of public-relations work they've been doing among the locals."

IX

That was just about the situation. Spasso and Valkanhayn and some of
their officers met them on the landing stage of the big building in
the middle of the spaceport, where they had established quarters.
Entering and going down a long hallway, they passed a dozen men and
women gathering up rubbish from the floor with shovels and with
their hands and putting it into a lifter-skid. Both sexes wore
shapeless garments of coarse cloth, like ponchos, and flat-soled
sandals. Watching them was another local in a kilt, buskins and a
leather jerkin; he wore a short sword on his belt and carried a
wickedly thonged whip. He also wore a Space Viking combat helmet,
painted with the device of Spasso's _Lamia_. He bowed as they
approached, putting a hand to his forehead. After they had passed,
they could hear him shouting at the others, and the sound of whip-blows.

You make slaves out of people, and some will always be slave-drivers;
they will bow to you, and then take it out on the others. Harkaman's
nose was twitching as though