Space Viking · Chapter 21 (2/2)

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.”