Ullr Uprising / Piper, H. Beam, 1904-1964

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Title: Ullr Uprising

Author: Henry Beam Piper

Release Date: January 2, 2007 [EBook #19370]
[This file was first posted on September 25, 2006]

Language: English

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                         Transcriber's Note:

   This etext was produced from Space Science Fiction, February and
   March, 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the
   U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.



                            ULLR UPRISING

                         A STORY IN TWO PARTS

                            [Illustration]



                           BY H. BEAM PIPER


                         ILLUSTRATED BY ORBAN

                            [Illustration]


         "The heathen geeks, they wear no breeks," the Terrans
          sang. But on a crazy world like Ullr, clothes didn't
          make the fighting man. There both red and yellow
          meant danger--and blood!

       *       *       *       *       *




I


The big armor-tender vibrated, gently and not unpleasantly, as the
contragravity field alternated on and off. Sometimes it rocked
slightly, like a boat on the water, and, in the big screen which
served in lieu of a window at the front of the control-cabin, the
dingy-yellow landscape would seem to tilt a little. The air was
faintly yellow, the sky was yellow with a greenish cast, and the
clouds were green-gray.

No human had ever set foot on the surface, or breathed the air, of
Niflheim. To have done so would have been instant death; the air was a
mixture of free fluorine and fluoride gasses, the soil was metallic
fluorides, damp with acid rains, and the river was pure hydrofluoric
acid. Even the ordinary spacesuit would have been no protection; the
glass and rubber and plastic would have disintegrated in a matter of
minutes. People came to Niflheim, and worked the mines and uranium
refineries and chemical plants, but they did so inside power-driven
and contragravity-lifted armor, and they lived on artificial
satellites two thousand miles off-planet. Niflheim was worse than
airless; much worse.

The chief engineer sat at his controls, making the minor lateral
adjustments in the vehicle's position which were not possible to the
automatic controls. At his own panel of instruments, a small man with
grizzled black hair around a bald crown, and a grizzled beard, chewed
nervously at the stump of a dead cigar and listened intently. A large,
plump-faced, young man in soiled khaki shirt and shorts, with
extremely hairy legs, was doodling on his notepad and eating candy out
of a bag. And a black-haired girl in a suit of coveralls three sizes
too big for her, and, apparently, not much of anything else, lounged
with one knee hooked over her chair-arm, staring into the screen at
the distant horizon.

"I can see them," the girl said, lifting a hand in front of her. "At
two o'clock, about one of my hand's-breaths above the horizon. But
only four of them."

The man with the grizzled beard put his face into the fur around the
eyepiece of the telescopic-'visor and twisted a dial. "You have good
eyes, Miss Quinton," he complimented. "The fifth's inside the handling
machine. One of the Ullrans. Gorkrink."

       *       *       *       *       *

The largest of the specks that had appeared on the horizon resolved
itself into a handling-machine, a thing like an oversized
contragravity-tank, with a bull-dozer-blade, a stubby derrick-boom
instead of a gun, and jointed, claw-tipped, arms at the sides. The
smaller dots grew into personal armor--egg-shaped things that sprouted
arms and grab-hooks and pushers in all directions. The man with the
grizzled beard began talking rapidly into his hand-phone, then hung it
up. There was a series of bumps, and the armor-tender, weightless on
contragravity, shook as the handling-machine came aboard.

"You ever see any nuclear bombing, Miss Quinton?" the young man with
the hairy legs asked, offering her his candybag.

"Only by telecast, back Solside," Paula Quinton replied, helping
herself. "Test-shots at the Federation Navy proving-ground on Mars. I
never even heard of nuclear bombs being used for mining till I came
here, though."

"It'll be something to see," he promised. "These volcanoes have been
dormant for, oh, maybe as long as a thousand years; there ought to be
a pretty good head of gas down there. The volcanoes we shot three
months ago yielded a fine flow of lava with all sorts of
metals--nickel, beryllium, vanadium, chromium, iridium, as well as
copper and iron."

"What sort of gas were you speaking about?" she asked.

"Hydrogen. That's what's going to make the fireworks; it combines
explosively with fluorine. The hydrogen-fluorine combination is what
passes for combustion here: the result is hydrofluoric acid, the local
equivalent of water. The subsurface hydrogen is produced when the acid
filters down through the rock, combines with pure metals underneath."

The door at the rear of the control-cabin opened, and Juan Murillo,
the seismologist, entered, followed by an assistant, who was not
human. He was a biped, vaguely humanoid, but he had four arms and a
face like a lizard's, and, except for some equipment on belt, he was
entirely naked.

He spoke rapidly to Murillo, in a squeaking jabber. Murillo turned.

"Yes, if you wish, Gorkrink," he said, in Lingua Terra. Then he turned
back to Gomes as the Ullran sat down in a chair by the door.

"Well, she's all yours, Lourenco; shoot the works."

Gomes stabbed the radio-detonator button in front of him.

       *       *       *       *       *

Out on the rolling skyline, fifty miles away, a lancelike ray of
blue-white light shot up into the gathering dusk--a clump of five
rays, really, from five deep shafts in an irregular pentagon half a
mile across, blended into one by the distance. An instant later, there
was a blinding flash, like sheet-lightning, and a huge ball of
varicolored fire belched upward, leaving a series of smoke-rings to
float more slowly after it. The fireball flattened, then spread to
form the mushroom-head of a column of incandescent gas that mounted to
overtake it, engorging the smoke-rings as it rose, twisting, writhing,
changing shape, turning to dark smoke in one moment and belching flame
and crackling with lightning the next.

"In about half an hour," the large young man told Paula Quinton, "the
real fireworks should be starting. What's coming up now is just small
debris from the nuclear blast. When the shock-waves get down far
enough to crack things open, the gas'll come up, and then steam and
ash, and then magma."

"Well, even this was worth staying over for," the girl said, watching
the screen.

"You going on to Ullr on the _City of Canberra_?" Lourenco Gomes
asked. "I wish I were; I have to stay over and make another shot, in a
month or so, and I've had about all of Niflheim I can take, now."

"When are you going to Terra?" the girl asked him.

"Terra? I don't know; a year, two years. But I'm going to Ullr on the
next ship--the _City of Pretoria_--if we get the next blast off in
time. They want me to design some improvements on a couple of
power-reactors at Keegark so I'll probably see you when I get there."

"Here she comes!" the chief engineer called. "Watch the base of the
column!"

The pillar of fiery smoke and dust, still boiling up from where the
bombs had gone off far underground, was being violently agitated at
the bottom. A series of new flashes broke out, lifting and spreading
the incandescent radioactive gasses, and then a great gush of flame
rose. A column of pure hydrogen must have rushed up into the vacuum
created by the explosion; the next blast of flame, in a lateral sheet,
came at nearly ten thousand feet above the ground. Then geysers of hot
ash and molten rock spouted upward; some of the white-hot debris
landed almost at the acid river, half-way to the armor-tender.

"We've started a first-class earthquake, too," Murillo said, looking
at the instruments.

"About six big cracks opening in the rock-structure. You know, when
this quiets down and cools off, we'll have more ore on the surface
than we can handle in ten years, and more than we could have mined by
ordinary means in fifty."

"Well, that finishes our work," the large young man said, going to a
kit-bag in the corner of the cabin and getting out a bottle. "Get some
of those plastic cups, over there, somebody; this one calls for a
drink."

The Ullran, in the background, rose quickly and squeaked
apologetically. Murillo nodded. "Yes, of course, Gorkrink. No need for
you to stay here." The Ullran went out, closing the door behind him.

"That taboo against Ullrans and Terrans watching each other eat and
drink," Paula Quinton commented. "But you were speaking to him in
Lingua Terra; I didn't know any of them understood it."

"Gorkrink does," Murillo said, uncorking the bottle and pouring into
the plastic cups. "None of them can speak it, of course, because of
the structure of their vocal organs, any more than we can speak their
languages without artificial aids. But I can talk to him in Lingua
Terra without having to put one of those damn gags in my mouth, and he
can pass my instructions on to the others. He's been a big help; I'll
be sorry to lose him."

"Lose him?"

"Yes, his year's up; he's going back to Ullr on the _Canberra_. He's
from Keegark; claims to be a prince, or something. But he's a damn
good worker. Very smart; picks things up the first time you tell him.
I'll recommend him unqualifiedly for any kind of work with
contragravity or mechanized equipment."

They all had drinks, now, except the chief engineer, who wanted a
rain-check on his.

"Well, here's to us," Murillo said. "The first A-bomb miners in
history...."




II


Carlos von Schlichten, General of the troops on Ullr, threw his
cigarette away and set his monocle more firmly in his eye, stepping
forward to let Brigadier-General Themistocles M'zangwe and little
Colonel Hideyoshi O'Leary follow him out of the fort. On the little
hundred-foot-square parade ground in front of the keep, his aircar was
parked, and the soldiers were assembled.

Ten or twelve of them were Terrans--a couple of lieutenants,
sergeants, gunners, technicians, the sergeant-driver and
corporal-gunner of his own car. The other fifty-odd were Ullrans. They
stood erect on stumpy legs and broad, six-toed feet. They had four
arms apiece, one pair from true shoulders and the other connected to a
pseudo-pelvis midway down the torso. Their skins were slate-gray and
rubbery, speckled with pinhead-sized bits of quartz that had been
formed from perspiration, since their body-tissues were silicone
instead of carbon-hydrogen. Their narrow heads were unpleasantly
saurian; they had small, double-lidded red eyes, and slit-like
nostrils, and wide mouths filled with opalescent teeth. Being
cold-blooded, they needed no clothing, beyond their belts and
equipment, and the emblem of the Chartered Ullr Company painted on
their chests and backs. They had no need for modesty, since all were
of the same gender--true, functional hermaphrodites; any individual
among them could bear young, or fertilize the ova of any other
individual.

Fifteen years before, when he had come to Ullr as a newly commissioned
colonel in the army of the Ullr Company, it had taken him some time to
adjust. But now his mind disregarded them and went on worrying about
the mysterious disappearance of pet animals from Terran homes; there
must be some connection with the subtle change he had noticed in the
attitudes of the natives, but he couldn't guess what. He didn't like
it, though, any more than the beginning of cannibalism among the wild
Jeel tribesmen. Or the visit of Paula Quinton on Ullr as field-agent
for the Extraterrestrials' Rights Association; now was no time to stir
up trouble among the natives, unless his hunch was wrong.

He shrugged it aside and climbed into the command-car, followed by
M'zangwe and O'Leary. Sergeant Harry Quong and Corporal Hassan
Bogdanoff took their places in the front seat; the car lifted, turned
to nose into the wind, and rose in a slow spiral.

"Where now, sir?" Quong asked.

"Back to Konkrook; to the island."

       *       *       *       *       *

The nose of the car swung east by south; the cold-jet rotors began
humming, and the hot-jets were cut in. The car turned from the fort
and the mountains and shot away over the foothills toward the coastal
plains. Below were forests, yellow-green with new foliage of the
second growing-season of the equatorial year, veined with narrow dirt
roads and spotted with occasional clearings. Farther east, the dirty
gray woodsmoke of Ullr marked the progress of the charcoal-burnings.
That was the only natural fuel on Ullr; there was too much silica on
Ullr and not enough of anything else; what would be coal-seams on
Terra were strata of silicified wood. And, of course, there was no
petroleum. There was less charcoal being burned now than formerly; the
Ullr Company had been bringing in great quantities of synthetic
thermoconcentrate-fuel, and had been setting up nuclear furnaces and
nuclear-electric power-plants, wherever they gained a foothold on the
planet.

As planets went, Ullr was no bargain, he thought sourly. At times, he
wished he had never followed the lure of rapid promotion and
fanatically high pay and left the Federation regulars for the army of
the Ullr Company. If he hadn't, he'd probably be a colonel, at five
thousand sols a year, but maybe it would be better to be a middle-aged
colonel on a decent planet than a Company army general at twenty-five
thousand on this combination icebox, furnace, wind-tunnel and
stonepile, where the water tasted like soapsuds and left a crackly
film when it dried; where the temperature ranged, from pole to pole,
between two hundred and fifty and minus a hundred and fifty Fahrenheit
and the Beaufort-scale ran up to thirty; where nothing that ran or
swam or grew was fit for a human to eat.

Ahead, the city of Konkrook sprawled along the delta of the Konk river
and extended itself inland. The river was dry, now. Except in Spring,
when it was a red-brown torrent, it never ran more than a trickle, and
not at all this late in the Northern Summer. The aircar lost altitude,
and the hot-jet stopped firing. They came gliding in over the suburbs
and the yellow-green parks, over the low one-story dwellings and
shops, the lofty temples and palaces, the fantastically-twisted
towers, following a street that became increasingly mean and squalid
as it neared the industrial district along the waterfront.

       *       *       *       *       *

Von Schlichten, on the right, glanced idly down, puffing slowly on his
cigarette. Then he stiffened, the muscles around his right eye
clamping tighter on the monocle. Leaning forward, he punched Harry
Quong lightly on the man's right shoulder.

"Yes, sir; I saw it," the Chinese-Australian driver replied. "Terrans
in trouble; bein' mobbed by geeks. Aircar parked right in the bloody
middle of it."

The car made a twisting, banking loop and came back, more slowly. Von
Schlichten had the handset of the car's radio, and was punching out
the combination of the Company guardhouse on Gongonk Island; he held
down the signal button until he got an answer.

"Von Schlichten, in car over Konkrook. Riot on Fourth Avenue, just off
Seventy-second Street." No Terran could possibly remember the names of
Konkrook's streets; even native troops recruited from outside found
the numbers easier to learn and remember. "Geeks mobbing a couple of
Terrans. I'm going down, now, to do what I can to help; send troops in
a hurry. Kragan Rifles. And stand by; my driver'll give it to you as
it happens."

The voice of somebody at the guardhouse, bawling orders, came out of
the receiver as he tossed the phone forward over Harry Quong's
shoulder; Quong caught it and began speaking rapidly and urgently into
it while he steered with the other hand. Von Schlichten took one of
the five-pound spiked riot-maces out of the rack in front of him.

Bogdanoff rose into the ball-turret and swung the twin 15-mm.'s
around, cutting loose. Quong brought the car in fast, at about
shoulder-height on the mob. Between them, they left a swath of
mangled, killed, wounded, and stunned natives. Then, spinning the car
around, Quong set it down hard on a clump of rioters as close as
possible to the struggling group around the two Terrans. Von
Schlichten threw back the canopy and jumped out of the car, O'Leary
and M'zangwe behind him.

There was another aircar, a dark maroon civilian job, at the curb; its
native driver was slumped forward over the controls, a short
crossbow-bolt sticking out of his neck. Backed against the closed door
of a house, a Terran with white hair and a small beard was clubbing
futilely with an empty pistol. He was wounded, and blood was streaming
over his face. His companion, a young woman in a long fur coat, was
laying about her with a native bolo-knife.

       *       *       *       *       *

Von Schlichten's mace had a spiked ball-head, and a four-inch spike in
front of that. He smashed the ball down on the back of one Ullran's
head, and jabbed another in the rump with the spike.

"_Zak! Zak!_" he yelled, in pidgin-Ullran. "_Jik-jik_, you
lizard-faced Creator's blunder!"

The Ullran whirled, swinging a blade somewhere between a big
butcher-knife and a small machete. His mouth was open, and there was
froth on his lips.

"_Znidd suddabit!_" he shrieked.

Von Schlichten parried the cut on the steel shaft of his mace.
"_Suddabit_ yourself!" he shouted back, ramming the spike-end into the
opal-filled mouth. "And _znidd_ you, too," he added, recovering and
slamming the ball-head down on the narrow saurian skull. The Ullran
went down, spurting a yellow fluid about the consistency of gun-oil.

Ahead, one of the natives had caught the wounded Terran with both
lower hands, and was raising a dagger with his upper right. The girl
in the fur coat swung wildly, slashing the knife-arm, then chopped
down on the creature's neck.

Another of them closed with the girl, grabbing her right arm with all
four hands and biting at her; she screamed and kicked her attacker in
the groin, where an Ullran is, if anything, even more vulnerable than
a Terran. The native howled hideously, and von Schlichten, jumping
over a couple of corpses, shoved the muzzle of his pistol into the
creature's open mouth and pulled the trigger, blowing its head apart
like a rotten pumpkin and splashing both himself and the girl with
yellow blood and rancid-looking gray-green brains.

O'Leary, jumping forward after von Schlichten, stuck his dagger into
the neck of a rioter and left it there, then caught the girl around
the waist with his free arm. M'zangwe dropped his mace and swung the
frail-looking man onto his back. Together, they struggled back to the
command-car, von Schlichten covering the retreat with his pistol.
Another rioter was aiming one of the long-barreled native air-rifles,
holding the ten-inch globe of the air-chamber in both lower hands. Von
Schlichten shot him, and the native literally blew to pieces.

For an instant, he wondered how the small bursting-charge of a 10-mm.
explosive pistol-bullet could accomplish such havoc, and assumed that
the native had been carrying a bomb in his belt. Then another
explosion tossed fragmentary corpses nearby, and another and another.
Glancing quickly over his shoulder, he saw four combat-cars coming in,
firing with 40-mm. auto-cannon and 15-mm. machine-guns. They swept
between the hovels on one side and the warehouses on the other,
strafing the mob, darted up to a thousand feet, looped, and came
swooping back, and this time there were three long blue-gray
troop-carriers behind them.

These landed in the hastily-cleared street and began disgorging native
Company soldiers--Kragan mercenaries, he noted with satisfaction. They
carried a modified version of the regular Terran Federation infantry
rifle, stocked and sighted to conform to their physical peculiarities,
with long, thorn-like, triangular bayonets. One platoon ran forward,
dropped to one knee, and began firing rapidly into what was left of
the mob. Four-handed soldiers can deliver a simply astonishing volume
of fire, particularly when armed with auto-rifles having twenty-shot
drop-out magazines which can be changed with the lower hands without
lowering the weapon.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was a clatter of shod hoofs, and a company of King Jaikark of
Konkrook's cavalry came trotting up on their six-legged,
lizard-headed, quartz-speckled, mounts. Some of these charged into
side alleys, joyfully lancing and cutting-down fleeing rioters, while
others dismounted, three tossing their reins to a fourth, and went to
work with their crossbows. Von Schlichten, who ordinarily entertained
a dim opinion of the King of Konkrook's soldiery, admitted,
grudgingly, that it was smart work; four hands were a big help in
using a crossbow, too.

A Terran captain of native infantry came over, saluting.

"Are you and your people all right, general?" he asked.

Von Schlichten glanced at the front seat of his car, where Harry
Quong, a pistol in his right hand, was still talking into the
radio-phone, and Hassan Bogdanoff was putting fresh belts into his
guns. Then he saw that they had gotten the wounded man into the car.
The girl, having dropped her bolo, was leaning against the side of the
car.

"We seem to be, Captain Pedolsky. Very smart work; you must have those
vehicles of yours on hyperspace-drive.... How is he, colonel?"

"We'd better get him to the hospital, right away," O'Leary replied. "I
think he has a concussion."

"Harry, call the hospital. Tell them what the score is, and tell them
we're bringing the casualty in to their top landing stage.... Why,
we'll make out very nicely, captain. You'd better stay around with
your Kragans and make sure that these geeks of King Jaikark's don't
let the riot flare up again and get away from them. And don't let them
get the impression that they can maintain order around here without
our help; the Company would like to see that attitude discouraged."

"Yes, sir; I understand." Captain Pedolsky opened the pouch on his
belt and took out the false palate and tongue-clicker without which no
Terran could do more than mouth a crude and barely comprehensible
pidgin-Ullran. Stuffing the gadget into his mouth, he turned and began
jabbering orders.

Von Schlichten helped the girl into the car, placing her on his right.
The wounded civilian was propped up in the left corner of the seat,
and Colonel O'Leary and Brigadier-General M'zangwe took the
jump-seats. The driver put on the contragravity-field, and the car
lifted up.

"Them, see if there's a flask and a drinking-cup in the door pocket
next you," he said. "I think Miss Quinton could use a drink."

       *       *       *       *       *

The girl turned. Even in her present disheveled condition, she was
beautiful--a trifle on the petite side, with black hair and black eyes
that quirled up oddly at the outer corners. Her nails were
black-lacquered and spotted with little gold stars, evidently a new
feminine fad from Terra.

"I certainly could, general.... How did you know my name?"

"You've been on Ullr for the last three months; ever since the _City
of Canberra_ got in from Niflheim. On Ullr, there aren't enough of us
that everybody doesn't know all about everybody else. You're Dr. Paula
Quinton; you're an extraterrestrial sociographer, and you're a
field-agent for the Extraterrestrials' Rights Association, like
Mohammed Ferriera, here." He took the cup and flask from Themistocles
M'zangwe and poured her a drink. "Take this easy, now; Baldur
honey-rum, a hundred and fifty proof."

He watched her sip the stuff cautiously, cough over the first
mouthful, and then get the rest of it down.

"More?" When she shook her head, he stoppered the flask and relieved
her of the cup. "What were you doing in that district, anyhow?" he
wanted to know. "I'd have thought Mohammed Ferriera would have had
more sense than to take you there, or go there, himself, for that
matter," he added quickly.

"We went to visit a friend of his, a native named Keeluk, who seems to
be a sort of combination clergyman and labor-leader," she replied.
"I'm going to observe labor conditions at the North Pole mines in a
short while, and Mr. Keeluk was going to give me letters of
introduction to friends of his at Skilk. We talked with Mr. Keeluk for
a while, and when we came out, we found that our driver had been
killed and a mob had gathered. Of course, we were carrying pistols;
they're part of this survival-kit you make everybody carry, along with
the emergency-rations and the water desilicator. Mr. Ferriera's wasn't
loaded, but mine was. When they rushed us, I shot a couple of them,
and then picked up that big knife.... I never in my life saw anything
as beautiful as you coming through that mob swinging that warclub!"

       *       *       *       *       *

The aircar swung out over Konkrook Channel and headed toward the
blue-gray Company buildings on Gongonk Island, and the Company
airport.

"Just what happened, while you and Mr. Ferriera were in Keeluk's
house, Miss Quinton?" O'Leary asked, trying not to sound official.
"Was Keeluk with you all the time? Or did he go out for a while, say
fifteen or twenty minutes before you left?"

"Why, yes, he did." Paula Quinton looked surprised. "How did you guess
it? You see, a dog started barking, behind the house, and he excused
himself and...."

"A dog?" von Schlichten almost shouted. The other officers echoed him.

"Why, yes...." Paula Quinton's eyes widened. "But there are no dogs on
Ullr, except a few owned by Terrans. And wasn't there something
about ...?"

Von Schlichten had the radio-phone and was calling the command car at
the scene of the riot. The sergeant-driver answered.

"Von Schlichten here; my compliments to Captain Pedolsky, and tell him
he's to make immediate and thorough search of the house in front of
which the incident occurred, and adjoining houses. For his
information, that's Keeluk's house. Tell him to look for traces of
Governor-General Harrington's collie, or any of the other terrestrial
animals that have been disappearing--that goat, for instance, or those
rabbits. And I want Keeluk brought in, alive and in condition to be
interrogated."

"But, what ...?" the girl began, her voice puzzled.

"That's why you were attacked," he told her. "Keeluk was afraid to let
you get away from there alive to report hearing that dog, so he went
out and had a gang of thugs rounded up to kill you."

"But he was only gone five minutes."

"In five minutes, I can put all the troops in Konkrook into action.
Keeluk doesn't have radio or TV--we hope--but he has his forces
concentrated, and he has a pretty good staff."

"But Mr. Keeluk's a friend of ours. He knows what our Association is
trying to do for his people...."

"So he shows his appreciation by setting that mob on you. Look, he has
a lot of influence in that section. When you were attacked, why wasn't
he out trying to quiet the mob?"

"When they jumped you, you tried to get back into the house," M'zangwe
put in. "And you found the door barred against you."

"Yes, but...." The girl looked troubled; M'zangwe had guessed right.
"But what's all the excitement about the dog? What is it, the sacred
totem-animal of the Ullr Company?"

"It's just a big brown collie named Stalin. But somebody stole it, and
Keeluk was keeping it. We want to know why. We don't like geek
mysteries--not when they lead to murderous attacks on Terrans, at
least."

It seemed to satisfy her, as the aircar let down on the hospital
landing stage. But it didn't satisfy von Schlichten. He could smell
trouble brewing. Just what could the geeks do with a dog? Nothing, so
far as he could tell--but they didn't go in for such behaviour without
what they considered good reason. Good for them, that is!




III


Governor-General Sidney Harrington had a ruddy outdoors-man's face and
a ragged gray mustache; in his old tweed coat spotted with pipe ashes,
he might have been any of a dozen-odd country-gentlemen of von
Schlichten's boyhood in the Argentine. His face was composed enough
for the part, too. But beyond him in the governor's office,
Lieutenant-Governor Eric Blount matched von Schlichten's frown, his
sandy-haired and younger face puckered in worry.

"We picked up a few of Keeluk's goon-gang," von Schlichten was
reporting. "But I doubt if they'll tell us anything we don't already
know. The dog was gone, but we found where it had been kept; at least
one of the rabbits had been there, too. No trace of the goat. Anyhow,
the riot's been put down. The Kragans and some of King Jaikark's
infantry are patrolling the section. Jaikark's troops are busy making
mass arrests. Either more slaves for the King's court favorites or
else our Prime Minister Gurgurk wants to use them for patronage."

Blount nodded. "Gurgurk's building quite a political organization,
lately. He must be about ready to shove Jaikark off the throne."

"Oh, Gurgurk wouldn't dare try anything like that," Harrington said.
"He knows we wouldn't let him get away with it."

"Then why's he subsidizing this Mad Prophet Rakkeed?" Blount wanted to
know. "Rakkeed is preaching a holy war against all Terrans and against
Jaikark. Gurgurk subsidizes Rakkeed, and...."

"You haven't any proof of that," the governor protested.

Blount shrugged, his face looking grim. Von Schlichten knew how he
felt. They couldn't prove it, but both knew that Rakkeed had been
getting funds from the hands of Gurgurk. The prophet had been stepping
up his crusade against the Terrans, and Gurgurk wasn't the only one
backing him. The Prime Minister probably figured on using Rakkeed to
stir up an outbreak; then Gurgurk could step in, after Jaikark was
killed, put down the revolt he helped incite, and claim to be the best
friend of the Company. But the question was whether Rakkeed could be
used that way. He was becoming more of a menace than Gurgurk could
ever be. Everywhere they turned, Rakkeed was at the bottom of their
trouble--just in this case, where Keeluk was one of Rakkeed's
followers.

His power seemed to be growing, too. There were rumors that he had
been entertained at the palace in Keegark, just as he was usually
entertained by the big shipowning nobles here at Konkrook; come to
think of it, the last time here, he'd been guest of the Keegarkan
ambassador. He went all over Ullr, crusading, traveling coolie-class
in disguise on Company ships, according to their best information.

Blount sighed heavily. "This damned dog business worries me."

"Worries me, too," Harrington said. "I'm fond of that mutt, and God
only knows what sort of stuff he's been getting to eat."

"I'm a lot more worried about why Keeluk was hiding him, and why he
was willing to murder the only two Terrans on Konkrook who trust him,
to prevent our finding out he had Stalin," Blount struck in.

Von Schlichten chain-lit another cigarette and stubbed out the old
one. "Maybe Keeluk turned him over to Rakkeed to kill before a
congregation of his followers--killing us in effigy. Or maybe they
figure we worship Stalin, and getting him would give them power over
us. I wish I knew a little more about Ullran psychology."

"One thing," Blount said. "It doesn't take any Ullran psychologist to
know about eighty per cent of them hate us poisonously."

"Oh, rubbish!" Harrington blew the exclamation out around his pipe
stem with a gush of smoke. "A few fanatics hate us, but nine-tenths of
them have benefitted enormously from us."

"And hate us more deeply with each new benefit," Blount added. "They
resent everything we've done for them."

"Yes, this spaceport proposition of King Orgzild of Keegark looks like
it, doesn't it?" Harrington retorted. "He hates us so much he's
offered us a spaceport at his city...."

"At what cost?" Blount asked. "He takes the land from some noble he
executes for treason and gives it to us--together with forced labor.
We furnish everything else. We get a port we don't need, and he gets
all the business it'll bring. In fact, considering that Rakkeed is a
welcome guest there, I wonder if he isn't fomenting trouble here at
Konkrook to make us move our main base to Keegark. He's so sure we'll
accept already that he's started building two new power-reactors to
handle the additional demand from increased business."

"Where's he getting the plutonium?" von Schlichten asked,
suspiciously.

"He just bought four tons of it from us, off the _City of Pretoria_,"
Harrington replied.

"A hell of a lot of plutonium," Blount said. "I wonder if he has any
idea of what else plutonium can be used for?"

"Oh, God, I hope not!" Harrington exclaimed. "Bosh! What about those
letters Keeluk gave the Quinton girl?"

"All addressed to rabidly anti-Terran Rakkeed disciples," von
Schlichten replied. "We couldn't find any indication of a cipher, but
the gossip about Keeluk's friends might have had code-meanings. I'll
have to advise her to have nothing to do with any of the people
Keeluk gave her letters to."

"Think she'll listen to you? These Extraterrestrial Rights Association
people are a lot of blasted fanatics, themselves. They think we're a
gang of bloody-fisted, flint-hearted imperialists."

"Oh, they're not as bad as all that. Old Mohammed Ferriera's always
been decent enough. And the Association's really done a lot of good in
other places."

A calculating look came into Harrington's eye. "She was going to
Skilk, eh? And you're going there yourself, to investigate some of
this Rakkeed worry of Eric's. Why not invite her along, and maybe you
can plant a couple of ideas where they'll do the most good. We all
know there are a lot of things at the polar mines that would look bad
to anybody who didn't understand. And with all this trouble being
stirred up now...."

It was his first admission that there _was_ trouble, but von
Schlichten let it pass. "Her company wouldn't be any heavy cross to
bear," he replied. "I won't guarantee anything, of course...."

The intercom-speaker on the table whistled, and Harrington flipped a
switch and spoke into the box. "Governor," a voice replied out of it,
"there's a geek procession just landed from a water-barge in front,
coming up the roadway to Company House. A platoon of Jaikark's
Household Guards with a royal litter, Spear of State, gift-litter,
nobles and such."

"Gurgurk with indemnity for the riot, eh? Let them in, give them an
honor guard of Kragans, but keep their own gun-toters outside. Take them
to Reception Hall until I signal from Audience Hall, then herd them in."
He flipped back the switch and turned back. "We'll have to let them wait
or they'll think we're worried. But you see--everything's going along
normal lines."

Blount nodded, but his face showed disbelief. And von Schlichten
grumbled unhappily to himself, without knowing why, until they finally
went out to the big Audience Hall to meet the delegation.

Governor-General Sidney Harrington, on the comfortably-upholstered
bench on the dais of the Audience Hall, didn't look particularly
regal. But then, to a Terran, any of the kings of Ullr would have
looked like a freak birth in a lizard-house at a zoo; it was hard to
guess what impression Harrington would make on the Ullran psychology.

He took the false palate and tongue-clicker, officially designated as
an "enunciator, Ullran" and, colloquially, as a geek-speaker, out of
his coat pocket and shoved it into his mouth. Von Schlichten and
Blount put in theirs, and Harrington pressed the floor-button with his
toe. After a brief interval, the wide doors at the other end of the
hall slid open, and the Konkrookan notables, attended by a dozen
Company native-officers and a guard of Kragan Rifles, entered. The
honor-guard advanced in two columns; between them marched an unclad
and heavily armed native carrying an ornate spear with a three-foot
blade upright in front of him with all four hands. It was the
Konkrookan Spear of State; it represented the proxy-presence of King
Jaikark. Behind it stalked Gurgurk, the Konkrookan equivalent of Prime
Minister or Grand Vizier; he wore a gold helmet and a thing like a
string-vest made of gold wire, and carried a long sword with a
two-hand grip, a pair of Terran automatics built for a hand with
six-four-knuckled fingers, and a pair of matched daggers. He was
considerably past the Ullran prime of life--seventy or eighty, to
judge from the worn appearance of his opal teeth, the color of his
skin, and the predominantly reddish tint of his quartz-speckles. The
retinue of nobles behind Gurgurk ran through the whole spectrum, from
a princeling who was almost oyster-gray to the Keegarkan Ambassador,
who was even blacker and more red-speckled than Gurgurk.

Four slaves brought up in the rear, carrying an ornately inlaid box on
poles. When the spear-bearer reached the exact middle of the hall, he
halted and grounded his regalia-weapon with a thump. Gurgurk came up
and halted a couple of paces behind and to the left of the spear, and
most of the other nobles drew up in two curved lines some ten paces to
the rear; the ambassador and another noble came up and planted
themselves beside Gurgurk.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Governor-General rose slowly and descended from the dais,
advancing to within ten paces of the Spear, von Schlichten and Blount
accompanying him.

"Welcome, Gurgurk," Harrington gibbered through his false palate. "The
Company is honored by this visit."

"I come in the name of my royal master, His Sublime and Ineffable
Majesty, Jaikark the Seventeenth, King of Konkrook and of all the
lands of the Konk Isthmus," Gurgurk squeaked and clicked. "I have the
honor to bring with me the Lord Ambassador of King Orgzild of Keegark
to the court of my royal master."

"And I," the ambassador said, after being suitably welcomed, "am
honored to be accompanied by Prince Gorkrink, special envoy from my
master, His Royal and Imperial Majesty King Orgzild, who is in your
city to receive the shipment of power-metal my royal master has been
honored to be permitted to purchase from the Company."

More protocol about welcoming Gorkrink. Then Gurgurk cleared his
throat with a series of barking sounds.

"My royal master, His Sublime and Ineffable Majesty, is prostrated
with grief," he stated solemnly. "Were his sorrow not so overwhelming,
he would have come in His Own Sacred Person to express the pain and
shame which he feels that people of the Company should be set upon and
endangered in the streets of the royal city."

"The soldiers of His Sublime and Ineffable Majesty came most promptly
to the aid of the troops of the Company, did they not, General von
Schlichten?" Harrington asked, solemn-faced.

"Within minutes, Your Excellency," von Schlichten replied gravely.
"Their promptness, valor and efficiency were most exemplary."

       *       *       *       *       *

Gurgurk spoke at length, expressing himself as delighted, on behalf of
his royal master, at hearing such high praise from so distinguished a
soldier. Eric Blount contributed a short speech, beseeching the gods
that the deep and beautiful friendship existing between the Chartered
Ullr Company and His Sublime etcetera would continue unimpaired. The
Keegarkan Ambassador spoke his piece, expressing on behalf of King
Orgzild the deepest regret that the people of the Company should be so
molested, and managing to hint that things like that simply didn't
happen at Keegark.

The Prince Gorkrink then spoke briefly, in sympathy. Von Schlichten
noticed that a few of his more recent quartz-specks were slightly
greenish in tinge, a sure sign that he had, not long ago, been exposed
to the fluorine-tainted air which men and geeks alike breathed on
Niflheim. When a geek prince hired out as a laborer for a year on
Niflheim, he did so for only one purpose--to learn Terran
technologies.

Gurgurk then announced that so enormous a crime against the friends of
His Sublime etcetera had not been allowed to go unpunished, signalling
behind him with one of his lower hands for the box to be brought
forward. The slaves carried it to the front, set it down, and opened
it, taking from it a rug which they spread on the floor. On this, from
the box, they placed twenty-four newly severed opal-grinning heads, in
four neat rows. They had all been freshly scrubbed and polished, but
they still smelled like crushed cockroaches.

The three Terrans looked at them gravely. A double-dozen heads was
standard payment for an attack in which no Terran had been killed.
Ostensibly, they were the heads of the ringleaders; in practice, they
were usually lopped from the first two-dozen prisoners or overage
slaves at hand, without regard for whether the victims had ever heard
of the crime they were expiating.

There was another long speech from Gurgurk, with the nobles behind him
murmuring antiphonal agreement--standard procedure, for which there
was a standard pun, geek chorus--and a speech of response from Sid
Harrington. Standing stiffly through the whole rigamarole, von
Schlichten waited for it to end, as, finally, it did.

They walked back from the door, whence they had escorted the
delegation, and stood looking down at the saurian heads on the rug.
Harrington raised his voice and called to a Kragan sergeant whose
chevrons were painted on all four arms.

"Take this carrion out and stuff it in the incinerator," he ordered.

       *       *       *       *       *

"Wait a minute," von Schlichten told the sergeant. Then he disgorged
and pouched his geek-speaker. "See that head, there?" he asked,
rolling it over with his toe. "I killed that geek, myself, with my
pistol. And Hid O'Leary stuck a knife in that one." He walked around
the rug, turning heads over with his foot. "This was a cut-rate
head-payment; they just slashed off two-dozen heads at the scene of
the riot. Six months ago, Gurgurk wouldn't have tried to pull anything
like this. Now he's laughing up his non-existent sleeve at us."

"That's what I've been preaching, all along," Eric Blount took up
after him. "These geeks need having the fear of Terra thrown into
them."

"Oh, nonsense, Eric; you're just as bad as Carlos, here!" Harrington
tut-tuted. "Next, you'll be saying that we ought to depose Jaikark
and take control ourselves."

"Well, what's wrong with that, for an idea?" von Schlichten demanded.

"My God!" Harrington exploded. "Don't let me hear that kind of talk
again! We're not _conquistadores_: we're employees of a business
concern, here to make money honestly, by exchanging goods and services
with these people...."

       *       *       *       *       *

He turned and walked away, out of the Audience Hall, leaving von
Schlichten and Blount to watch the removal of the geek-heads.

"You know, I went a little too far," von Schlichten confessed. "Or too
fast, rather."

"We can't go too slowly, though," Blount replied.

Von Schlichten nodded seriously. "Did you notice the green specks in
the hide of that Prince Gorkrink?" he asked. "He's just come back from
Niflheim. Probably on the _Canberra_, three months ago."

"And he's here to get that plutonium, and ship it to Keegark on the
_Oom Paul Kruger_," Blount considered. "I wonder just what he learned,
on Niflheim."

"I wonder just what's going on at Keegark," von Schlichten said.
"Orgzild's pulled down a regular First-Century-model iron curtain. You
know, four of our best native Intelligence operatives have been
murdered in Keegark in the last three months, and six more have just
vanished there."

"Well, I'm going there in a few days, myself, to talk to Orgzild about
this spaceport deal," Blount said. "I'll have a talk with Hendrik
Lemoyne and Colonel MacKinnon. And I'll see what I can find out for
myself."

"Well, let's go have a drink," von Schlichten suggested.

But he kept remembering the falsehood of Gurgurk's indemnity. When the
Ullrans started making a mockery of such things, it was no time for
Harrington's trusting policies. The smell of trouble was suddenly
stronger in his nostrils.




IV


Von Schlichten and Blount entered the bar together. Going to a
bartending machine, von Schlichten dialed the cocktail they had
decided upon and inserted his key to charge the drinks to his account,
filling a four-portion jug.

As they turned away, they almost collided with Hideyoshi O'Leary and
Paula Quinton. The girl wore a long-sleeved gown to conceal a bandage
on her right wrist, and her face was rather heavily powdered in spots;
otherwise she looked none the worse for recent experiences. Von
Schlichten invited her and her escort to join him and Blount. Colonel
O'Leary was carrying a cocktail jug and a couple of glasses; finding a
table out of the worst of the noise, they all sat down together.

"I suppose you think it's a joke, our being nearly murdered by the
people we came to help," Paula began, a trifle defensively.

"Not a very funny joke," von Schlichten told her. "It's been played on
us till it's lost its humor."

"Yes, geek ingratitude's an old story to all of us," Blount agreed.
"You stay on this planet very long and you'll see what I mean."

"You call them that, too?" she asked, as though disappointed in him.
"Maybe if you stopped calling them geeks, they wouldn't resent you the
way they do. You know, that's a nasty name; in the First Century
Pre-Atomic, it designated a degraded person who performed some sort of
revolting public exhibition...."

"As far as that goes, you know what the geek name for a Terran is?"
Blount asked. "_Suddabit_."

She looked puzzled for a moment, then slipped in her enunciator. Even
in the absence of any native, she used her handkerchief to mask the
act.

"Suddabit," she said, distinctly. "Sud-da-a-_bit_." Taking out the
geek-speaker, she put it away. "Why, that's exactly how they'd
pronounce it!"

"And don't tell me you haven't heard it before," O'Leary said. "The
geeks were screaming it at you, over on Seventy-second Street, this
afternoon. _Znidd suddabit_; kill the Terrans. That's Rakkeed the
Prophet's whole gospel."

"So you see," Eric Blount rammed home the moral, "this is just another
case of nobody with any right to call anybody else's kettle black....
Cigarette?"

       *       *       *       *       *

"Thank you." She leaned toward the lighter-flame O'Leary had snapped
into being. "I suspect that of being a principle you'd like me to bear
in mind at the Polar mines, when I see, let's say, some laborer being
beaten by a couple of overseers with three foot lengths of
three-quarter-inch steel cable."

"If you think the natives who work at the mines feel themselves
ill-treated, you might propose closing them down entirely and see what
the native reaction would be," von Schlichten told her.
"Independently-hired free workers can make themselves rich, by native
standards, in a couple of seasons; many of the serfs pick up enough
money from us in incentive-pay to buy their freedom after one season."

"Well, if the Company's doing so much good on this planet, how is it
that this native, Rakkeed, the one you call the Mad Prophet, is able
to find such a following?" Paula demanded. "There must be something
wrong somewhere."

"That's a fair question," Blount replied, inverting a cocktail jug
over his glass to extract the last few drops. "When we came to Ullr,
we found a culture roughly like that of Europe during the Seventh
Century Pre-Atomic. We initiated a technological and economic
revolution here, and such revolutions have their casualties, too. A
number of classes and groups got squeezed pretty badly, like the
horse-breeders and harness-manufacturers on Terra by the invention of
the automobile, or the coal and hydroelectric interests when direct
conversion of nuclear energy to electric current was developed, or the
railroads and steamship lines at the time of the discovery of the
contragravity-field. Naturally, there's a lot of ill-feeling on the
part of merchants and artisans who weren't able or willing to adapt
themselves to changing conditions; they're all backing Rakkeed and
yelling '_Znidd suddabit!_' now. But it is a fact, which not even
Rakkeed can successfully deny, that we've raised the general living
standard of this planet by about two hundred per cent."

       *       *       *       *       *

Both jugs were empty. Colonel O'Leary, as befitted his junior rank,
picked them up; after a good-natured wrangled with von Schlichten,
Blount handed the colonel his credit-key.

"The merchants in the North don't like us; beside spoiling the
caravan-trade, we're spoiling their local business, because the
landowning barons, who used to deal with them, are now dealing
directly with us. At Skilk, King Firkked's afraid his feudal nobility
is going to force a Runnymede on him, so he's been currying favor with
the urban merchants; that makes him as pro-Rakkeed and as anti-Terran
as they are. At Krink, King Jonkvank has the support of his barons,
but he's afraid of his urban bourgeoisie, and we pay him a handsome
subsidy, so he's pro-Terran and anti-Rakkeed. At Skilk, Rakkeed comes
and goes openly; at Krink he has a price on his head."

"Jonkvank is not one of the assets we boast about too loudly,"
Hideyoshi O'Leary said, pausing on his way from the table. "He's as
bloody-minded an old murderer as you'd care not to meet in a dark
alley."

"We can turn our backs on him and not expect a knife between our
shoulders, anyhow," von Schlichten said. "And we can believe, oh, up
to eighty per cent of what he tells us, and that's sixty per cent
better than any of the other native princes, except King Kankad, of
course. The Kragans are the only real friends we have on this planet."
He thought for a moment. "Miss Quinton, are you doing sociographic
research-work here, in addition to your Ex-Rights work?" he asked.
"Well, let me advise you to pay some attention to the Kragans."

"Oh, but they're just a parasite-race on the Terrans," Dr. Paula
Quinton objected. "You find races like that all through the explored
Galaxy--pathetic cultural mongrels."

Both men laughed heartily. Colonel O'Leary, returning with the jugs,
wanted to know what he'd missed. Blount told him.

"Ha! She's been reading that thing of Stanley-Browne's," he said.

"What's the matter with Stanley-Browne?" Paula demanded.

"Stanley-Browne is one author you can depend on," O'Leary assured her.
"If you read it in Stanley-Browne, it's wrong. You know, I don't think
she's run into many Kragans. We ought to take her over and introduce
her to King Kankad."

       *       *       *       *       *

Von Schlichten allowed himself to be smitten by an idea. "By Allah, so
we had!" he exclaimed. "Look, you're going to Skilk, in the next week,
aren't you? Well, do you think you could get all your end-jobs cleared
up here and be ready to leave by 0800 Tuesday? That's four days from
today."

"I'm sure I could. Why?"

"Well, I'm going to Skilk, myself, with the armed troopship
_Aldebaran_. We're stopping at King Kankad's Town to pick up a
battalion of Kragan Rifles for duty at the Polar mines, where you're
going. Suppose we leave here in my command-car, go to Kankad's Town,
and wait there till the _Aldebaran_ gets in. That would give us about
two to three hours. If you think the Kragans are 'pathetic cultural
mongrels', what you'll see there will open your eyes. And I might add
that the nearest Stanley-Browne ever came to seeing Kankad's Town was
from the air, once, at a distance of more than four miles."

"Well, general, I'll take you up," she said. "But I warn you; if this
is some scheme to indoctrinate me with the Ullr Company's side of the
case and blind me to unjust exploitation of the natives here, I don't
propagandize very easily."

"Fair enough, as long as you don't let fear of being propagandized
blind you to the good we're doing here, or impair your ability to
observe and draw accurate conclusions. Just stay scientific about it
and I'll be satisfied. Now, let's take time out for lubrication," he
said, filling her glass and passing the jug.

Two hours and five cocktails later, they were still at the table, and
they had taught Paula Quinton some twenty verses of _The Heathen
Geeks, They Wear No Breeks_, including the four printable ones.

       *       *       *       *       *

Four days later they stood together as the aircar passed over the
Kraggork Swamps--pleasantly close together, von Schlichten realized.
For the moment, he could almost forget the queer, intangible tension
that had been growing steadily, and the feeling that things were
nearing a breaking point of some kind.

Von Schlichten was scanning the horizon ahead. He pulled over a pair
of fifty-power binoculars on a swinging arm and put them where she
could use them.

"Right ahead, there; just a little to the left. See that brown-gray
spot on the landward edge of the swamp? That's King Kankad's Town.
It's been there for thousands of years, and it's always been Kankad's
Town. You might say, even the same Kankad. The Kragan kings have
always provided their own heirs, by self-fertilization. The offspring
is an exact duplicate of the single parent. The present Kankad speaks
of his heir as 'Little Me,' which is a fairly accurate way of putting
it."

He knew what she was seeing through the glasses--a massive butte of
flint, jutting out into the swamp on the end of a sharp ridge, with a
city on top of it. All the buildings were multi-storied, some piling
upward from the top and some clinging to the sides. The high
watchtower at the front now carried a telecast-director, aimed at an
automatic relay-station on an unmanned orbiter two thousand miles
off-planet.

"They're either swamp-people who moved up onto that rock, or they're
mountaineers who came out that far along the ridges and stopped," she
said. "Which?"

"Nobody's ever tried to find out. Maybe if you stay on Ullr long
enough, you can. That ought to be good for about eight to ten honorary
doctorates. And maybe a hundred sols a year in book royalties."

"Maybe I'll just do that, general.... What's that, on the little
island over there?" she asked, shifting the glasses. "A clump of
flat-roofed buildings. Under a red-and-yellow danger-flag."

"That's Dynamite Island; the Kragans have an explosives-plant there.
They make nitroglycerine, like all the thalassic peoples; they also
make TNT and propellants. Learned that from us, of course. They also
manufacture most of their own firearms, some of them pretty
extreme--up to 25-mm. for shoulder rifles. Don't ever fire one; it'd
break every bone in your body."

"Are they that much stronger than us?"

He shook his head. "Just denser; heavier. They're about equal to us in
weight-lifting. They can't run, or jump, as well as we can. We often
come out here for games with the Kragans, where the geeks can't watch
us. And that reminds me--you're right about that being a term of
derogation, because I don't believe I've ever knowingly spoken of a
Kragan as a geek, and in fact they've picked up the word from us and
apply it to all non-Kragans. But as I was saying, our baseball team
has to give theirs a handicap, but their football team can beat the
daylights out of ours. In a tug-of-war, we have to put two men on our
end for every one of theirs. But they don't even try to play tennis
with us."

"Don't the other natives make their own firearms?"

"No, and we're not going to teach them how!"

       *       *       *       *       *

The aircar came in, circling slowly over the town on the big rock, and
let down on the roof of the castle-like building from which the
watchtower rose. There were a dozen or so individuals waiting for
them--the five Terrans, three men and two women, from the telecast
station, and the rest Kragans. One of these, dark-skinned but with
speckles no darker than light amber, armed only with a heavy dagger,
came over and clapped von Schlichten on the shoulder, grinning
opalescently.

"Greetings, Von!" he squawked in Kragan, then, seeing Paula, switched
over to the customary language of the Takkad Sea country. "It makes
happiness to see you. How long will you stay with us?"

"Till the _Aldebaran_ gets in from Konkrook, to pick up the Rifles,"
von Schlichten replied, in Lingua Terra. He looked at his watch. "Two
hours and a half.... Kankad, this is Paula Quinton; Paula, King
Kankad."

He took out his geek-speaker and crammed it into his mouth. Before any
other race on Ullr, that would have been the most shocking sort of bad
manners, without the token-concealment of the handkerchief. Kankad
took it as a matter of course. At some length, von Schlichten
explained the nature of Paula's sociographic work, her connection with
the Extraterrestrials' Rights Association, and her intention of going
to the Arctic mines. Kankad nodded.

"You were right," he said. "I wouldn't have understood all that in
your language. If I had read it, maybe, but not if I heard it." He put
his upper right hand on Paula's shoulder and uttered a clicking
approximation of her name. He turned and introduced another Kragan,
about his own age, who wore the equipment and insignia of a Company
native-major and was freshly painted with the Company emblem. "This is
Kormork. He and I have borne young to each other. Kormork, you watch
over Paula Quinton." He managed, on the second try, to make it more or
less recognizable. "Bring her back safe. Or else find yourself a good
place to hide."

Kankad introduced the rest of his people, and von Schlichten
introduced the Terrans from the telecast-station. Then Kankad looked
at the watch he was wearing on his lower left wrist.

"We will have plenty of time, before the ship comes, to show Paula the
town," he suggested. "Von, you know better than I do what she would
like to see."

       *       *       *       *       *

He led the way past a pair of long 90-mm. guns to a stone stairway.
Von Schlichten explained, as they went down, that the guns of King
Kankad's town were the only artillery above 75-mm. on Ullr in
non-Terran hands. They climbed into an open machine-gun carrier and
strapped themselves to their seats, and for two hours King Kankad
showed her the sights of the town. They visited the school, where
young Kragans were being taught to read Lingua Terra and studied from
textbooks printed in Johannesburg and Sydney and Buenos Aires. Kankad
showed her the repair-shops, where two-score descendants of Kragan
river-chieftains were working on contragravity equipment, under the
supervision of a Scottish-Afrikaner and his Malay-Portuguese wife;
the small-arms factory, where very respectable copies of Terran rifles
and pistols and auto-weapons were being turned out; the machine-shop;
the physics and chemistry labs; the hospital; the ammunition-loading
plant; the battery of 155-mm. Long Toms, built in Kankad's own shops,
which covered the road up the sloping rock-spine behind the city; the
printing-shop and book-bindery; the observatory, with a big telescope
and an ingenious orrery of the Beta Hydrae system; the nuclear-power
plant, part of the original price for giving up brigandage.

Half an hour before the ship from Konkrook was due, they had arrived
at the airport, where a gang of Kragans were clearing a berth for the
_Aldebaran_. From somewhere, Kankad produced two cold bottles of Cape
Town beer for Paula and von Schlichten, and a bowl of some boiling-hot
black liquid for himself. Von Schlichten and Paula lit cigarettes;
between sips of his bubbling hell brew, Kankad gnawed on the stalk of
some swamp-plant. Paula seemed as much surprised at Kankad's disregard
for the eating taboo as she had been at von Schlichten's open flouting
of the convention of concealment when he had put in his geek-speaker.

"This is the only place on Ullr where this happens," von Schlichten
told her. "Here, or in the field when Terran and Kragan soldiers are
together. There aren't any taboos between us and the Kragans."

"No," Kankad said. "We cannot eat each others' food, and because our
bodies are different, we cannot be the fathers of each others' young.
But we have been battle-comrades, and work-sharers, and we have
learned from each other, my people more from yours than yours from
mine. Before you came, my people were like children, shooting arrows
at little animals on the beach, and climbing among the rocks at
dare-me-and-I-do, and playing war with toy weapons. But we are growing
up, and it will not be long before we will stand beside you, as the
grown son stands beside his parent, and when that day comes, you will
not be ashamed of us."

       *       *       *       *       *

It was easy to forget that Kankad had four arms and a rubbery,
quartz-speckled skin, and a face like a lizard's.

"I want Little Me, when he's old enough to travel, to visit your
world," Kankad said. "And some of the other young ones. And when
Little Me is old enough to take over the rule of our people, I would
like to go to Terra, myself."

"You're going," von Schlichten assured him. "Some day, when I return,
I'll see that you make the trip with me."

"Wonderful, Von!" Kankad was silent for a moment. When he spoke again,
it was in Kragan, and quickly. "If we live so long, old friend. There
is trouble coming, though even my spies cannot find what that trouble
is. And two days ago in Keegark, two of my people died trying to learn
it. I ask you--be careful!"

Then he switched hastily back to the language Paula could understand,
apologizing. It gave von Schlichten time to wipe the worry from his
face before she turned back to him, though it was worse news than he
had expected. If Kankad thought things were bad enough to add his own
spies to those of the Company, things couldn't be much worse. In fact,
anything that brought whatever it was out into the open would be
better.

He was still fretting over it as they said their good-byes to Kankad
and boarded the _Aldebaran_ for Skilk.




V


The last clatter of silverware and dishes ceased as the native
servants finished clearing the table. There was a remaining clatter of
cups and saucers; liqueur-glasses tinkled, and an occasional
cigarette-lighter clicked. At the head table, the voices seemed
louder.

"... don't like it a millisol's worth," Brigadier-General Barney
Mordkovitz, the Skilk military CO, was saying to the lady on his
right. "They're too confounded meek. Nowadays, nobody yells '_Znidd
suddabit!_' at you. They just stand and look at you like a farmer
looking at a turkey the week before Christmas, and that I don't like!"

"Oh, bosh!" Jules Keaveney, the Skilk Resident-Agent, at the head of
the table, exclaimed. "If they don't bow and scrape to you and get off
the sidewalk to let you pass, you say they're insolent and need a
lesson. If they do, you say they're plotting insurrection."

"What I said," Mordkovitz repeated, "was that I expect a certain
amount of disorder, and a certain minimum show of hostility toward us
from some of these geeks, to conform to what I know to be our
unpopularity with many of them. When I don't find it, I want to know
why."

"I'm inclined," von Schlichten came to his subordinate's support, "to
agree. This sudden absence of overt hostility is disquieting. Colonel
Cheng-Li," he called on the local Intelligence officer and
Constabulary chief. "This fellow Rakkeed was here, about a month ago.
Was there any noticeable disorder at that time? Anti-Terran
demonstrations, attacks on Company property or personnel, shooting at
aircars, that sort of thing?"

"No more than usual, general. In fact, it was when Rakkeed came here
that the condition General Mordkovitz was speaking of began to become
conspicuous."

Von Schlichten nodded. "And I might say that Lieutenant-Governor
Blount has reported from Keegark, where he is now, that the same
unnatural absence of hostility exists there."

"Well, of course, general," Keaveney said patronizingly, "King Orgzild
has things under pretty tight control at Keegark. He'd not allow a few
fanatics to do anything to prejudice these spaceport negotiations."

       *       *       *       *       *

"I wonder if the idea back of that spaceport proposition isn't to get
us concentrated at Keegark, where Orgzild could wipe us all out in one
surprise blow," somebody down the table suggested, and others nodded.

"Oh, Orgzild wouldn't be crazy enough to try anything like that,"
Commander Dirk Prinsloo, of the _Aldebaran_, declared. "He'd get away
with it for just twelve months--the time it would take to get the news
to Terra and for a Federation Space Navy task-force to get here. And
then, there'd be little bits of radioactive geek floating around this
system as far out as the orbit of Beta Hydrae VII."

"That's quite true," von Schlichten agreed. "The point is, does
Orgzild know it? I doubt if he even believes there is a Terra."

"Then where in Space does he think we come from?" Keaveney demanded.

"I believe he thinks Niflheim is our home world," von Schlichten
replied. "Or, rather, the string of orbiters and artificial satellites
around Niflheim. Where he thinks Niflheim is, I wouldn't even try to
guess."

"Yes. After he'd wiped us out, he might even consider the idea of an
invasion of Niflheim with captured contragravity ships," Hideyoshi
O'Leary chuckled. "That would be a big laugh--if any of us were alive,
then, to do any laughing."

"You don't really believe that, general?" Keaveney asked. His tone was
still derisive, but under the derision was uncertainty. After all,
von Schlichten had been on Ullr for fifteen years, to his two.

"Any question of geek psychology is wide open as far as I'm concerned;
the longer I stay here, the less I understand it." Von Schlichten
finished his brandy and got out cigarette-case and lighter. "I have an
idea of the sort of garbled reports these spies of his who spend a
year on Niflheim as laborers bring back."

       *       *       *       *       *

"You know the line Rakkeed's been taking, of course," Colonel Cheng-Li
put in. "He as much as says that Niflheim's our home, and that the
farms where we raise food, here, and those evergreen plantings on Konk
Isthmus and between here and Grank are the beginning of an attempt to
drive all native life from this planet and make it over for
ourselves."

"And that savage didn't think an idea like that up for himself; he got
it from somebody like Orgzild," the black-bearded brigadier-general
added. "You know, the main base off Niflheim is practically
self-supporting, with hyproponic-gardens and animal-tissue culture
vats. And it's enough bigger than one of the _City_ ships to pass for
a little world. Yes; somebody like Orgzild, or King Firkked, here,
could easily pick up the idea that that's our home planet."

"The Company ought to let us stockpile nuclear weapons here, just to
be on the safe side," another officer, farther down the table, said.

"Well, I'm not exactly in favor of that," von Schlichten replied.
"It's the same principle as not allowing guards who have to go in
among the convicts to carry firearms. If somebody like Orgzild got
hold of a nuclear bomb, even a little old First-Century H-bomb, he
could use it for a model and construct a hundred like it, with all the
plutonium we've been handing out for power reactors. And there are too
few of us, and we're concentrated in too few places, to last long if
that happened. What this planet needs, though, is a visit by a
fifty-odd-ship task-force of the Space Navy, just to show the geeks
what we have back of us. After a show like that, there'd be a lot less
_znidd suddabit_ around here."

"General, I deplore that sort of talk," Keaveney said. "I hear too
much of this mailed-fist-and-rattling-sabre stuff from some of the
junior officers here, without your giving countenance and
encouragement to it. We're here to earn dividends for the
stockholders of the Ullr Company, and we can only do that by gaining
the friendship, respect and confidence of the natives...."

       *       *       *       *       *

"Mr. Keaveney," Paula Quinton spoke. "I doubt if even you would
seriously accuse the Extraterrestrials Rights Association of favoring
what you call a mailed fist and rattling sabre policy. We've done
everything in our power to help these people, and if anybody should
have their friendship, we should. Well, only five days ago, in
Konkrook, Mr. Mohammed Ferriera and I were attacked by a mob, our
native aircar driver was murdered, and if it hadn't been for General
von Schlichten and his soldiers, we'd have lost our own lives. Mr.
Ferriera is still hospitalized as a result of injuries he received. It
seems that General von Schlichten and his Kragans aren't trying to get
friendship and confidence; they're willing to settle for respect, in
the only way they can get it--by hitting harder and quicker than the
natives can."

Somebody down the table--one of the military, of course--said, "Hear,
hear!" Von Schlichten came as close as a man wearing a monocle can to
winking at Paula. Good girl, he thought; she's started playing on the
Army team, and about time!

"Well, of course...." Keaveney began. Then he stopped, as a Terran
sergeant came up to the table and bent over Barney Mordkovitz'
shoulder, whispering urgently. The black-bearded brigadier rose
immediately, taking his belt from the back of his chair and putting it
on. Motioning the sergeant to accompany, he spoke briefly to Keaveney
and then came around the table to where von Schlichten sat, the
Resident-Agent accompanying him.

"Message just came in from Konkrook, general," he said softly.
"Governor Harrington's dead."

It took von Schlichten all of a second to grasp what had been said.
"Good God! When? How?"

"Here's all we know, sir," the sergeant said, giving him a radioprint
slip. "Came in ten minutes ago."

It was an all-station priority telecast. Governor-General Harrington
had died suddenly, in his room, at 2210; there were no details. He
glanced at his watch; it was 2243. Konkrook and Skilk were in the same
time-zone; that was fast work. He handed the slip to Mordkovitz, who
gave it to Keaveney.

"You from the telecast station, sergeant?" he asked. "All right, in
that case, let's go."

As he hurried from the banquet-room, he could hear Keaveney tapping on
his wine-glass.

"Everybody, please! Let me have your attention! There has just come in
a piece of the most tragic news...."

       *       *       *       *       *

A woman captain met him just inside the door of the big soundproofed
room of the telecast station, next to the Administration Building.

"We have a wavelength open to Konkrook, general," she said. "In booth
three."

Another girl, a tech-sergeant, was in the booth; on the screen was the
image of a third young woman, a lieutenant, at Konkrook station. The
sergeant rose and started to leave the booth.

"Stick around, sergeant," von Schlichten told her. "I'll want you to
take over when I'm through." He sat down in front of the combination
visiscreen and pickup. "Now, lieutenant; just what happened?" he
asked. "How did he die?"

"We think it was poison, general. General M'zangwe has ordered autopsy
and chemical analysis. If you can wait about ten minutes, he'll be
able to talk to you, himself."

"Call him. In the meantime, give me everything you know."

"Well, at about 2210, the Kragan guard-sergeant on that floor heard
ten pistol-shots, as fast as they could be fired semi-auto, in the
governor's room. The door was locked, but he shot it off with his own
pistol and went in. He found Governor Harrington on the floor, wearing
only his gown, holding an empty pistol. He was in convulsions,
frothing at the mouth, in horrible pain. Evidently he'd fired his
pistol, which he kept on his desk, to call help; all the bullets had
gone into the ceiling. One of the medics got there in five minutes,
just as he was dying. He'd written his diary up to noon of today, and
broken off in the middle of a word. There was a bottle and an
overturned glass on his desk. The Constabulary got there a few minutes
later, and then Brigadier-General M'zangwe took charge. A white rat,
given fifteen drops from the whiskey-bottle, died with the same
symptoms in about ninety seconds."

"Who had access to the whiskey-bottle?"

"A geek servant, who takes care of the room. He was caught, an hour
earlier, trying to slip off the island without a pass; they were
holding him at the guardhouse when Governor Harrington died. He's now
being questioned by the Kragans." The girl's face was bleakly
remorseless. "I hope they do plenty to him!"

"I hope they don't kill him before he talks."

       *       *       *       *       *

"Wait a moment, general; we have General M'zangwe, now," the girl
said. "I'll switch you over."

The screen broke into a kaleidoscopic jumble of color, then cleared;
the chocolate-brown face of M'zangwe was looking out of it.

"I heard what happened, how they found him, and about that geek
chamber-valet being arrested," von Schlichten said. "Did you get
anything out of him?"

"He's admitted putting poison in the bottle, but he claims it was his
own idea. But he's one of Father Keeluk's parishioners, so...."

"Keeluk! God damn, so that was it!" von Schlichten almost shouted.
"Now I know what he wanted with Stalin, and that goat, and those
rabbits! Of course they'd need terrestrial animals, to find out what
would poison a Terran! Who's in charge at Konkrook now?"

"Not much of anybody. Laviola, the Fiscal Secretary, and Hans
Meyerstein, the Banking Cartel's lawyer, and Howlett, the Personnel
Chief, and Buhrmann, the Commercial Secretary, have made up a sort of
quadrumvirate and are trying to run things. I don't know what would
happen if anything came up suddenly...." A blue-gray uniformed arm,
with a major's cuff-braid, came into the screen, handing a slip of
paper to M'zangwe; he took it, glanced at it, and swore. Von
Schlichten waited until he had read it through.

"Well, something has, all right," the African said. "Just got a call
from Jaikark's palace--a revolt's broken out, presumably headed by
Gurgurk; Household Guards either mutinied or wiped out by the
mutineers, all but those twenty Kragan Rifles we loaned Jaikark. They,
and about a dozen of Jaikark's courtiers and their personal retainers,
are holding the approaches to the King's apartments. The
native-lieutenant in charge of the Kragans just radioed in; says the
situation is desperate."

"When a Kragan says that, he means damn near hopeless. Is this being
recorded?" When M'zangwe nodded, he continued. "All right. Use the
recording for your authority and take charge. I'm declaring martial
rule at Konkrook, as of now, 2258. Tell Eric Blount what's happened,
and what you've done, as soon as you can get in touch with him at
Keegark. I'm leaving for Konkrook at once! I ought to get in by 0800.

"Now, as to the trouble at the Palace. Don't commit more than one
company of Kragans and ten airjeeps and four combat-cars, and tell
them to evacuate Jaikark and his followers and our Kragans to Gongonk
Island. And alert your whole force. These geek palace revolutions are
always synchronized with street-rioting, and this thing seems to have
been synchronized with Sid Harrington's death, too. Get our Kragans
out if you can't save anybody else from the Palace, but sacrificing
thirty or forty men to save twenty is no kind of business. And keep
sending reports; I can pick them up on my car radio as I come down."
He turned to the girl Sergeant. "Keep on this; there'll be more coming
in."

       *       *       *       *       *

He rose and left the booth. If we can pull Jaikark's bacon off the
fire, he was thinking, the Company can dictate its own terms to him
afterward; if Jaikark's killed, we'll have Gurgurk's head off for it,
and then take over Konkrook. In either case, it'll be a long step
toward getting rid of all these geek despots. And with Eric Blount as
Governor-General....

The inner door of the soundproofed telecast-room burst open, three men
hurried inside, and it slammed shut behind them. In the brief
interval, there had been firing audible from outside. One of the men
had a pistol in his right hand, and with his left arm he supported a
companion, whose shoulder was mangled and dripped blood. The third man
had a burp-gun in his hands. All were in civilian dress--shorts and
light jackets. The man with the pistol holstered it and helped his
injured companion into a chair. The burp-gunner advanced into the
room, looked around, saw von Schlichten, and addressed him.

"General! The geeks turned on us!" he cried. "The Tenth North Ullr's
mutinied; they're running wild all over the place. They've taken their
barracks and supply-buildings, and the lorry-hangars and the
maintenance-yard; they're headed this way in a mob. Some of the Zirk
Cavalry's joined them."

"Have any ammo left for that burp-gun? Come on, then; let's see what
it's like at Company House," von Schlichten said. "Captain Malavez,
you know what to do about defending this station. Get busy doing it.
And have that girl in booth three tell Konkrook what's happened here,
and say that I won't be coming down, as I planned, just yet."

[Illustration]

He opened the door, and the rattle of shots outside became audible
again. The civilian with the burp-gun knew better than to let a
general go out first; elbowing von Schlichten out of the way, he
crouched over his weapon and dashed outside. Drawing his pistol, von
Schlichten followed, pulling the door shut after him.

       *       *       *       *       *

Darkness had fallen, while he had been inside; now the whole Company
Reservation was ablaze with electric lights. Somebody at the
power-plant had thrown on the emergency lights. There was a confused
mass of gray-skinned figures in front of Company House, reflected
light twinkling on steel over them; from the direction of the
native-troops barracks more natives were coming on the run. On the
roof of a building across the street, two machine-guns were already
firing into the mob. From up the street, a hundred-odd saurian-faced
native soldiers were coming at the double, bayonets fixed and rifles
at high port; with them ran-several Terrans. Motioning his companion
to follow, von Schlichten ran to meet them, falling in beside a Terran
captain who ran in front.

"What's the score, captain?" he asked the panting captain.

"Tenth North Ullr and the Fifth Cavalry have mutinied; so have these
rag-tag Auxiliaries. That mob down there's part of them." He was
puffing under the double effort of running and talking. "Whole thing
blew up in seconds; no chance to communicate with anybody...."

A Terran woman, in black slacks and an orange sweater, ran across the
street in front of them, pursued by a group of enlisted "men" of the
Tenth North Ullr Native Infantry, all shrieking "_Znidd suddabit!_"
The fugitive ran into a doorway across the street; before her pursuers
were aware of their danger, the Kragans had swept over them. There was
no shooting; the slim, cruel-bladed bayonets did the work. From behind
him, as he ran, von Schlichten could hear Kragan voices in a new cry:
"_Znidd geek! Znidd geek!_"

The mob were swarming up onto the steps and into the semi-rotunda of
the storm-porch. There was shooting, which told him that some of the
humans who had been at the banquet were still alive. He wondered,
half-sick, how many, and whether they could hold out till he could
clear the doorway, and, most of all, he found himself thinking of
Paula Quinton. Skidding to a stop within fifty yards of the mob, he
flung out his arms crucifix-wise to halt the Kragans. Behind, he could
hear the Terrans and native-officers shouting commands to form front.

"Give them one clip, reload, and then give them the bayonet!" he
ordered. "Shove them off the steps and then clear the porch!"

The hundred rifles let go all at once; and for five seconds they
poured a deafening two thousand rounds into the mutineers. There was
some fire in reply; a Zirk corporal narrowly missed him with a pistol;
he saw the captain's head fly apart when an explosive rifle-bullet hit
him, and half a dozen Kragans went down.

"Reload! Set your safeties!" von Schlichten bellowed. "Charge!"

       *       *       *       *       *

Under human officers, the North Ullr Native Infantry would have stood
firm. Even under their native-officers and sergeants, they should not
have broken as they did, but the best of these had paid for their
loyalty to the Company with their lives. At that, the Skilkan
peasantry who made up the Tenth Infantry, and the Zirk cavalrymen,
tried briefly to fight as individuals, shrieking "_Znidd suddabit!_"
until the Kragans were upon them, stabbing and shooting. They drove
the rioters from the steps or killed them there, they wiped out those
who had gotten into the semicircle of the storm-porch. The inside
doors, von Schlichten saw, were open, but beyond them were Terrans and
a dozen or so Kragans. Hideyoshi O'Leary and Barney Mordkovitz seemed
to be in command of these.

"We had about thirty seconds' warning," Mordkovitz reported, "and the
Kragans in the hall bought us another sixty seconds. Of course, we all
had our pistols...."

"Hey! These storm-doors are wedged!" somebody discovered. "Those
goddam geek servants ...!"

"Yeah; kill any of them you catch," somebody else advised. "If we
could have gotten these doors closed...."

The mob, driven from the steps, was trying to re-form and renew the
attack. From up the street, the machine-guns, silent during the
bayonet-fight, began hammering again. The mob surged forward to get
out of their fire, and were met by a rifle-blast and a hedge of
bayonets at the steps; they surged back, and the machine-guns flailed
them again. They started to rush the building from whence the
automatic-fire came, and there was a fusilade and a shriek of "_Znidd
geek!_" from up the street. They turned and fled in the direction from
whence they had come, bullets scourging them from three directions at
once.

For a moment, von Schlichten and the three Terrans and eighty-odd
Kragans who had survived the fight stood on the steps, weapons poised,
seeking more enemies. The machine-guns up the street stuttered a few
short bursts and were silent. From behind, the beleaguered Terrans and
their Kragan guards were emerging. He saw Jules Keaveney and his wife;
Commander Prinsloo of the _Aldebaran_; Harry Quong and Bogdanoff. Ah,
there she was! He heaved a breath of relief and waved to her.

The Kragans were already setting about their after-battle chores. A
couple of hundred more Kragans, led by Native-Major Kormork, the
co-parent of young with King Kankad, came up at the double and stopped
in front of Company House.

       *       *       *       *       *

"We were in quarters, aboard the _Aldebaran_ and in the guest-house at
the airport," Kormork reported. "We were attacked, fifteen minutes
ago, by a mob. We took ten minutes beating them off, and five more
getting here. I sent Native-Captain Zeerjeek and the rest of the force
to re-take the supply-depot and the shops and lorry hangars, which had
been taken, and relieve the military airport, which is under attack."

"Good enough. I hope you didn't spread yourself out too thin. What's
the situation at the commercial airport?"

"The two ships, the _Aldebaran_ and the freighter _Northern Star_, are
both safe," Kormork replied. "I saw them go on contragravity and rise
to about a hundred feet."

"Whose crowd is that you have?" he asked the Terran lieutenant who had
taken over command of the first force of Kragans.

"Company 6, Eighteenth Rifles, sir. We were on duty at the guardhouse;
fighting broke out in the direction of the native barracks. A couple
of runners from Captain Retief of Company 4 came in with word that he
was being attacked by mutineers from the Tenth N.U.N.I., but that he
was holding them back. So Captain Charbonneau, who was killed a few
minutes ago, left a Terran lieutenant and a Kragan native-lieutenant
and a couple of native-sergeants and thirty Kragans to hold the
guardhouse, and brought the rest of us here."

Von Schlichten nodded. "You'd pass the military airport and the
power-plant, wouldn't you?" he asked.

"Yes, sir. The military airport's holding out, and I saw the
red-and-yellow danger-lights on the fence around the power-plant."

That meant the power-plant was, for the time, safe; somebody'd turned
twenty thousand volts into the fence.

"All right. I'm setting up my command post at the telecast station,
where the communication equipment is." He turned to the crowd that had
come out onto the porch from inside. "Where's Colonel Cheng-Li?"

"Here, general." The Intelligence and Constabulary officer pushed
through the crowd. "I was on the phone, talking to the military
airport, the commercial airport, ordnance depot, spaceport, ship-docks
and power plant. All answer. I'm afraid Pop Goode, at the city
power-plant, is done for; nobody answers there, but the TV-pickup is
still on in the load-dispatcher's room, and the place is full of
geeks. Colonel Jarman's coming here with a lorry to get combat-car
crews; he's short-handed. Port-Captain Leavitt has all the native
labor at the airport and spaceport herded into a repair dock; he's
keeping them covered with the forward 90-mm. gun of the _Northern
Star_. Lorry-hangars, repair-shops and maintenance-yards don't
answer."

"That's what I was going to ask you. Good enough. Harry Quong, Hassan
Bogdanoff!"

His command-car crew front-and-centered.

"I want you to take Colonel O'Leary up, as soon as my car's brought
here.... Hid, you go up and see what's going on. Drop flares where
there isn't any light. And take a look at the native-labor camp and
the equipment-park, south of the reservation.... Kormork, you take all
your gang, and half these soldiers from the Eighteenth, here, and help
clear the native-troops barracks. And don't bother taking any
prisoners; we can't spare personnel to guard them."

Kormork grinned. The taking of prisoners had always been one of those
irrational Terran customs which no Ullran regarded with favor, or even
comprehension.




VI


There was fresh intelligence from Konkrook, by the time he returned
to the telecast station. Mutiny had broken out there among the
laborers and native troops, who outnumbered the Terrans and their
Kragan mercenaries on Gongonk Island by five thousand to five hundred
and fifteen hundred respectively. The attempt to relieve Jaikark's
palace had been called off before the relief-force could be sent;
there was heavy and confused fighting all over the island, and most of
the combat contragravity and about half the Kragan Rifles had had to
be committed to defend the Company farms across the Channel, on the
mainland, south of the city. There had also been an urgent call for
help from Colonel Rodolfo MacKinnon, in command of Company troops at
the Keegark Residency.

He called Keegark; a girl, apparently one of the civilian telecast
technicians, answered.

"We must have help, General von Schlichten," she told him. "The native
troops, all but two hundred Kragans, have mutinied. They have
everything here except Company House--docks, airport, everything.
We're trying to hold out, but there are thousands of them."

"What happened to Eric Blount and your Resident-Agent, Mr. Lemoyne?"

"We don't know. They were at the Palace, talking to King Orgzild.
We've tried to call the Palace, but we can't get through. General, we
must have help...."

A call came in, a few minutes later, from Krink, five hundred miles to
the north-east across the mountains; the Resident-Agent there, one
Francis Xavier Shapiro, reported rioting in the city and an attempted
palace-revolution against King Jonkvank, and that the Residency was
under attack. By way of variety, it was the army of King Jonkvank that
had mutinied; the Sixth North Ullr Native Infantry and the two
companies of Zirk cavalry at Krink were still loyal, along with the
Kragans.

       *       *       *       *       *

There was a pattern to all this. Von Schlichten stood staring at the
big map, on the wall, showing the Takkad Sea area at the Equatorial
Zone, and the country north of it to the Pole, the area of Ullr
occupied by the Company. He was almost beginning to discern the
underlying logic of the past half-hour's events when Keaveney, the
Skilk Resident, blundered into him in a half-daze.

"Sorry, general; didn't see you." His face was ashen, and his jowls
sagged. "My God, it's happening all over Ullr! Why, it's the end of
all of us!"

"It's not quite that bad, Mr. Keaveney." He looked at his watch. It
was now nearly an hour since the native troops here at Skilk had
mutinied. Insurrections like this usually succeeded or failed in the
first hour. "If we all do our part, we'll come out of it all right,"
he told Keaveney, more cheerfully than he felt, then turned to ask
Brigadier-General Mordkovitz how the fighting was going at the
native-troops barracks.

"Not badly, general. Colonel Jarman's got some contragravity up and
working. They blew out all four of the Tenth N.U.N.I.'s barracks; the
Tenth and the Zirks are trying to defend the cavalry barracks. Some of
our Kragans managed to slip around behind the cavalry stables. They're
leading out hipposaurs, and sniping at the rear of the cavalry
barracks."

"That'll give us some cavalry of our own; a lot of these Kragans are
good riders.... How about the repair-shops and maintenance-yard and
lorry-hangars? I don't want these geeks getting hold of that equipment
and using it against us."

"Kormork's outfit are trying to take back the lorry-hangars. Jarman's
got a couple of airjeeps and a combat-car helping them."

"... won't be one of us left by this time tomorrow," Keaveney was
wailing, to Paula Quinton and another woman. "And the Company is
finished!"

Colonel Cheng-Li, the Intelligence officer, approached Keaveney and
tried to quiet him. At the same time, a woman in black slacks and an
orange sweater--the one whose pursuers had been overrun by the Kragans
at the beginning of the fighting--approached von Schlichten.

"General; King Kankad's calling," she said. "He's on the screen in
booth four."

       *       *       *       *       *

Kankad's face was looking out of the screen at him, with Phil
Yamazaki, the telecast operator at Kankad's Town, standing behind him.

"Von!" The Kragan spoke almost as though in physical pain. "What can I
do to help? I have twenty thousand of my people here who are capable
of bearing arms, all with firearms, but I have transport for only five
hundred. Where shall I send them?"

Von Schlichten thought quickly. Keegark was finished; the Residency
stood in the middle of the city, surrounded by two hundred thousand of
King Orgzild's troops and subjects. Sending Kankad's five hundred
warriors and his meager contragravity there would be the same as
shovelling them into a furnace. The people at Keegark would have to be
written off, like the twenty Kragans at Jaikark's palace.

"Send them to Konkrook," he decided. "Them M'zangwe's in command,
there; he'll need help to hold the Company farms. Maybe he can find
additional transport for you. I'll call him."

"I'll send off what force I can, at once," Kankad promised. "How does
it go with you at Skilk?"

"We're holding, so far," he replied.

Captain Inez Malavez, the woman officer in charge of the station, put
her head into the booth.

"General! Immediate-urgency message from Colonel O'Leary," she said.
"Native laborers from the mine-labor camp are pouring into the
mine-equipment park. Colonel O'Leary's used all his rockets and
mg-ammunition trying to stop them."

"Call you back, later," von Schlichten told Kankad. "I'll see what
Them M'zangwe can do about transport; get what force you can started
for Konkrook at once."

He left the booth. "Barney!" he called. "General Mordkovitz! Who's the
ranking officer in direct contact with the Eighteenth Rifles? Major
Falkenberg?"

"That's right."

"Well, tell him to get as many of his Kragans as he can spare down to
the equipment-park." He turned to Inez Malavez. "You call Jarman; tell
him what O'Leary reported, and tell him to get cracking on it. Tell
him not to let those geeks get any of that equipment onto
contragravity; knock it down as fast as they try to lift out with it.
And tell him to see what he can do in the way of troop-carriers or
lorries, to get Falkenberg's Rifles to the equipment-park.... How's
business at the lorry-hangars and maintenance-yard?"

"Kormork's still working on that," the girl captain told him. "Nothing
definite, yet."

       *       *       *       *       *

In one corner of the big room, somebody had thumbtacked a
ten-foot-square map of the Company area to the floor. Paula Quinton
and Mrs. Jules Keaveney were on their knees beside it, pushing out
handfuls of little pink and white pills that somebody had brought in
two bottles from the dispensary across the road, each using a
billiard-bridge. The girl in the orange sweater had a handful of
scribbled notes, and was telling them where to push the pills. There
were other objects on the map, too--pistol-cartridges, and
cigarettes, and foil-wrapped food-concentrate wafers. Paula, seeing
him, straightened.

"The pink are ours, general," she said. "The white are the geeks." Von
Schlichten suppressed a grin; that was the second time he'd heard her
use that word, this evening. "The cigarettes are airjeeps, the
cartridges are combat-cars, and the wafers are lorries or
troop-carriers."

"Not exactly regulation map-markers, but I've seen stranger things
used.... Captain Malavez!"

"Yes, sir?" The girl captain, rushing past, her hands full of
teleprint-sheets, stopped in mid-stride.

"What we need," he told her, "is a big TV-screen, and a pickup mounted
on some sort of a contragravity vehicle at about two to five thousand
feet directly overhead, to give us an image of the whole area. Can
do?"

"Can try, sir. We have an eight-foot circular screen that ought to do
all right for two thousand feet. I'll implement that at once."

Going into a temporarily idle telecast booth, he called Konkrook, and
finally got Themistocles M'zangwe on the screen.

"How is it, now?" he asked.

"Getting a little better," the Graeco-African replied. "Half an hour
ago, we were shooting geeks out the windows, here; now we have them
contained between the spaceport and the native-troops and labor
barracks, and down the east side of the island to the farms. We have
the wire around the farms on the island electrified, and we're using
almost all our combat contragravity to keep the farms on the mainland
clear." He hesitated for a moment. "Did you hear about Eric Blount and
Lemoyne?"

Von Schlichten shook his head.

       *       *       *       *       *

"The whole party that were at Orgzild's palace were massacred. Some of
them were lucky enough to get killed fighting. The geeks took Eric and
Hendrik alive; rolled them in a puddle of thermoconcentrate fuel and
set fire to them. When we can spare the contragravity, we're going to
drop something on the Kee-geek embassy, over in town."

Von Schlichten grimaced, but he'd expected something like it. He told
M'zangwe about King Kankad's offer. "His crowd ought to be coming in
in a couple of hours. What can you scrape up to send to Kankad's Town
to airlift Kragans in?"

"Well, we have three hundred-and-fifty-foot gun-cutters, one 90-mm.
apiece. The _Elmoran_, the _Gaucho_, and the _Bushranger_. But they're
not much as transports, and we need them here pretty badly. Then, we
have five fertilizer and charcoal scows, and a lot of heavy transport
lorries, and two one-eighty-foot pickup boats."

"How about the _Piet Joubert?_" von Schlichten asked. "She was due in
Konkrook from the east about 1300 today, wasn't she?"

M'zangwe swore. "She got in, all right. But the geeks boarded her at
the dock, within twenty minutes after things started. They tried to
lift out with her, and the Channel Battery shot her down into Konkrook
Channel, off the Fifty-sixth Street docks."

"Well, you couldn't let the geeks have her, to use against us. What do
you hear from the other ships?"

"_Procyon's_ at Grank; we haven't had any reports of any kind from
there, which doesn't look so good. The _Northern Lights_ is at Grank,
too. The _Oom Paid Kruger_ should have been at Bwork, in the east,
when the gun went off. And the _Jan Smuts_ and the _Christiaan De
Wett_ were both at Keegark; we can assume Orgzild has both of them."

"All right. I'm sending _Aldebaran_ to Kankad's, to pick up more
reenforcements for you."

       *       *       *       *       *

Leaving the booth, he heard, above the clatter of
communications-machines and the hubbub of voices, Jules Keaveney
arguing contentiously. Evidently Colonel Cheng-Li's efforts to drag
the Resident out of his despondency had been an excessive success.

"But it's crazy! Not just here; everywhere on Ullr!" Keaveney was
saying. "How did they do it? They have no telecast equipment."

"You have me stopped, Jules," Mordkovitz was replying. "I know a lot
of rich geeks have receiving sets, but no sending sets."

The pattern that had been tantalizing von Schlichten took visible
shape in his mind. For a moment, he shelved the matter of the
_Aldebaran_.

"They didn't need sending equipment, Barney," he said. "They used
ours. Sid Harrington was poisoned in Konkrook. The news, of course,
was sent out at once, as the geeks knew it would be, to every
residency and trading-station on Ullr, and that was the signal they'd
agreed upon, probably months in advance!"

"Well, what was our Intelligence doing; sleeping?" Keaveney demanded
angrily.

"No; they were writing reports for your civil administration blokes to
stuff in the wastebasket, and being called mailed-fist-and-rattling-sabre
alarmists for their pains." He turned away from Keaveney. "Barney, where
is Dirk Prinsloo?"

"Aboard his ship. He hitched a ride to the airport with Jarman, when
he was here picking up air-crews."

"Call him. Tell him to take the _Aldebaran_ to Kankad's Town, at once;
as soon as he arrives there, which ought to be about 1100, he's to
pick up all the Kragans he can pack aboard and take them to Konkrook.
From then on, he'll be under Them M'zangwe's orders."

"To Konkrook?" Keaveney fairly howled. "Are you nuts? Don't you think
we need reenforcements here, too?"

"Yes, I do. I'm going to try to get them," von Schlichten told him.
"Now pipe down and get out of people's way."

He crossed the room, to where two Kragans, a male sergeant, and the
ubiquitous girl in the orange sweater were struggling to get a big
circular TV-screen up, then turned to look at the situation-map. A
girl tech-sergeant was keeping Paula Quinton and Mrs. Jules Keaveney
informed.

"Start pushing geeks out of the Fifth Zirk Cavalry barracks," the
sergeant was saying. "The one at the north end, and the one next to
it; they're both on fire, now." She tossed a slip into the wastebasket
beside her and glanced at the next slip. "And more pink pills back of
the barracks and stables, and move them a little to the north-west;
Kragans as skirmishers, to intercept geeks trying to slip away from
the cavalry barracks."

       *       *       *       *       *

A young Kragan with his lower left arm in a sling and a daub of
antiseptic plaster over the back of his head came up and gave him a
radioprint slip. Guido Karamessinis, the Resident-Agent at Grank, had
reported, at last. The city, he said, was quiet, but King Yoorkerk's
troops had seized the Company airport and docks, taken the _Procyon_
and the _Northern Lights_ and put guards aboard them, and were
surrounding the Residency. He wanted to know what to do.

Von Schlichten managed to get him on the screen, after awhile.

"It looks as though Yoorkerk's trying to play both sides at once," he
told the Grank Resident. "If the rebellion's put down, he'll come
forward as your friend and protector; if we're wiped out elsewhere,
he'll yell '_Znidd suddabit!_' and swamp you. Don't antagonize him; we
can't afford to fight this war on any more fronts than we are now.
We'll try to do something to get you unfrozen, before long."

He called Krink again. A girl with red-gold hair and a dusting of
freckles across her nose answered.

"How are you making out?" he asked.

"So far, fine, general. We're in complete control of the Company area,
and all our native-troops, not just the Kragans, are with us.
Jonkvank's pushed the mutineers out of his palace, and we're keeping
open a couple of streets between there and here. We airlifted all our
Kragans and half the Sixth N.U.N.I. to the Palace, and we have the
Zirks patrolling the streets on 'saur-back. Now, we have our lorries
and troop-carriers out picking up elements of Jonkvank's loyal troops
outside town."

"Who's doing the rioting, then?"

She named three of Jonkvank's regiments. "And the city hoodlums, and
priests from the temples of one sect that followed Rakkeed, and the
whole passel of Skilkan fifth columnists."

"How long do you think it'd take, with the equipment you have, to
airlift all of Jonkvank's loyal troops into the city?"

"Not before this time tomorrow."

"All right. Are you in radio communication with Jonkvank now?"

"Full telecast, audio-visual," the girl replied. "Just a minute,
general."

       *       *       *       *       *

He put in his geek-speaker. Within a few minutes, a saurian Ullran
face was looking out of it at him; a harsh-lined, elderly, face, with
an old scar, quartz-crusted, along one side.

"Your Majesty," von Schlichten greeted him.

Jonkvank pronounced something intended to correspond to von
Schlichten's name. "We have image-met under sad circumstances,
general," he said.

"Sad for both of us, King Jonkvank; we must help one another. I am
told that your soldiers in Krink have risen against you, and that your
loyal troops are far from the city."

"Yes. That was the work of my War Minister, Hurkkirk, who was in the
pay of King Firkked of Skilk, may Jeels devour him alive! I have
Hurkkirk's head here somewhere. I can have it found, if you want to
see it."

"Dead-traitors' heads do not interest me, King Jonkvank," von
Schlichten replied, in what he estimated that the Krinkan king would
interpret as a tone of cold-blooded cruelty. "There are too many
traitors' heads still on traitors' shoulders.... What regiments are
loyal to you, and where are they now?"

Jonkvank began naming regiments and locating them, all at minor
provincial towns at least a hundred miles from Krink.

"Hurkkirk did his work well; I'm afraid you killed him too
mercifully," von Schlichten said. "Well, I'm sending the _Northern
Star_ to Krink. She can only bring in one regiment at a trip, the way
they're scattered; which one do you want first?"

Jonkvank's mouth, until now compressed grimly, parted in a gleaming
smile. He made an exclamation of pleasure which sounded rather like a
boy running along a picket fence with a stick.

"Good, general! Good!" he cried. "The first should be the regiment
Murderers, at Furnk; they all have rifles like your soldiers. Have
them brought to the Great Square, at the Palace here. And then, the
regiment Fear-Makers, at Jeelznidd, and the regiment Corpse-Reapers,
at...."

"Let that go until the Murderers are in," von Schlichten advised.
"They're at Furnk, you say? I'll send the _Northern Star_ there,
directly."

"Oh, good, general! I will not soon forget this! And, as soon as the
work is finished here, I will send soldiers to help you at Skilk.
There shall be a great pile of the heads of those who had part in this
wickedness, both here and there!"

"Good. Now, if you will pardon me, I'll go to give the necessary
orders...."

       *       *       *       *       *

As he left the booth, he saw Hideyoshi O'Leary in front of the
situation-map, and hailed him.

"Harry and Hassan are getting the car re-ammoed; they dropped me off
here. Want to come up with us and see the show?" O'Leary asked, as he
saw the general.

"No, I want you to go to Krink, as soon as Harry brings the car here
again." He told O'Leary what he intended doing. "You'll probably have
to go around ahead of the _Star_ and alert these regiments. And as
soon as things stabilize at Krink, prod Jonkvank into airlifting
troops here. You're authorized, in my name, to promise Jonkvank that
he can assume political control at Skilk, after we've stuffed
Firkked's head in the dustbin."

Jules Keaveney, who always seemed to be where he wasn't wanted, heard
that and fairly screamed.

"General von Schlichten! That is a political decision! You have no
authority to make promises like that; that is a matter for the
Governor-General, at least!"

"Well, as of now, and until a successor to Sid Harrington can be sent
here from Terra, I'm Governor-General," von Schlichten told him,
mentally thanking Keaveney for reminding him of the necessity for such
a step. "Captain Malavez! You will send out an all-station telecast,
immediately: Military Commander-in-Chief Carlos von Schlichten, being
informed of the deaths of both Governor-General Harrington and
Lieutenant-Governor Blount, assumes the duties of Governor-General, as
of 0001 today." He turned to Keaveney. "Does that satisfy you?" he
asked.

"No, it doesn't. You have no authority to assume a civil position of
any sort, let alone the very highest position...."

Von Schlichten unbuttoned his holster and took out his authority,
letting Keaveney look in to the muzzle of it.

"Here it is," he said. "If you're wise, don't make me appeal to it."

Keaveney shrugged. "I can't argue with that," he said. "But I don't
fancy the Ullr Company is going to be impressed by it."

"The Ullr Company," von Schlichten replied, "is six and a half parsecs
away. It takes a ship six months to get from here to Terra, and
another six months to get back. A radio message takes a little over
twenty-one years, each way." He holstered the pistol again.

"That brings up another question, general," one of Keaveney's
subordinates said. "Can we hold out long enough for help to get here
from Terra?"

"By the time help could reach us from Terra," von Schlichten replied,
"we'll either have this revolt crushed, or there won't be a live
Terran left on Ullr." He felt a brief sadistic pleasure as he watched
Keaveney's face sag in horror. "On this planet, there's not more than
a three months' supply of any sort of food a human can eat. And the
ships that'll be coming in until word of our plight can get to Terra
won't bring enough to keep us going. We need the farms and livestock
and the animal-tissue culture plant at Konkrook, and the farms at
Krink and on the plateau back of Skilk, and we need peace and native
labor to work them."

       *       *       *       *       *

Nobody seemed to have anything to say after that, for awhile. Then
Keaveney suggested that the next ship was due in from Niflheim in
three months, and that it could be used to evacuate all the Terrans on
Ullr.

"And I'll personally shoot any able-bodied Terran who tries to board
that ship," von Schlichten promised. "Get this through your heads, all
of you. We are going to break this rebellion, and we are going to hold
Ullr for the Company and the Terran Federation." He looked around him.
"Now, get back to work, all of you," he told the group that had formed
around him and Keaveney. "Miss Quinton, you just heard me order my
adjutant, Colonel O'Leary, on detached duty to Krink. I want you to
take over for him. You'll have rank and authority as colonel for the
duration of this war."

She was thunderstruck. "But I know absolutely nothing about military
matters. There must be a hundred people here who are better qualified
than I am...."

"There are, and they all have jobs, and I'd have to find replacements
for them, and replacements for the replacements. You won't leave any
vacancy to be filled. And you'll learn, fast enough." He went over to
the situation-map again, and looked at the arrangements of pink and
white pills. "First of all, I want you to call Jarman, at the military
airport, and have an airjeep and driver sent around here for me. I'm
going up and have a look around. Barney, keep the show going while I'm
out, and tell Colonel Quinton what it's all about."




VII


He looked at his watch, as the light airjeep let down into the street.
Oh-one-fifteen--two hours and a half since the mutiny at the
native-troops barracks had broken out. The Company reservation was
still ablaze with lights, and over the roof of the hospital and
dispensary and test-lab he could see the glare of the burning
barracks. There was more fire-glare to the south, in the direction of
the mine-equipment park and the mine-labor camp, and from that
direction the bulk of the firing was to be heard.

The driver, a young lieutenant, slid back the duraglass canopy for him
to climb in, then snapped it into place when he had strapped himself
into his seat, and hit the controls.

They lifted up, the driver turning the nose of the airjeep in the
direction of the flames and explosions and magnesium-lights to the
south and tapping his booster-button gently. The vehicle shot forward
and came floating in over the scene of the fighting. The situation-map
at the improvised headquarters had shown a mixture of pink and white
pills in the mine-equipment park; something was going to have to be
done about the lag in correcting it, for the area was entirely in the
hands of loyal Company troops, and the mob of laborers and mutinous
soldiers had been pushed back into the temporary camp where the
workers had been gathered to await transportation to the Arctic. As he
had feared, the rioting workers, many of whom were trained to handle
contragravity equipment, had managed to lift up a number of
dump-trucks and power-shovels and bulldozers, intending to use them as
improvised air-tanks, but Jarman's combat-cars had gotten on the job
promptly and all of these had been shot down and were lying in
wreckage, mostly among the rows of parked mining-equipment.

       *       *       *       *       *

From the labor-camp, a surprising volume of fire was being directed
against the attack which had already started from the retaken
equipment-park.

Hovering above the fighting, aloof from it, he saw six long
troop-carriers land and disgorge Kragan Rifles who had been released
by the liquidation of resistance at the native-troops barracks. A
little later, two air-tanks floated in, and then two more, going off
contragravity and lumbering forward on treads to fire their 90-mm.
rifles. At the same time, combat-cars swooped in, banging away with
their lighter auto-cannon and launching rockets. The titanium
prefab-huts, set up to house the laborers and intended to be taken
north with them for their stay on the polar desert, were simply wiped
away. Among the wreckage, resistance was being blown out like the
lights of a candelabrum.

He took up the hand-phone and called HQ.

"Von Schlichten; what's the wavelength of the officer in command at
the equipment-park?"

A voice at the telecast station furnished it; he punched it out.

"Von Schlichten, right overhead. That you, Major Falkenberg? Nice
going, major; how are your casualties?"

"Not too bad. Twenty or thirty Kragans and loyal Skilkans, and eight
Terrans killed; about as many wounded."

"Pretty good, considering what you're running into. Get many of your
Kragans mounted on those hipposaurs?"

"About a hundred; a lot of 'saurs got shot, while we were leading them
out from the stables."

"Well, I can see geeks streaming away from the labor-camp, out the
south end, going in the direction of the river. Use what cavalry you
have on them, and what contragravity you can spare. I'll drop a few
flares to show their position and direction."

Anticipating him, the driver turned the airjeep and started toward the
dry Hoork River. Von Schlichten nodded approval and told him to
release flares when over the fugitives.

"Right," Falkenberg replied. "I'll get on it at once, general."

"And start moving that mine-equipment up into the Company area. Some
of it we can put into the air; the rest we can use to build
barricades. None of it do we want the geeks getting hold of, and the
equipment-park's outside our practical perimeter. I'll send people to
help you move it."

"No need to do that, sir; I have about a hundred and fifty loyal North
Ullrans--foremen, technicians, overseers--who can handle it."

"All right. Use your own judgment. Put the stuff back of the
native-troops barracks, and between the power-plant and the Company
office-buildings, and anywhere else you can." The lieutenant nudged
him and pushed a couple of buttons on the dashboard. "Here go the
flares, now."

       *       *       *       *       *

Immediately, a couple of airjeeps pounced in, to strafe the fleeing
enemy. Somebody must have already been issuing orders on another
wavelength; a number of Kragans, riding hipposaurs, were galloping
into the light of the flares.

"Now, let's have a look at the native barracks and the
maintenance-yards," he said. "And then, we'll make a circuit around
the Reservation, about two-three miles out. I'm not happy about where
Firkked's army is."

The driver looked at him. "I've been worrying about that, too, sir,"
he said. "I can't understand why he hasn't jumped us, already. I know
it takes time to get one of these geek armies on the road, but...."

"He's hoping our native-troops and the mine laborers will be able to
wipe us out, themselves," von Schlichten said.

There was nothing going on in the area between the native barracks
and the mountains except some sporadic firing as small patrols of
Kragans clashed with clumps of fleeing mutineers. All the barracks,
even those of the Rifles, were burning; the red-and-yellow
danger-lights around the power-plant and the water-works and the
explosives magazines were still on. Most of the floodlights were still
on, and there was still some fighting around the maintenance-yard. It
looked as though the survivors of the Tenth N.U.N.I. were in a few
small pockets which were being squeezed out.

There was nothing at all going on north of the Reservation; the
countryside, by day a checkerboard of walled fields and small
villages, was dark, except for a dim light, here and there, where the
occupants of some farmhouse had been awakened by the noise of battle.

Then, two miles east of the Reservation, he caught a new sound--the
flowing, riverlike, murmur of something vast on the move.

"Hear that, lieutenant?" he asked. "Head for it, at about a thousand
feet. When we're directly above it, let go some flares."

"Yes, sir." The younger man had lowered his voice to a whisper.

"That's geeks; headed for the Reservation."

"Maybe Firkked's army," von Schlichten thought aloud. "Or maybe a city
mob."

       *       *       *       *       *

The noises were growing clearer, louder. He picked up the phone and
punched the wavelength of the military airport.

"Von Schlichten; my compliments to Colonel Jarman. Tell him there's a
geek mob, or possibly Firkked's regulars, on the main highway from
Skilk, two miles east of the Reservation. Get some combat
contragravity over here, at once. We'll light them up for you. And
tell Colonel Jarman to start flying patrols up and down along the
Hoork River; this may not be the only gang that's coming out to see
us."

The sounds were directly below, now--the scuffing of horny-soled feet
on the dirt road, the clink and rattle of slung weapons, the clicking
and squeaking of Ullran voices.

The lieutenant said: "Here go the flares, sir."

Von Schlichten shut his eyes, then opened them slowly. The driver,
upon releasing the flares, had nosed up, banked, turned, and was
coming in again, down the road toward the advancing column. Von
Schlichten peered into his all-armament sight, his foot on the
machine-gun pedal and his fingers on the rocket buttons. The highway
below was jammed with geeks, and they were all stopped dead and
staring upward, as though hypnotized by the lights. It was obviously a
mob. A second later, they had recovered and were shooting--not at the
airjeep, but at the four globes of blazing magnesium. Then he had the
close-packed mass of non-humanity in his sights; he tramped the pedal
and began punching buttons. He still had four rockets left by the time
the mob was behind him.

"All right, let's take another pass at them. Same direction."

The driver put the airjeep into a quick loop and came out of it in
front of the mob, who now had their backs turned and were staring in
the direction in which they had last seen the vehicle. Again, von
Schlichten plowed them with rockets and harrowed them with his guns.
Some of the Skilkans were trying to get over the high fences on either
side of the road--really stockades of petrified tree-trunks. Others
were firing, and this time they were shooting at the airjeep. It took
one hit from a heavy shellosaur-rifle, and immediately the driver
banked and turned away from the road, heading back.

"Dammit, why did you do that?" von Schlichten demanded, lifting his
foot from the gun-pedal. "Are you afraid of the kind of popguns those
geeks are using?"

"I am not afraid to risk my vehicle, or myself, sir," the lieutenant
replied, with the extreme formality of a very junior officer chewing
out a very senior one. "I am, however, afraid to risk my passenger.
Generals are not expendable, sir."

He was right, of course. Von Schlichten admitted it. "I'm too old to
play cowboy, like this," he said. "Back to the Reservation; telecast
station."

Looking back over his shoulder, he saw eight or ten more flares
alight, and the ground-flashes of exploding shells and rockets; the
air above the road was sparkling with gun-flames. Jarman must have had
some contragravity ready to be sent off on the instant.

       *       *       *       *       *

While he had been out, somebody had gotten a TV-pickup mounted on a
contragravity-lifter and run up to two thousand feet, on the end of a
steel-tough tensilon mooring-line. The big circular screen was lit,
showing the whole Company Reservation, with the surrounding
countryside foreshortened by perspective to the distant lights of
Skilk. The map had been taken up from the floor, and a big
terrain-board had been brought in from the Chief Engineer's office and
set up in its place. In front of the screen, Paula Quinton, Barney
Mordkovitz, Colonel Cheng-Li, and, conspicuously silent, Jules
Keaveney, sat drinking coffee and munching sandwiches. Half a dozen
Terrans, of both sexes, were working furiously to get the markers
which replaced the pink and white pills placed on the board, and one
of Captain Inez Malavez' non-coms, with a headset, was getting combat
reports directly from the switchboard. Everything was clicking like
well-oiled machinery.

On the TV-screen, the Residency area was ablaze with light, and so
were the ship-docks, the airport and spaceport, the shops, and the
maintenance-yard. On the terrain-board, the latter was now marked as
completely in Company hands. The ruins of the native-troops barracks
were still burning, and there was a twinkle of orange-red here and
there among the ruins of the labor-camp. Much of the equipment for the
Polar mines had already been shifted into defensible ground. The rest
of the circle was dark, except for the distant lights of Skilk, where
the nuclear power plant was apparently still functioning in native
hands.

Then, without warning, a spot of white light blazed into being
south-east of the Company area and south-west of Skilk, followed by
another and another. Instantly, von Schlichten glanced up at the row
of smaller screens, and on one of them saw the view as picked up by a
patrolling airjeep.

The army of King Firkked of Skilk had finally put in its appearance,
about three miles south of the Reservation. The Skilkan regulars had
been marching in formation, some on the road and some along parallel
lanes and paths. They had the look of trained and disciplined troops,
but they had made the same mistake as the rabble that had been shot up
on the north side of the Reservation. Unused to attack from the air,
they had all halted in place and were gaping open-mouthed, their opal
teeth gleaming in the white flare-light.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the big screen, it could be seen that Colonel Jarman had thrown
most of his available contragravity at them, including the combat-cars
that had already started to form the second wave of the attack on the
mob to the north. Other flares bloomed in the darkness, and the fiery
trails of rockets curved downward to end in yellow flashes on the
ground.

The airjeep with the pickup circled back; the troops on the road and
in the adjoining fields had broken. The former were caught between the
fences which made Ullran roads such deathtraps when under air-attack.
The latter had dispersed, and were running away, individually and by
squads; at first, it looked like a panic, but he could see officers
signalling to the larger groups of fugitives to open out, apparently
directing the flight. By this time, there were ten or twelve
combat-cars and about twenty airjeeps at work. In the moving view from
the pickup-jeep, he saw what looked like a 90-mm. rocket land in the
middle of a company that was still trying to defend itself with
small-arms fire on the road, wiping out about half of them.

"The next time they're air-struck, they won't stay bunched,"
Mordkovitz stated. "A lot of them didn't stay bunched this time, if
you noticed. And they'll keep out from between the fences."

In the large screen, a quick succession of gun-flashes leaped up from
the direction of the Hoork River; shells began bursting over the scene
of the attack. The screen tuned to the pickup on the airjeep went
dead; in the big screen, there was a twinkling of falling fire. Almost
at once, thirty or forty rocket-trails converged on the gun-position,
and, for a moment, explosions burned like a bonfire.

"They had a 75-mm. at the rear of the column," somebody called from
the big switchboard. "Lieutenant Kalanang's jeep was hit; Lieutenant
Vermaas is cutting in his pickup on the same wavelength."

       *       *       *       *       *

The small screen lighted again. In the big screen, a cluster of
magnesium-lights then appeared above where the Skilkan gun had been;
in the small screen, there was a stubbled grain-field, pocked with
craters, and the bodies of fifteen or twenty natives, all rather badly
mangled. An overturned and apparently destroyed 75-mm. gun lay on its
side.

"As far as we know, that was the only 75-mm. gun Firkked had," Colonel
Cheng-Li said. "He has at least six, possibly ten, 40-mm's. It's a
wonder we haven't seen anything of them."

"Well, there's no way of being sure," Jules Keaveney said, "but I have
an idea they're all at or around the Palace. Firkked knows about how
much contragravity we have. He's probably wondering why we aren't
bombing him, now."

"He doesn't know we've sold the Palace to King Jonkvank for an army,"
von Schlichten said. "And that reminds me; how much contragravity
could Firkked scrape together, for an attack on us? I've been
expecting a geek Luftwaffe over here, at any moment."

Colonel Cheng-Li studied the smoking tip of his cigarette for a
moment. "Well, Firkked owns, personally, three ten-passenger aircars,
a thing like a troop-carrier that he transports some of his courtiers
around in, four airjeeps armed with a pair of 15-mm. machine-guns
apiece, and two big lorries. There are possibly two hundred vehicles
of all types in Skilk and the country around, but some of them are in
the hands of natives friendly to us."

Von Schlichten nodded. "And there'll be oodles of
thermoconcentrate-fuel, and blasting explosives. Colonel Quinton,
suppose you call Ed Wallingsby, the Chief Engineer, right away; have
him commissioned colonel. Tell him to get to work making this place
secure against air-attack, to consult with Colonel Jarman, and to get
those geeks Leavitt has penned in the repair-dock at the airport and
use them to dig slit-trenches and fill sandbags and so on. He can use
Kragan limited-duty wounded to guard them.... Mr. Keaveney, you'll
begin setting up something in the way of an ARP-organization. You'll
have to get along on what nobody else wants. You will also consult
with Colonel Jarman, and with Colonel Wallingsby. Better get started
on it now. Just think of everything around here that could go wrong in
case of an air attack, and try to do something about it in advance."




VIII


At 0245, an attack developed on the north-western corner of the
Reservation, in the direction of the explosives magazines. It turned
out to be relatively trivial. Remnants of the mob that had been broken
up by air attack on the road had gotten together and were making
rushes in small bands, keeping well spread out. Beating them off took
considerable ammunition, but it was accomplished with negligible
casualties to the defenders. They finally stopped coming around
daylight.

In the meantime, Themistocles M'zangwe called from Konkrook. "About
six hundred of Kankad's people have gotten in, already, in the
damnedest collection of vehicles you ever saw," he reported. "Kankad
must be using every scrap of contragravity he has; it's a regular
airborne Dunkirk-in-reverse. Kankad sent word that he's coming here in
person, as soon as he has things organized at his place. And the
geeks, here, have scraped together an air-force of their
own--farm-lorries, aircars, that sort of thing--and they're using them
to bomb us here and at the mainland farm, mostly with nitroglycerine.