could be convicted of misdemeanors by local courts, and fined, these fines had to be paid before the next Laadsraad session, or charges might be brought by the planetary administrators to strip the errant House of its status As with the Great Houses under Imperial law the Head of the House was the House under certain circumstances and might be forced to suffer the ultimate penalty of death or exile if members of his House The numbers of the Houses Minor fluctuat ed greatly throughout history depending pn manly on economic conditions and political gamesmanship During the reign of Leto II many of the Great Houses were demoted to Minor House status and most of the existing Minor Houses lost their economic bases becoming ordinary citizenrj Only under the strongly feudalized conditions ot the Cornno Empire could this highly artificial structure maintain itself as that structure disintegrated so did the props supporting it Business entrepreneurs will continue to exist as long as there ib busmen to conduct but the Houses Minor had virtually disappeared as a unit of society by 13000 R R Further references GREAT HOUSES Count Bent Evon The Houses Minor A Major Part of Imperial Govern ment 10188 (Katam Linthrm UP) Audrii Krauwon A Social Dialect c of the Houses Minor (Centraha Kutath) Heralds College The Planetary Gentry (Kaitain New Burke) HUANUI (or Deathstill) A device to distill the water from a corpse It was developed and used, so far as we know only by the Fremen of Arrakis, the Dune planet No where else have people tned to survive m such an and climate and their strange death ritual underlines the importance of water conservation m their society The deathstill s major components were two plasteel vats one within the other plus a heating device and condensing system Its use was very simple The body was placed in the inside vat and the space between the walls of the two vats was filled with maker oil The lid containing a pressure valve and vapor tube was clamped on Heat from an external source was transferred by the oil from the outer to the inner vat Inner vat temperatures reached over 200 C in prolonged use The liquid m the body began to boil The pressure buildup accelerated the process Vdpor escaped through the valve and was HUNTER SEEKER 316 HUNTER SEEKER channeled through a coiled condenser tube Condensate was collected and measured There were two distinct types of Huanui The more permanent was built on stone footings within all the sietches and many of the large stopovers Its interior vat was usually about 25m long and 1 m in diameter An ultra-high-frequency wave generator produced a 2,450 megahertz signal to heat the maker oil, which appears to have had a very high boiling point {Tests of the trace compound disclosed a match between this oil and tissue samples from fossilized skaihuludata ) The space between the two vats was 5 cm The locking hd covered both vats, tab locked to the inside OIK and clamped with a snapnng to the outside The domed center of the lid contained a spring and ball pressure valve opening into a high-temperature vaportube Up to 10 m of tube was coiled in concentric spirals above the lid The tube led to the waiting basin of a fiowmeter Some sophisticated details of the device included encased cooling tubes and a drain tube at the bottom of the inside vat These helped cool the inside and condense trace vapor, which was then collected in the wait ing basin Space-paper filters in the drain tube kept foreign matter from clogging the system The portable Huanui were much smaller, measuring only 15m long and 75 m m diameter.