Hawat allowed the faintest of smiles to touch his dark lips. His eyes glinted in the glowtube light as he stared at the Baron. "And you've never wondered where the Emperor gets his Sardaukar?"
The Baron pursed his fat lips. This gave his features the look of a pouting baby, and his voice carried a tone of petulance as he said: "Why . . . he recruits . . . that is to say, there are the levies and he enlists from --"
"Faaa!" Hawat snapped. "The stories you hear about the exploits of the Sardaukar, they're not rumors, are they? Those are first-hand accounts from the limited number of survivors who've fought against the Sardaukar, eh?"
"The Sardaukar are excellent fighting men, no doubt of it," the Baron said.
"But I think my own legions --"
"A pack of holiday excursionists by comparison!" Hawat snarled. "You think I don't know why the Emperor turned against House Atreides?"
"This is not a realm open to your speculation," the Baron warned.
Is it possible that even he doesn't know what motivated the Emperor in this?
Hawat asked himself.
"Any area is open to my speculation if it does what you've hired me to do,"
Hawat said. "I am a Mentat. You do not withhold information or computation lines from a Mentat."
For a long minute, the Baron stared at him, then: "Say what you must say.
Mentat."
"The Padishah Emperor turned against House Atreides because the Duke's Warmasters Gurney Halleck and Duncan Idaho had trained a fighting force -- a small fighting force -- to within a hair as good as the Sardaukar. Some of them
were even better. And the Duke was in a position to enlarge his force, to make it every bit as strong as the Emperor's."
The Baron weighed this disclosure, then: "What has Arrakis to do with this?"
"It provides a pool of recruits already conditioned to the bitterest survival training."
The Baron shook his head. "You cannot mean the Fremen?"
"I mean the Fremen."
"Hah! Then why warn Rabban? There cannot be more than a handful of Fremen left after the Sardaukar pogrom and Rabban's oppression."
Hawat continued to stare at him silently.
"Not more than a handful!" the baron repeated. "Rabban killed six thousand of them last year alone!"
Still, Hawat stared at him.
"And the year before it was nine thousand," the baron said. "And before they left, the Sardaukar must've accounted for at least twenty thousand."
"What are Rabban's troop losses for the past two years?" Hawat asked.
The Baron rubbed his jowls. "Well, he has been recruiting rather heavily, to be sure. His agents make rather extravagant promises and --"
"Shall we say thirty thousand in round numbers?" Hawat asked.
"That would seem a little high," the baron said.
"Quite the contrary," Hawat said. "I can read between the lines of Rabban's reports as well as you can. And you certainly must've understood my reports from our agents."
"Arrakis is a fierce planet," the Baron said. "Storm losses can --"
"We both know the figure for storm accretion," Hawat said.
"What if he has lost thirty thousand?" the Baron demanded, and blood darkened his face.
"By your own count," Hawat said, "he killed fifteen thousand over two years while losing twice that number. You say the Sardaukar accounted for another twenty thousand, possibly a few more. And I've seen the transportation manifests for their return from Arrakis. If they killed twenty thousand, they lost almost five for one. Why won't you face these figures, Baron, and understand what they mean?"
The Baron spoke in a coldly measured cadence: "This is your job, Mentat.
What do they mean?"
"I gave you Duncan Idaho's head count on the sietch he visited," Hawat said.
"It all fits. If they had just two hundred and fifty such sietch communities, their population would be about five million. My best estimate is that they had at least twice that many communities. You scatter your population on such a planet."
"Ten million?" The Baron's jowls quivered with amazement.
"At least."
The Baron pursed his fat lips. The beady eyes stared without wavering at Hawat. Is this true Mentat computation? he wondered. How could this be and no one suspect?
