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

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Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr

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Title: Uller Uprising

Author: Henry Beam Piper, John D. Clark and John F. Carr

Release Date: January 21, 2007 [EBook #19474]
[Original Release Date: October 5, 2006]

Language: English

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                         Transcriber's Note:

       Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the
       U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.



                            H. BEAM PIPER


                                ULLER
                               UPRISING




                      ACE SCIENCE FICTION BOOKS

                               NEW YORK


       *       *       *       *       *

This Ace Science Fiction Book contains the complete text of the
original hardcover edition. It has been completely reset in a typeface
designed for easy reading, and was printed from new film.

PRINTING HISTORY
Twayne edition/ 1952
Ace edition/ June 1983

Copyright (C) 1952 by Twayne Publishers, Inc.
Copyright (C) renewed 1983 by Charter Communications, Inc.
Introduction (C) 1952, 1983 by Dr. John D. Clark
New Introduction (C) 1983 by John F. Carr
Cover art by Gino D'Achille

       *       *       *       *       *




Introduction to

_ULLER UPRISING_

by John F. Carr


With the publication of this novel, _Uller Uprising_, all of H. Beam
Piper's previously published science fiction is now available in Ace
editions. _Uller Uprising_ was first published in 1952 in a Twayne
Science Fiction Triplet--a hardbound collection of three thematically
connected novels. (The other two were Judith Merril's _Daughters of
Earth_ and Fletcher Pratt's _The Long View_.) A year later it appeared
in the February and March issues of _Space Science Fiction_, edited by
Lester Del Rey.

The magazine version, which was abridged by about a third, was
believed by many bibliographers to be the only version--and as a
novella it was too short for book publication. The Twayne version had
a small print run and is so scarce that few people have seen it. Those
bibliographers who knew of its existence assumed that both versions of
_Uller_ were the same. It was through a telephone conversation with
Charles N. Brown, publisher of _Locus_ and correspondent with Piper,
that I learned about the Twayne edition and its greater length. Brown
allowed me to photocopy his original, for which we owe him a debt of
thanks; because the Twayne version is not only novel length, but far
better than the shorter one that appeared in _Space Science Fiction_.

Probably the most surprising and interesting thing about the Twayne
edition is the essay that forms the introduction to that volume, and
is reprinted here. The essay is by Dr. John D. Clark, an eminent
scientist of the fourties and fifties and one of the discoverers of
sulfa, the first "miracle drug." It describes in great detail the
planetary system of the star Beta Hydri, and gives the names of those
planets: Uller and Niflheim. A publisher's note states that Clark's
essay was written first, and given to the contributors as background
material for a novel they would then write.

The fans of H. Beam Piper seem to owe a great debt to Dr. Clark.
_Uller Uprising_ became the foundation of Piper's monumental
Terro-Human Future History; the first story where we encounter the
Terran Federation. In it we learn about Odin, the planet that will one
day be the capital of the First Galactic Empire; and humble Niflheim,
which in more decadent times will become a common expletive, a word
meaning hell. This is also where Piper introduced and explained the
Atomic Era dating system (A.E.). _Uller Uprising_ is set in the early
years of the Terran Federation's expansion and exploration, an epoch
of great vitality. In "The Edge of the Knife" Piper compares this time
of discovery to the Spanish conquest of the Americas. This feeling of
vigor and unlimited possibilities runs through all the early
Federation stories: _Uller Uprising_, "Omnilingual," "Naudsonce,"
"When in the Course--," and, to a lesser degree, in the late
Federation novels, _Little Fuzzy_, _Fuzzy Sapiens_, and _Fuzzies and
Other People_. (See _Federation_ by H. Beam Piper for a good overview
of this period.)

In these stories we see Terro-Humans at their best and at their worst:
Individual heroism and bravery in the face of grave danger in _Uller
Uprising_; Federation law and justice in _Little Fuzzy_ and its
sequels; and, in "Omnilingual" and "Naudsonce," the spirit of science
and rational inquiry. Yet we also see colonial exploitation and
subjugation in _Uller Uprising_ and "Oomphel in the Sky," the greed
and corruption of Chartered land companies in _Little Fuzzy_, and
political corruption in _Four-Day Planet_. These stories are about a
living Terro-Human culture, not a utopia.

It was Piper's attention to historical realism and his use of actual
historical models that have helped his work to pass the test of time
and have led to his becoming the favorite of a new generation of
readers more than twenty-five years after his death.

_Uller Uprising_ is the story of a confrontation between a human
overlord and alien servants, with an ironic twist at the end. Like
most of Piper's best work, _Uller Uprising_ is modeled after an actual
event in human history; in this case the Sepoy Mutiny (a Bengal
uprising in British-held India brought about when rumors were spread
to native soldiers that cartridges being issued by the British were
coated with animal fat. The rebellion quickly spread throughout India
and led to the massacre of the British Colony at Cawnpore.). Piper's
novel is not a mere retelling of the Indian Mutiny, but rather an
analysis of an historical event applied to a similar situation in the
far future.

       *       *       *       *       *

Like many philosophers and social theorists before him, Piper
attempted to chart the progress of human-kind; unlike most, however,
he did not envision or try to create a system of ethics that would end
all of humanity's problems. The best he could offer was his model of
the self-reliant man: The man who "actually knows what has to be done
and how to do it, and he's going to go right ahead and do it, without
holding a dozen conferences and round-table discussions and giving
everybody a fair and equal chance to foul things up for him."

Piper brought his own ideas and judgments about society and history
into all of his work, but they appear most clearly in his Terro-Human
Future History. While not everyone will agree with Piper's theories
they give his work a bite that most popular fiction lacks. One cannot
read Piper complacently. And one can often find a wry insight
sandwiched in between the blood and thunder.

Other future histories may span more centuries or better illuminate
the highlights of several decades, but until a rival is created with
more historical depth and attention to detail, H. Beam Piper's
Terro-Human Future History will stand as the Bayeux Tapestry of
science fiction histories.

In many ways--certainly during his lifetime--Piper was the most
underrated of the John W. Campbell's "Astounding" writers. He was
probably also the most Campbellian; his _self-reliant man_ is almost a
mirror image of Campbell's "Citizen."

Piper died a bitter man, a failure in his own mind; shortly before his
death he believed he could no longer earn a living as a writer without
charity from his friends or the state.

Now he's the cornerstone of Ace Books. Had he lived long enough to
finish another half dozen books, he would have been among the sf
greats of the sixties....

But maybe he does know, after all. Jerry Pournelle, who was very much
influenced by Piper and in many ways considers himself Beam's
spiritual descendant--and incidently was John W. Campbell's last major
_discovery_--has said that sometimes, when he's gotten down a
particularly good line, he can hear the "old man" chuckle and whisper,
_atta boy_.




Introduction

Dr. John D. Clark

THE SILICONE WORLD


1. THE STAR AND ITS MOST IMPORTANT PLANET

The planet is named Uller (it seems that when interstellar travel was
developed, the names of Greek Gods had been used up, so those of Norse
gods were used). It is the second planet of the star Beta Hydri, right
angle 0:23, declension-77:32, G-0 (solar) type star, of approximately
the same size as Sol; distance from Earth, 21 light years.

Uller revolves around it in a nearly circular orbit, at a distance of
100,000,000 miles, making it a little colder than Earth. A year is of
the approximate length of that on Earth. A day lasts 26 hours.

The axis of Uller is in the same plane as the orbit, so that at a
certain time of the year the north pole is pointed directly at the
sun, while at the opposite end of the orbit it points directly away.
The result is highly exaggerated seasons. At the poles the temperature
runs from 120 deg.C to a low of-80 deg.C. At the equator it remains not far
from 10 deg.C all year round. Strong winds blow during the summer and
winter, from the hot to the cold pole; few winds during the spring and
fall. The appearance of the poles varies during the year from baked
deserts to glaciers covered with solid CO_{2}. Free water exists in
the equatorial regions all year round.


2. SOLAR MOVEMENT AS SEEN FROM ULLER

As seen from the north pole--no sun is visible on Jan. 1. On April 1,
it bisects the horizon all day, swinging completely around. April 1 to
July 1, it continues swinging around, gradually rising in the sky, the
spiral converging to its center at the zenith, which it reaches July
1. From July 1 to October 1 the spiral starts again, spreading out
from the center until on October 1 it bisects the horizon again. On
October 1 night arrives to stay until April 1.

At the equator, the sun is visible bisecting the southern horizon for
all 26 hours of the day on January 1. From January 1 to April 1, the
sun starts to dip below the horizon at night, to rise higher above it
during the day. During all this time it rises and sets at the same
hours, but rises in the southeast and sets in the southwest. At noon
it is higher each day in the southern sky until April 1, when it rises
due east, passes through the zenith and sets due west. From April 1 to
July 1, its noon position drops down to the north, until on July 1, it
is visible all day, bisected by the northern horizon.


3. CHEMISTRY AND GEOLOGY OF ULLER

Calcium and chlorine are rarer than on earth, sodium is somewhat
commoner. As a result of the shortage of calcium there is a higher
ration of silicates to carbonates than exists on earth. The water is
slightly alkaline and resembles a very dilute solution of sodium
silicate (water glass). It would have a pH of 8.5 and tastes slightly
soapy. Also, when it dries out it leaves a sticky, and then a glassy,
crackly film. Rocks look fairly earthlike, but the absence or scarcity
of anything like limestone is noticeable. Practically all the
sedimentary rocks are of the sandstone type.

All rivers are seasonal, running from the polar regions to the central
seas in the spring only, or until the polar cap is completely dried
out.


4. ANIMAL LIFE

As on Earth life arose in the primitive waters and with a carbon base,
but because of the abundance of silicone, there was a strong tendency
for the microscopic organisms to develop silicate exoskeletons, like
diatoms. The present invertebrate animal life of the planet is of this
type and is confined to the equatorial seas. They run from amoeba-like
objects to things like crayfish, with silicate skeletons. Later, some
species of them started taking silicone into their soft tissues, and
eventually their carbon-chain compounds were converted to silicone
type chains, from

  |  |  |         |   |  |   |  |
--C--C--C-- to O--Si--O--Si--O--Si,
  |  |  |         |   |  |   |  |

with organic radicals on the side links. These organisms were a
transitional type, with silicone tissues and water body fluids,
resembling the earthly amphibians, and are now practically extinct.
There are a few species, something like segmented worms, still to be
seen in the backwaters of the central seas.

A further development occurred when the silicone chain animals began
to get short-chain silicones into their circulatory systems, held in
solution by OH or NH_{2} groups on the ends and branches of the
chains. The proportion of these compounds gradually increased until
the water was a minor and then a missing constituent. The larger
mobile species were, then, practically anhydrous. Their blood consists
of short-chain silicones, with quartz reinforcing for the soft parts
and their armor, teeth, etc., of pure amorphous quartz (opal). Most of
these parts are of the milky variety, variously tinted with metallic
impurities, as are the varieties of sapphires.

These pure silicone animals, due to their practical indestructibility,
annihilated all but the smaller of the carbon animals, and drove the
compromise types into odd corners as relics. They developed into a
fish-like animal with a very large swim-bladder to compensate for the
rather higher density of the silicone tissues, and from these fish the
land animals developed. Due to their high density and resulting high
weight, they tend to be low on the ground, rather reptilian in look.
Three pairs of legs are usual in order to distribute the heavy load.
There is no sharp dividing line between the quartz armor and the
silicone tissue. One merges into the other.

The dominant pure silicone animals only could become mobile and
venture far from the temperate equatorial regions of Uller, since they
neither froze nor stiffened with cold, nor became incapacitated by
heat. Note that all animal life is cold-blooded, with a negligible
difference between body and ambient temperatures. Since the animals
are silicones, they don't get sluggish like cold snakes.


5. PLANT LIFE

The plants are of the carbon-metabolism, silicate-shell type, like the
primitive animals. They spread out from the equator as far as they
could go before the baking polar summers killed them. They have normal
seasonal growth in the temperate zones and remain dormant and frozen
in the winter. At the poles there is no vegetation, not because of the
cold winter, but because of the hot summer. The winter winds
frequently blow over dead trees and roll them as far as the equatorial
seas. Other dead vegetation, because of the highly silicious water,
always gets petrified unless it is eaten first. What with the
quartz-speckled hides of the living vegetation and the solid quartz of
the dead, a forest is spectacular.

The silicone animals live on the plants. They chew them up, dehydrate
them, and convert their silicious outer bark and carbonaceous
interiors into silicones for themselves. When silicone tissue is
metabolized, the carbon and hydrogen go to CO_{2} and H_{2}O, which
are breathed out, while the silicone goes into SiO_{2}, which is
deposited as more teeth and armor. (Compare the terrestrial octopus,
which makes armor-plating out of calcium urate instead of excreting
urea or uric acid.) The animals can, of course, eat each other too, or
make a meal of the small carbonaceous animals of the equatorial seas.

Further note that the animals cannot digest plants when they are cold.
They can eat them and store them, but the disposal of the solid water
and CO_{2} is too difficult a problem. When they warm up, the water in
the plants melts and can be disposed of, and things are simpler.




II

THE FLUORINE PLANET

1. THE STAR AND PLANET


The planet named Niflheim is the fourth planet of Nu Puppis, right
angle 6:36, declension-43:09; B8 type star, blue-white and hot, 148
light years distant from Earth, which will require a speed in excess
of light to reach it.

Niflheim is 462,000,000 miles from its primary, a little less than the
distance of Jupiter from our sun. It thus does not receive too great a
total amount of energy, but what it does receive is of high potential,
a large fraction of it being in the ultra-violet and higher
frequencies. (Watch out for really super-special sunburn, etc., on
unwarned personnel.)

The gravity of Niflheim is approximately 1 g, the atmospheric pressure
approximately 1 atmosphere, and the average ambient temperature
about-60 deg.C;-76 deg.F.


2. ATMOSPHERE

The oxidizer in the atmosphere is free fluorine (F_{2}) in a rather
low concentration, about 4 or 5 percent. With it appears a mad
collection of gases. There are a few inert diluents, such as N_{2}
(nitrogen), argon, helium, neon, etc., but the major fraction consists
of CF_{4} (carbon tetrafluoride), BF_{3} (boron trifluoride), SiF_{4}
(silicon tetrafluoride), PF_{5} (phosphorous pentafluoride), SF_{6}
(sulphur hexafluoride) and probably others. In other words, the
fluorides of all the non-metals that can form fluorides. The
phosphorous pentafluoride rains out when the weather gets cold. There
is also free oxygen, but no chlorine. That would be liquid except in
very hot weather. It sometimes appears combined with fluorine in
chlorine trifluoride. The atmosphere has a slight yellowish tinge.


3. SOIL AND GEOLOGY

Above the metallic core of the planet, the lithosphere consists
exclusively of fluorides of the metals. There are no oxides, sulfides,
silicates or chlorides. There are small deposits of such things as
bromine trifluoride, but these have no great importance. Since
fluorides are weak mechanically, the terrain is flattish. Nothing
tough like granite to build mountains out of. Since the fluoride ion
is colorless, the color of the soil depends upon the predominant metal
in the region. As most of the light metals also have colorless ions,
the colored rocks are rather rare.


4. THE WATERS UNDER THE EARTH

They consist of liquid hydrofluoric acid (HF). It melts at-83 deg.C and
boils at 19.4 deg.C. In it are dissolved varying quantities of metallic
and non-metallic fluorides, such as boron trifluoride, sodium
fluoride, etc. When the oceans and lakes freeze, they do so from the
bottom up, so there is no layer of ice over free liquid.


5. PLANTS AND PLANT METABOLISM

The plants function by photosynthesis, taking HF as water from the
soil, and carbon tetrafluoride as the equivalent of carbon dioxide
from the air to produce chain compounds, such as:

  H  H  H  H
  |  |  |  |
--C--C--C--C--
  |  |  |  |
  F  F  F  F

and at the same time liberating free fluorine. This reaction could
only take place on a planet receiving lots of ultra-violet because so
much energy is needed to break up carbon tetrafluoride and
hydrofluoric acid. The plant catalyst (doubling for the magnesium in
chlorophyll) is nickel. The plants are colored in various ways. They
get their metals from the soil.


6. ANIMALS AND ANIMAL METABOLISM

Animals depend upon two main reactions for their energy, and for the
construction of their harder tissues. The soft tissues are about the
same as the plant molecules, but the hard tissues are produced by the
reaction:

  H  H  H                 F  F  F
  |  |  |                 |  |  |
--C--C--C-- + F_{2} --> --C--C--C-- + HF
  |  |  |                 |  |  |
  F  F  F                 F  F  F

resulting in a teflon boned and shelled organism. He's going to be
tough to do much with. Diatoms leave strata of powdered teflon. The
main energy reaction is:

  H  H  H
  |  |  |
--C--C--C-- ... + F_{2} --> CF_{4} + HF
  |  |  |
  F  F  F

The blood catalyst metal is titanium, which results in colorless
arterial blood and violet veinous, as the titanium flips back and
forth between tri and tetra-valent states.


7. EFFECT ON INTRUDING ITEMS

Water decomposes into oxygen and hydrofluoric acid. All organic matter
(earth type) converts into oxygen, carbon tetrafluoride, hydrofluoric
acid, etc., with more or less speed. A rubber gas mask lasts about an
hour. Glass first frosts and then disappears. Plastics act like
rubber, only a little slower. The heavy metals, iron, nickel, copper,
monel, etc., stand up well, forming an insoluble coat of fluorides at
first and then doing nothing else.


8. WHY GO THERE?

Large natural crystals of fluorides, such as calcium difluoride,
titanium tetrafluoride, zirconium tetrafluoride, are extremely useful
in optical instruments of various forms. Uranium appears as uranium
hexafluoride, all ready for the diffusion process. Compounds of such
non-metals as boron are obtainable from the atmosphere in high purity
with very little trouble. All metallurgy must be electrical. There are
considerable deposits of beryllium, and they occur in high
concentration in its ores.




PROLOGUE

On Satan's Footstool


The big armor-tender vibrated, gently and not unpleasantly, as the
contragravity field alternated on and off, occasionally varying its
normal rate of five hundred to the second when some thermal updraft
lifted the vehicle and the automatic radar-altimeter control acted to
alter the frequency and lower it again. 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. If unshielded human eyes could
have endured the rays of Nu Puppis, Niflheim's primary, the whole scene
would have appeared a vivid Saint Patrick's Day green, the effect of
the blue-predominant light on the yellow atmosphere. The outside
'visor-pickup, however, was fitted with filters which blocked out the
gamma-rays and X-rays and most of the ultra-violet-rays, and added the
longer light-waves of red and orange which were absent, so that things
looked much as they would have under the light of a G0-type star like
Sol. The air was faintly yellow, the sky was yellow with a greenish
cast, and the clouds were green-gray.

A thousand feet below, the local equivalent of a forest grew, the
trees, topped with huge ragged leaves, looking like hundred-foot
stalks of celery. There would be animal life down there, too--little
round things, four inches across, like eight-legged crabs, gnawing at
the vegetation, and bigger things, two feet long, with articulated
shell-armor and sixteen legs, which fed on the smaller herbivores.
Beyond, in the middleground, was open grassland, if one could so call
a mat of wormlike colorless or pastel-tinted sprouts, and a river
meandered through it. On the skyline, fifty miles away, was a range of
low dunes and hills, none more than a thousand feet high.

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. This vehicle, for instance,
was built and protected as no spaceship ever had to be, completely
insulated and entered only through a triple airlock--an outer lock,
which would be evacuated outward after it was closed, a middle lock
kept evacuated at all times, and an inner lock, evacuated into the
interior of the vehicle before the middle lock could be opened.
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. One of the radiomen was receiving from the orbital
base; the other was saying, over and over, in an exasperatedly
patient voice: "Dr. Murillo. Dr. Murillo. Please come in, Dr.
Murillo." 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 to what was--or for
what wasn't--coming in to his headset receiver. A couple of assistants
checked dials and refreshed their memories from notebooks and peered
anxiously into the big screen. 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.

"Dr. Murillo. Dr. Mur--" The radioman broke off in mid-syllable and
listened for a moment. "I hear you, doctor, go ahead." Then, a moment
later "What's your position, now, doctor?"

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

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. "Only four personal armors;
Ahmed, ask him where the fifth is."

"We only see four of your personal-armors," the radioman said. "Who's
missing, and why?" He waited for a moment, then lowered the hand-phone
and turned. "The fifth one's inside the handling-machine. One of the
Ullerans. Gorkrink."

The larger of the specks that had appeared on the horizon resolved
itself into a handling-machine, a thing like an oversized
contragravity-tank, with a bulldozer-blade, a stubby derrick-boom
instead of a gun, and jointed, claw-tipped arms to 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 candy bag.

"Only by telecast, back Sol-side," she 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."

"Well, if this turns out as well as the other job, three months ago,
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. And the magma'll be thick,
viscous stuff, like basalt on Terra. Of course, this won't be anything
like basalt in composition--it'll be intensely compressed metallic
fluorides, with a very high metal-content. The volcanoes we shot three
months ago yielded a fine flow of lava with all sorts of
metals--nickel, beryllium, vanadium, chromium, indium, 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. See, the metallic core of this planet is
covered, much less thickly than that of Terra, with fluoride
rock--fluorspar, and that sort of thing. There's nothing like granite
here, for instance. That's why those big dunes, out there, are the
best Niflheim has in the way of mountains. The subsurface hydrogen is
produced when the acid filters down through the rock, combines with
pure metals underneath."

"Dr. Murillo's inside, now," the radioman said. "Just came out of the
inner airlock. He'll be up as soon as he gets out of his
pressure-suit."

"As soon as he gets here, I'll touch it off," the bearded man said.
"Everything set, de Jong?"

"Everything ready, Dr. Gomes," one of his assistants assured him.

The door at the rear of the control-cabin opened, and Juan Murillo,
the seismologist, entered, followed by an assistant. Murillo was a big
man, copper-skinned, barrel-chested; he looked like a third-or
fourth-generation Martian, of Andes Indian ancestry. He came forward
and stood behind Gomes' chair, looking down at the instruments. His
assistant stopped at the door. This assistant 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 a belt, he was entirely
naked.

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

"Yes, if you wish, Gorkrink," he said, in the
English-Spanish-Afrikaans-Portuguese mixture that was Sixth Century,
A.E., Lingua Terra. Then he turned back to Gomes as the Ulleran 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. A voice came
out of the PA-speaker overhead: "In sixty seconds, the bombs will be
detonated ... thirty seconds ... fifteen seconds ... ten seconds ...
five seconds, four seconds, three seconds, two seconds, one
second...."

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. That 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. The armor-tender began to pitch
and roll; it was all the engineer and one of the assistants could do,
together, to keep it level.

"In about half an hour," the large young man told the girl, "the real
fireworks should be starting. What's coming up now is just small
debris from the nuclear blast. When the shockwaves get down far enough
to crack things open, the gas'll come up, and then steam and ash, and
then the magma. This one ought to be twice as good as the one we shot
three months ago; it ought to be every bit as good as Krakatoa, on
Terra, in 59 Pre-Atomic."

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

"You going on to Uller 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. The
sooner I get onto a planet where they don't ration the air, the better
I'll like it."

"Well, what do you know!" the large young man with the hairy legs
mock-marveled. "He doesn't like our nice planet!"

"Nice planet!" Gomes muttered something. "They call Terra God's
Footstool; well, I'll give you one guess who uses this thing to prop
his cloven hoofs on."

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

"Terra? I don't know, a year, two years. But I'm going to Uller 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, 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, and great rags of
fire, changing from red to violet and back through the spectrum to red
again, went soaring away to dissipate in the upper atmosphere. 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," the Hispano-Indian
Martian 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."

About four miles from the original blast, another eruption began with
a terrific gas-explosion.

"Well, that finishes our work," the large young man said, going to a
kitbag 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."

"That's right," Gomes said. "You do something once, it may be an
accident; you repeat the performance, and it's a success." He began
pushing papers aside on his desk, and the girl in the too-ample
coveralls brought drinking cups.

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

"That taboo against Ullerans and Terrans watching each other eat and
drink," Murillo said. "What is that, part of their religion?"

"No, it's their version of modesty," the girl replied. "Like some of
our sex-inhibitions, which they can't even begin to understand.... 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 Uller on the _Canberra_. You
know, it's impossible to keep some trace of fluorine from the air in
the handling-machines, or even out on the orbiters, and it plays the
devil with their lungs. He wanted to stay on another three months, to
help with the next shot, but the medics wouldn't hear of it.... He's
from Keegark, wherever on Uller that is; claims to be a prince, or
something. I know all the other geeks kowtow to him. 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...."




I.

Commander-in-Chief Front and Center


General Carlos von Schlichten threw his cigarette away, flexed his
hands in his gloves, and set his monocle more firmly in his eye,
stepping forward as the footsteps on the stairway behind him ceased
and the other officers emerged from the squat flint keep--Captain
Cazabielle, the post CO; big, chocolate-brown Brigadier-General
Themistocles M'zangwe; little Colonel Hideyoshi O'Leary. Far in front
of him, to the left, the horizon was lost in the cloudbank over Takkad
Sea; directly in front, and to the right, the brown and gray and black
flint mountains sawed into the sky until they vanished in the
distance. Unseen below, the old caravan-trail climbed one side of the
pass and slid down the other, a sheer five hundred feet below the
parapet and the two corner catapult-platforms which now mounted 90-mm
guns. 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 Ulleran
natives. 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, for 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.
Except for their belts and equipment, they were completely naked; the
uniform consisted of the emblem of the Chartered Uller Company
stencil-painted on chests and backs. Clothing, to them, was
unnecessary, either for warmth or modesty. As to the former, they were
cold-blooded and could stand a temperature-range of from a hundred and
twenty to minus one hundred Centigrade. Von Schlichten had seen them
sleeping in the open with their bodies covered with frost or freezing
rain; he had also seen them wade through boiling water. As to the
second, they had practically no sex-inhibitions; they were all of the
same gender, true, functional, hermaphrodites. Any individual among
them could bear young, or fertilize the ova of any other individual.
Fifteen years ago, when he had come to Uller as a former Terran
Federation captain newly commissioned colonel in the army of the Uller
Company, it had taken some time before he had become accustomed to the
detailing of a non-com and a couple of privates out of each platoon
for baby-sitting duty. At least, though, they didn't have the
squaw-trouble around army posts on Uller that they had on Thor, where
he had last been stationed.

An airjeep, coming in out of the sun, circled the crag-top fort and
let down onto the terrace next to von Schlichten's command-car. It
carried a bristle of 15-mm machine-guns, and two of the eight 50-mm
rocket-tubes on either side were empty and freshly smoke-stained. The
duraglass canopy slid back, and the two-man crew--lieutenant-driver
and sergeant-gunner--jumped out. Von Schlichten knew them both.

"Lieutenant Kendall; Sergeant Garcia," he greeted. "Good afternoon,
gentlemen."

Both saluted, in the informal, hell-with-rank-we're-all-human manner
of Terran soldiers on extraterrestrial duty, and returned the
greeting.

"How's the Jeel situation?" he asked, then nodded toward the fired
rocket-tubes. "I see you had some shooting."

"Yes, sir," the lieutenant said. "Two bands of them. We sighted the
first coming up the eastern side of the mountain about two miles this
side of the Blue Springs. We got about half of them with MG-fire, and
the rest dived into a big rock-crevice. We had to use two rockets on
them, and then had to let down and pot a few of them with our pistols.
We caught the second band in that little punchbowl place about a mile
this side of Zortolk's Old Fort. There were only six of them; they
were bunched together, feeding. Off one of their own gang, I'd say;
the way we've been keeping them up in the high rocks, they've been
eating inside the family quite a bit, lately. We let them have two
rockets. No survivors. Not many very big pieces, in fact. We let down
at Zortolk's for a beer, after that, and Captain Martinelli told us
that one of his jeeps caught what he thinks was the same band that was
down off the mountain night-before-last and ate those peasants on
Prince Neeldink's estate."

"By God, I'm glad to hear that!" There'd been a perfect hell of a flap
about that business. Before the Terrans came to Uller, it was a good
year when not more than five hundred farm-folk would be killed and
eaten by Jeel cannibals. The incident of two nights ago had been the
first of its kind in almost six months, but the nobleman whose serfs
had been eaten was practically accusing the Company of responsibility
for the crime. "I'll see that Neeldink is informed. The more you do
for these damned geeks, the more they expect from you.... When you get
your vehicle re-ammoed, lieutenant, suppose you buzz back to where you
machine-gunned that first gang. If there are any more around, they'll
have moved in for the free meal by now." This breakdown of the Jeels'
taboo against eating fellow-tribesmen was one of the best things he'd
heard from the cannibal-extermination project for some time.

He turned to Themistocles M'zangwe. "In about two weeks, get a little
task-force together. Say ten combat-cars, about twenty airjeeps, and a
battalion of Kragan Rifles in troop-carriers. Oh, yes, and this
good-for-nothing Konkrook Fencibles outfit of Prince Jaizerd's; they
can be used for beaters, and to block escape routes." He turned back
to Lieutenant Kendall and Sergeant Garcia. "Good work, boys. And if
the synchro-photos show that any of that first bunch got away, don't
feel too badly about it. These Jeels can hide on the top of a
pool-table."

He climbed into the command-car, followed by Themistocles M'zangwe and
Hideyoshi O'Leary. Sergeant Harry Quong and Corporal Hassan Bogdanoff
took their places on the front seat; the car lifted, turned to nose
into the wind, and rose in a slow spiral. Below, the fort grew
smaller, a flat-topped rectangle of masonry overlooking the pass, a
gun covering each approach, and two more on the square keep to cover
the rocky hogback on which the fort had been built, with the flagpole
between them. Once that pole had lifted a banner of ragged black
marsh-flopper skin bearing the device of the Kragan riever-chieftain
whose family had built the castle; now it carried a neat rectangle of
blue bunting emblazoned with the wreathed globe of the Terran
Federation and, below that, the blue-gray pennant which bore the
vermilion trademark of the Chartered Uller Company.

"Where now, sir?" Harry Quong asked.

He looked at his watch. Seventeen-hundred; there wasn't time for a
visit to Zortolk's Old Fort, ten miles to the north at the next pass.

"Back to Konkrook, to the island."

The nose of the car swung east by south; the cold-jet rotors began
humming and then the hot-jets were cut in. The car turned from the
fort and the mountains and shot away over the foothills toward the
coastal plain. 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 Uller marked the progress of the
charcoal-burnings. It took forty years to burn the forests clear back
to the flint cliffs; by the time the burners reached the mountains,
the new trees at the seaward edge would be ready to cut. Off to the
south, he could see the dark green squares, where the hemlocks and
Norway spruce had been planted by the Company. With a little chemical
fertilizer, they were doing well, and they made better charcoal than
the silicate-heavy native wood. That was the only natural fuel on
Uller; there was no coal, of course, since fallen timber and even
standing dead trees petrified in a matter of a couple of years. There
was too much silica on Uller, 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 Uller 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.

Beyond the forests came the farmlands. Around the older estates, thick
walls of flint and petrified wood had been built, and wide moats dug,
to keep out the shellosaurs. But now the moats were dry, and the walls
falling into disrepair. Some of the newer farms, land devoted to
agriculture with the declining demand for charcoal, had neither moats
nor walls. That was the Company, too; the huge shell-armored beasts
had become virtually extinct in the Konk Isthmus now, since the
introduction of bazookas and recoilless rifles. There seemed to be
quite a bit of power-equipment working in the fields, and big
contragravity lorries were drifting back and forth, scattering
fertilizer, mainly nitrates from Mimir or Yggdrasill. There were still
a good number of animal-drawn plows and harrows in use, however.

As planets went, Uller was no bargain, he thought sourly. At times, he
wished he had never followed the lure of rapid promotion and
fantastically high pay and left the Federation regulars for the army
of the Uller 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--Odin, with its two moons,
Hugin and Munin, and its wide grasslands and its evergreen forests
that looked and even smelled like the pinewoods of Terra, or Baldur,
with snow-capped mountains, and clear, cold lakes, and rocky rivers
dashing under great vine-hung trees, or Freya, where the people were
human to the last degree and the women were so breathtakingly
beautiful--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, and where the people....

Of course, there were worse planets than Uller. There was Nidhog, cold
and foggy, its equatorial zone a gloomy marsh and the rest of the planet
locked in eternal ice. There was Bifrost, which always kept the same
face turned to its primary; one side blazingly hot and the other close
to absolute zero, with a narrow and barely habitable twilight zone
between. There was Mimir, swarming with a race of semi-intelligent
quasi-rodents, murderous, treacherous, utterly vicious. Or Niflheim. The
Uller Company had the franchise for Niflheim, too; they'd had to take
that and agree to exploit the planet's resources in order to get the
franchise for Uller, which furnished a good quick measure of the
comparative merits of the two.

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 shoulder.

"Circle back, sergeant; let's have a look at that street again," he
directed. "Something going on, down there; looks like a riot."

"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.
Colonel Hideyoshi O'Leary was using the binoculars.

"That's right," he said. "Terrans being mobbed. Two of them, backed up
against a house. I saw one of them firing a pistol."

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.
Themistocles M'zangwe had already drawn his pistol; he shifted it to
his left hand and took a mace in his right. The Nipponese-Irish
colonel, looking like a homicidally infuriated pixie, had an automatic
in one hand and a long dagger in the other.

Harry Quong and Hassan Bogdanoff were old Uller hands; they'd done
this sort of work before. 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 Ulleran's
head, and jabbed another in the rump with the spike.

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

The Ulleran whirled, swinging a blade somewhere between a big
butcherknife and a small machete. His mouth was open, and there was
froth on his lips.

"_Znidd suddabit!_" he screamed.

Von Schlichten parried the cut on the steel shaft of his mace.
"_Suddabit_ yourself, you geek bastard!" 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 Ulleran went down, spurting a yellow fluid about
the consistency of gun-oil. Then, without wasting words, he maced
another of the things.

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. To one side, a native somewhat better
dressed than the others, to the extent of a couple of belts with gold
ornaments, drew a Terran automatic. Von Schlichten hurled his mace and
drew his pistol, thumbing off the safety as he swung it up, but before
he could fire, Hassan Bogdanoff had seen and swung his guns around;
the double burst caught the native in the chest and fairly tore him
apart.

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 Ulleran 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.

Hideyoshi 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. Themistocles 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--a Zirk nomad from the North, he
guessed--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 Zirk 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 the King 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 the Graeco-African brigadier and the
Irish-Japanese colonel had gotten the wounded man into the car. The
girl, having dropped her bolo, was leaning against the side of the
car, one foot heedlessly in what was left of an Ulleran who had gotten
smashed under it, weak with nervous reaction.

"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-Ulleran. 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 to 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 quirked 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 Uller for the last three months; ever since the _City
of Canberra_ got in from Niflheim. On Uller, 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."

"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."

With the aid of his monocle, von Schlichten managed to keep a straight
face. Neither M'zangwe nor O'Leary had any such aid; the African
rolled his eyes and the Japanese-Irishman grimaced.

"We talked with Mr. Keeluk for a while," the girl said, "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...."

"That's why you're still alive," von Schlichten commented.

"We wouldn't be if you hadn't come along," she told him. "I never in
my life saw anything as beautiful as you coming through that mob
swinging that war-club!"

"Well, I never saw anything much more beautiful than those 40-mm's
beginning to land in the mob," von Schlichten replied.

The aircar swung out over Konkrook Channel and headed toward the
blue-gray Company buildings on Gongonk Island, and the Company
airport, swarming with lorries and airboats, where the ten
thousand-ton _Oom Paul Kruger_ had just come in from Keegark, and the
Company's one real warship, the cruiser _Procyon_, was lifting out for
Grank, in the North. Down at the southern tip of the island, the
three-thousand-foot globe of the spaceship _City of Pretoria_, from
Niflheim, was loading with cargo for Terra.

"Just what happened, while you and Mr. Ferriera were in Keeluk's
house. Miss Quinton?" Hideyoshi 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,
and on the front seat, Harry Quong said, "Coo-bli'me!"

"Why, yes...." Paula Quinton's eyes widened. "But there are no dogs on
Uller, 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. I'll send more troops, or Constabulary, to help you." He
handed the phone to M'zangwe. "You take care of that end of it, Them;
you know who can be spared."

"But, what ...?" the girl began.

"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 Uller Company?"

"It's just a big brown collie, named Stalin, like half the dogs on
Terra. Somebody stole it, and Keeluk was keeping it, and we want to
know why. We don't like geek mysteries; not when they lead to
murderous attacks on Terrans, at least."

The aircar let down on the hospital landing stage. A stretcher was
waiting, with a Terran interne and two Ulleran orderlies. They got the
still-unconscious Mohammed Ferriera out of the car.

"You'd better go with them, yourself, Miss Quinton," von Schlichten
advised. "You have a couple of nasty-looking bruises and bumps. A
couple of abrasions, too, where those geeks grabbed you; they have
hides like sandpaper. And better have that coat cleaned, before that
goo on it hardens, or it'll be ruined."

"Yes. You have a lot of it on your uniform, too."

He glanced down at the blue-gray jacket. "So I have. And another
thing. Those letters Keeluk was going to give you, the ones to his
friends in Skilk. Did you get them?"

She felt in the pocket of her coat. "Yes. I still have them."

"I wish you'd let Colonel O'Leary have a look at them. There may be
more to them than you think.... Hid, will you go with Miss Quinton?"




II.

Rakkeed, Stalin, and the Rev. Keeluk


Von Schlichten, in a fresh uniform, sat at the end of the table in
Sidney Harrington's office; Harrington and Eric Blount, the
Lieutenant-Governor, faced each other across it, over the three-foot
disc of an Ulleran chess-board. Harrington had the white, or center,
position. Blount, sandy-haired and considerably younger, was playing
black, and his pieces were closing in relentlessly from the outer rim.

"Well, then what?" Harrington asked.

Von Schlichten dropped ash from his cigarette into the tray that
served all three of them.

"Nothing much," he replied. "Keeluk bugged out as soon as he saw my
car let down. We picked up a few of his ragtag-and-bobtail, and
they're being questioned now, but I doubt if they'll tell us anything
we don't know already. The dog had been kept in a lean-to back of the
house; it had been removed, probably as soon as Keeluk called in his
goon-gang. At least one of the rabbits had been kept on the premises,
too, some time ago. No trace of the goat."

He watched Blount move one of his pieces and nodded approvingly. "The
riot's been put down," he continued, "but we're keeping two companies
of Kragans in the city, and about a dozen airjeeps patrolling the
section from Eightieth down to Sixty-fourth, and from the waterfront
back to Eighth Avenue. There is also the equivalent of a regiment of
King Jaikark's infantry--spearmen, crossbowmen, and a few
riflemen--and two of those outsize cavalry companies of his, helping
hold the lid down. They're making mass arrests, indiscriminately. More
slaves for Jaikark's court favorite, of course."

"Or else Gurgurk wants them to use for patronage," Blount added. "He's
been building quite a political organization, lately. Getting ready to
shove Jaikark off the throne, I'd say."

Harrington pushed one of his pieces out along a radial line toward the
rim. Blount promptly took a pawn, which, under Ulleran rules, entitled
him to a second move. He shifted another piece, a sort of combination
knight and bishop, to threaten the piece Harrington had moved.

"Oh, Gurgurk wouldn't dare try anything like that," the
Governor-General said. "He knows we wouldn't let him get away with it.
We have too much of an investment in King Jaikark."

"Then why's Gurgurk been supporting this damned Rakkeed?" Blount
wanted to know, hastily interposing a piece. "Gurgurk can follow one
of two lines of policy. He can undertake to heave Jaikark off the
throne and seize power, or he has to support Jaikark on the throne.
We're subsidizing Jaikark. Rakkeed has been preaching this crusade
against the Terrans, and against Jaikark, whom we control. Gurgurk has
been subsidizing Rakkeed...."

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

"My Intelligence Section has," von Schlichten put in. "We can give
sums of money, and dates, and the names of the intermediaries through
whom they were paid to Rakkeed. Eric is absolutely correct in making
that statement."

"Personally, I think Gurgurk's plan is something like this: Rakkeed
will stir up anti-Terran sentiment here in Konkrook, and direct it
against our puppet, Jaikark, as well as against us," Blount said.
"When the outbreak comes, Jaikark will be killed, and then Gurgurk
will step in, seize the Palace, and use the Royal army to put down the
revolt that he's incited in the first place. That will put him in the
position of the friend of the Company, and most of his dupes will be
rounded up and sold as slaves, and King Gurgurk'll pocket the
proceeds. The only question is, will Rakkeed let himself be used that
way? I think Rakkeed's bigger than Gurgurk ever can be. And more of a
threat to the Company. Everywhere we turn, Rakkeed's at the bottom of
whatever happens to be wrong. This business, for instance; Keeluk's
one of Rakkeed's followers."

"Eric, you have Rakkeed on the brain!" Harrington exclaimed
impatiently, then moved the threatened piece counterclockwise on the
circle where he had placed it. "He's just a barbarian caravan-driver."

Eric Blount moved the piece that had taken Harrington's pawn.

"Your king's in danger," he warned. "And Hitler was just a
paper-hanger."

"Rakkeed has no following, except among the rabble." Harrington puffed
furiously at his pipe, trying to figure the best protection for his
king.

"You just think he hasn't," Blount retorted. "Here in Konkrook, he's
always entertained by one or another of the big ship-owning nobles.
They probably deprecate his table-manners, but they just love his
politics. And the same thing at Keegark, and at the Free Cities along
the Eastern Shore."

"The last time Rakkeed was in Konkrook, he was the guest of the
Keegarkan Ambassador," von Schlichten stated. "Intelligence got that
from a spy we'd planted among the embassy servants."

"You sure this spy wasn't just romancing?" Harrington asked. "You get
so confounded many wild stories about Rakkeed. Three days after he was
reported here at Konkrook, he was reported at Skilk, five thousand
miles away, said to be having an audience with King Firkked."

"No mystery to that," von Schlichten said. "He travels on our ships,
in disguise, coolie-class, on the geek-deck."

"Be a good idea if he could be caught at it, some time," Blount said,
making another move. "One of the lower-deck loading ports could be
left unlocked, by carelessness, and he could blunder overboard at
about five thousand feet." He watched Harrington make a deceptively
pointless-looking move. "Sid, this damn dog business worries me."

"Worries me, too. I'm fond of that mutt, and God only knows what sort
of stuff he's been getting to eat. And I hate to think of why those
geeks stole him, too."

"Well, at risk of seeming heartless, I'm not so much worried for
Stalin as I am about why Keeluk was hiding him, and why he was willing
to murder the only two Terrans in Konkrook who trust him, to prevent
our finding out that he had him."

"A Mr. Keeluk, a clergyman," von Schlichten quoted. He chain-lit
another cigarette and stubbed out the old one. "Maybe the Rev. Keeluk
wanted Stalin for sacramental purposes."

Blount looked up sharply. "Ritual killing?" he asked. "Or sympathetic
magic?"

Von Schlichten shrugged. "Take your choice. Maybe Rakkeed wanted the
dog, to kill before a congregation of his followers, killing us by
proxy, or in effigy. Or maybe they think we worship Stalin, and
getting control of him would give them power over us. I wish we knew a
little more about Ulleran psychology."

That wasn't the first time he'd made that wish. Even if sex weren't
the paramount psychological factor the ancient Freudians believed, it
was an extremely important one, and on Uller most of the fundamental
terms of Terran psychology were meaningless. At the same time, the
average Ulleran probably had complexes and neuroses that would have
had Freud talking to himself, and they certainly indulged in practices
that would have even stood Krafft-Ebing's hair on end.

"One thing," Blount said. "It doesn't take any Ulleran psychologist to
know that about eighty percent 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, and a few
merchants who lost money when we replaced this primitive barter
economy of theirs, but nine-tenths of them have benefited enormously
from us, and continue to benefit...."

"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, now doesn't it?" Harrington retorted. "He hates and resents us so
much that he's offered us a spaceport at his city...."

"What's it going to cost him?" Blount asked. "He furnishes the
land--sequestered from the estate of some noble he executed for
treason--and the labor--all forced. We furnish the structural steel,
the machine-equipment, the engineering. We get a spaceport we don't
really need, and he gets all the business it'll bring to Keegark.
Considering the fact that Rakkeed is a welcome guest at his embassy
here, and at the Royal Palace at Keegark, I'm beginning to wonder if
he isn't fomenting trouble for us here at Konkrook to make us willing
to move our main base to his city."

He made a move. Instantly, Harrington slashed out from the middle of
the board with one of his heavy-duty, all-purpose pieces and took a
piece, then moved again.

"Now look whose king's threatened!" he crowed.

"Yes, I see." Blount brought a piece clockwise around the board and
took the threatening piece, then moved again. "I hope you see whose
king's threatened, now."

Harrington swore, reached out to move a piece, and then jerked his
hand back as though the piece were radioactive. For a while, he sat
puffing his pipe and staring at the board.

"In fact, Orgzild's so sure that we're going to accept his offer that
he's started building two new power-reactors, to handle the additional
power-demand that'll result from the increased business," Blount
continued.

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

"Where can he get it?" Harrington replied. "He just bought four tons
of it from us, off the _City of Pretoria_."

"That's a hell of a lot of plutonium," Blount said. "I wonder if he
mightn't have some idea of what else plutonium can be used for,
beside generating power."

"Oh, God, I hope not!" Harrington exclaimed. "You're going to get me
started seeing burglars under the bed, next...."

"Maybe there are burglars," Blount said, pointing with his
cigarette-holder to Harrington's threatened king. "Can't you do
something about that, Sid?" Then he turned to von Schlichten. "Before
we get off the subject, how about those letters the Rev. Keeluk gave
to the Quinton girl?"

"All addressed to Skilkans known to be Rakkeed disciples and rabidly
anti-Terran," von Schlichten replied. "We radioed the list to Skilk;
Colonel Cheng-Li, our intelligence man there, teleprinted us back a
lot of material on them that looks like the Newgate Calendar. We
turned the letters themselves over to Doc Petrie, the Ulleran
philology sharp, who is a pretty fair cryptanalyst. He couldn't find
any indications of cipher, but there was a lot of gossip about
Keeluk's friends and parishioners which might have arbitrary
code-meanings. I'm going to explain the situation to Miss Quinton, and
advise her to have nothing to do with any of the people Keeluk gave
her letters to."

Harrington had gotten his king temporarily out of danger, losing a
piece doing it.

"Think she'll listen to you?" he asked. "These Extraterrestrials'
Rights Association people are a lot of blasted fanatics, themselves.
We're a gang of bloody-handed, flint-hearted, imperialistic sons of
bitches in their book, and anything we say's sure to be a Hitler-sized
lie."

"Oh, they're not as bad as all that. I never met the girl before
today, but old Mohammed Ferriera's a decent bloke. And their
association's really done a lot of good. For one thing, they put an
end to the peonage system on Yggdrasill, and I know what conditions
were like, there, before they did."

A calculating look came into Harrington's eye. He puffed slowly at his
pipe and slid a piece from the center toward the sector of the board
nearest him. Blount whistled softly and made a quick re-arrangement.

"Carlos, did you say she told you she was going to Skilk, in the near
future?" Harrington asked. "Well, look here; you're going up that way,
yourself, with that battalion of Kragans, on the _Aldebaran_. Why
don't you invite her to make the trip with you? You can be quite
attractive to young ladies, when you try, and she'll be grateful for
that rescue this afternoon, which is always a good foundation. Maybe
you can plant a couple of ideas where they'll do the most good. She's
only been here for three months--since the _Canberra_ got in from
Niflheim. You know and I know and we all know that there are a lot of
things up there at the polar mines that would look like hell to
anybody who didn't understand local conditions...."

"Well, Miss Quinton's company won't be any particularly heavy cross
for me to bear," von Schlichten replied. "I won't guarantee anything,
of course...."

The intercom-speaker on the table whistled several times. Harrington
swore, laid down his pipe, and got up, brushing ashes from the front
of his coat. He 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, and is coming up the roadway to
Company House. A platoon of Jaikark's Household Guards, with rifles;
the Spear of State; a royal litter; about thirty geek nobles, on foot;
a gift-litter; another platoon of riflemen, if you say the last
syllable quick enough."

"That'll be Gurgurk, coming to tell us how unhappy his Sodden and
Inebriated Geekship is about that fracas on Seventy-second Street,"
Harrington said. "The gift-litter will contain the customary
indemnity, at the current market quotation. Have Gurgurk and party
admitted, all but the rifle-platoons; give him an honor guard of our
Kragans, and keep his own gun-toters outside. Take them to the
Reception Hall, and hold them there till I signal from the Audience
Hall, and then herd them in."

He came back and made a move. Immediately, Blount took one of his
pieces, moved again, took another, and made the third move to which he
was entitled.

"I'll mate you in four moves," he predicted. "Want to play it out,
before we go down?"

"Sure; what's time to a geek? Gurgurk'd think we were worried about
something if we didn't keep him waiting.... Good Lord! You do have me
over a barrel, Eric!"




III.

Four-and-Twenty Geek Heads


Governor-General Sidney Harrington sat on the comfortably upholstered
bench on the dais of the Audience Hall, flanked by von Schlichten and
Eric Blount. He didn't look particularly regal, even on that high
seat--with his ruddy outdoorsman's face and his ragged gray mustache
and his old tweed coat spotted with pipe-ashes, he might have been any
of the dozen-odd country-gentleman neighbors of von Schlichten's
boyhood in the Argentine. But then, to a Terran, any of the kings of
Uller 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 an
Ulleran.

He took the false palate and tongue-clicker, officially designated as
an "enunciator, Ulleran" 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 Ulleran 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. An
immature Ulleran would be a very light gray, white under the arms, and
his quartz-specks would run from white to pale yellow. The retinue of
nobles behind Gurgurk ran through the whole spectrum, from a
princeling who was almost oyster-gray to old Ghroghrank, the Keegarkan
Ambassador, who was even blacker and more red-speckled than Gurgurk.
All of them carried about as much ironmongery as the Prime
Minister--the pistols were all Terran, and the swords and daggers were
mostly made either on Terra or at the Terran-operated steel-works on
Volund.

Four slaves brought up 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
all the other nobles drew up in two curved lines some ten paces to the
rear, with considerable pushing and jostling and a _sotto voce_
argument, with overtones of weapon-fingering, about precedence. All,
that is, but Ghroghrank and another noble, who came up and planted
themselves beside Gurgurk. Von Schlichten regarded the assemblage
sourly through his monocle. Maybe Sid Harrington _did_ look regal,
after all.

The Governor-General rose slowly and descended from the dais,
advancing to within ten paces of the Spear, von Schlichten and Blount
accompanying him. Out of the corner of his eye, von Schlichten watched
a couple of Kragan mercenaries with fifty-shot machine-rifles move
unobtrusively to positions from whence they could, if necessary, spray
the visitors with bullets without endangering the Terrans.

"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 Ghroghrank, Ambassador of King Orgzild
of Keegark to the court of my royal master."

"And I," Ghroghrank 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."

If he weren't doped to the ears, von Schlichten substituted mentally.
There was a native drug which had, on its users, the combined effects
of hashish, heroin and yohimbine; Jaikark and all his court circle
were addicts. He probably hadn't even heard of the riot.

"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.

"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 then contributed a short speech, beseeching the
gods that the deep and beautiful friendship existing between the
Chartered Uller Company and His Sublime etcetera would continue
unimpaired, and that His Sublime etcetera would enjoy long life and
peaceful reign, managing, by a trick of Konkrookan grammar, to imply
that the second would be conditional upon the first. The Keegarkan
Ambassador then 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 for the great and
good friend of all Ulleran peoples, Mohammed Ferriera, who had been
injured, and hoping that he would soon enjoy full health again. He
also managed to convey King Orgzild's pleasure at having obtained the
plutonium. 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, signaling
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 over-age
slaves at hand, without regard for whether the victims had even heard
of the crime which they were expiating. If the Extraterrestrial's
Rights Association were really serious about the rights of these
geeks, they'd advocate booting out all these native princes and
turning the whole planet over to the Company. That had been the Terran
Federation's idea, from the beginning; why else give the Company's
chief representative the title of Governor-General?

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.
"If any of you think you can clean up this rug and this box, you're
welcome to them."

"Wait a moment," 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, while Them and Hid were getting Ferriera into the car. Miss
Quinton killed that one with the bolo; see where she chopped him on
the back of the neck? The cut that took off the head was a little low,
and missed it. And Hid O'Leary stuck a knife in that one." He walked
around the rug, turning heads over with his foot. "This was cut-rate
head-payment; they just slashed off two-dozen heads at the scene of
the riot. I don't like this butchery of worn-out slaves and petty
thieves any better than anybody else, but this I don't like either.
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-tutted. "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.
"Don't you think we could? Our Kragans could go through that army of
Jaikark's like fast neutrons through toilet-paper."

"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. He's got to be conditioned to accept that idea."

"We can't go too slowly, either," Blount replied. "If we wait for him
to change his mind, it'll be the same as waiting for him to retire.
And that'll be waiting too long."

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. Not on the _Pretoria_, I don't think. 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 MacKinnon. And I'll see what I can find out for myself."

"Well, let's go have a drink," von Schlichten suggested, consulting
his watch. "About time for a cocktail."




IV.

If You Read It in Stanley-Browne


Von Schlichten and Blount entered the bar together--the Broadway Room,
decorated in gleaming plastics and chromium in enthusiastic if
slightly inaccurate imitation of a First Century New York nightclub.
There were no native servants to spoil the illusion, such as it was:
the service was fully automatic. 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.

"Well, you seem to have gotten yourself repaired, Miss Quinton," he
greeted her. "Feel better, now?... Miss Quinton, this is
Lieutenant-Governor Blount. Eric, Miss Paula Quinton."

"Delighted, Miss Quinton," Blount said. "Carlos tells us he found you
standing over poor Mohammed Ferriera, fighting like a commando. How is
Mohammed, by the way? No danger, I hope; we all like him."

Mohammed Ferriera was still unconscious, the girl reported; he had a
minor concussion, but the medics were not greatly disturbed, and
expected him to be fully recovered in a few weeks. 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...."

"Biting off live chickens' heads, in a sideshow wild-man act,"
Hideyoshi O'Leary supplied. "When you get up north, watch how the
peasants kill these little things like six-legged iguanas that they
raise for food."

"That isn't the reason, though," von Schlichten said. "As we use it,
the word's pure onomatopoeia. You've learned some of the languages;
you know what they sound like. _Geek-geek-geek._"

"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."

"Well, you could also remember that a native's skin is about half an
inch thick, and a good deal tougher than a human's," von Schlichten
told her. "And it wouldn't hurt any if you found out how these
laborers are treated at home. Mostly they're serfs hired from the big
landowners; it's a fact you can easily verify that permission to join
the labor-companies at the polar mines is regarded as a privilege,
granted as a reward or denied as a punishment. And most of the geek
landowners are bitterly critical of the way we treat our labor at the
mines; they claim we make them dissatisfied with the treatment they
get at home."

"Of course, they're always glad to have the peasants taken off their
hands during a slack agricultural season," Blount added, "and we train
workers to handle contragravity power-equipment. I won't deny that
there's a lot of unnecessary brutality on the part of the native
foremen and overseers, which we're trying, gradually, to eliminate.
You'll have to remember, though, that we're dealing with a naturally
brutal race."

"Of course, mistreatment of native labor is always blamed on other
natives, never on the gentle and kindly Terrans," she replied. "That's
been SOP on every planet our Association's had any experience with."

"Now look; you just came here from Niflheim," von Schlichten objected.
"The Company employs quite a few geeks there; how much brutality did
you run into there?"

"Well, I must admit, the Ullerans who work there are very well
treated. Except that I don't think it's right to employ any people
with silicone body-tissues where they're going to breathe
fluorine-tainted air."

"Nobody ought to be employed on that planet!" Hideyoshi O'Leary
declared. "I did a two-year hitch there, when I was first commissioned
in the Company service."

"I put in two years there, too," Blount supported him. "And I might
add that that's a year longer than any Ulleran native is ever allowed
to spend on Niflheim. You know what the setup is, there, don't you?
The Terran Federation Space Navy discovered and explored both Uller
and Niflheim, which made both planets public domain. The Company was
originally formed to exploit Uller alone, but the Federation insisted
that both planets would have to be franchised to the same company.
They wanted Niflheim exploited, mainly because of the uranium-deposits
there. As it turned out, the Company's making as much money out of
Niflheim as we are out of Uller."

"What you miss is this," von Schlichten pointed out. "On Niflheim,
there are about a thousand Terrans, and not more than five hundred
geeks, all employed on construction-work and in the mines, on the
planet itself, working directly under Terran supervision. We use them
because they have four hands, and in the power-driven contragravity
armor that's necessary there, they can manipulate more controls and do
more things at once than we can. Here on Uller, at the polar mines,
there are about ten thousand geeks working under five hundred Terrans,
and most of the latter are engineers or technicians who don't do
supervisory work. So we have to use native foremen, and they're guilty
of what mistreatment the workers suffer."

"And remember, too," O'Leary added, "work at the polar mines can only
go on for about two months out of the year--mid-September to
mid-November at the Arctic, and mid-March to mid-May at the Antarctic.
Naturally, things have to be done in a hurry and under pressure."

"Well, why do you work mines at the poles? Aren't there mineral
deposits in places where you can work all year 'round?"

"Not as rich, or as accessible," Blount said. "You know what the
seasons are like, at the poles of this planet. The temperature will
range from about two-fifty Fahrenheit in mid-summer to a hundred and
fifty below in winter. There's the most intense sort of thermal
erosion you can imagine--the ice-cap melts in the spring to a sea,
which boils away completely by the middle of the summer. There will be
violent circular storms of hot wind, blowing away the light sand and
dust and leaving the heavier particles of metallic ores and metals
behind. Then, when the winds fall, we move in for a couple of months.
It isn't really mining, or even quarrying; we just scoop up ore from
the surface, load it onto ore-boats, and fly it down to Skilk and
Krink and Grank, where it's smelted through the winter. The natives
run the smelters; use the heat to thaw frozen food for themselves and
their livestock while they're melting the ore. In the north,
metallurgy and food-preparation have always been combined that way."

"Yes, 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 Uller,
we found a culture roughly like that of Europe during the Seventh
Century Pre-Atomic, or, more closely, like that of Japan before the
beginning of the First Century P. A. 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. You know, it's a shame that geek
messiah isn't a smart crook, instead of an honest fanatic; he could
take in the equivalent of a couple of million sols a year off the
North Uller merchants and the Equatorial Zone shipowners. 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
percent."

"Rakkeed is a Zirk," von Schlichten said. "They're the nomads who hire
out to the northern merchants as caravan-drivers, and also prey, or
used to prey, on the caravans as brigands. Since our air-freighters
got into operation, neither caravan-driving nor caravan-raiding has
been a paying business, and our air-patrols have made caravan-raiding
suicidal as well. So the Zirks don't like us. The only thing they know
or are willing to learn is handling these six-legged riding-and
pack-animals we call hipposaurs. We employ a few of them as cavalry,
and a few more of them work as the local equivalent of _gauchos_, and
the rest just sit around and listen to Rakkeed's sermons."

Both jugs were empty. Colonel O'Leary, as befitted his junior rank,
picked them up; after a good-natured wrangle 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
land-owning 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 try 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 anywhere."

"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 percent of what he tells us, and that's sixty percent 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. You'll
only find them treated at any length at all in that compendium of
misinformation, Willard Stanley-Browne's _Short Sociographic History
of Beta Hydrae II_, and ninety percent of what Stanley-Browne says
about them is completely erroneous."

"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 four miles."

"Well, they live entirely by serving as mercenary soldiers for the
Uller Company, don't they?"

"More or less. You see, when we came to Uller, they were barbarian
brigands; had a string of forts along caravan-roads and at fords and
mountain-passes, and levied tolls. They raided into Konkrook and
Keegark territory, too. Well, we had to break that up. We fought a
little war with them, beat them rather badly in a couple of
skirmishes, and then made a deal with them. That was before my time,
when old Jerry Kirke was Governor-General. He negotiated a treaty with
their King, bought their rievers'-forts outright, and paid them a
subsidy to compensate for loss of tolls and raid-spoil, and agreed to
employ the whole tribe as soldiers. We've taught them a lot--you'll
see how much when you visit their town--but they aren't cultural
mongrels. You'll like them."

"Well, general, I'll take you up," she said. "But I warn you; if this
is some scheme to indoctrinate me with the Uller 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.




V.

You Can Depend on It It's Wrong


Gongonk Island, with its blue-gray Company buildings, and the Terran
green of the farms, and the spaceport with its ring of mooring-pylons
empty since the _City of Pretoria_ had lifted out, two days before,
for Terra, was dropping away behind. Von Schlichten held his lighter
for Paula Quinton, then lit his own cigarette.

"I was rather horrified, Friday afternoon, at the way you and Colonel
O'Leary and Mr. Blount were blaspheming against Stanley-Browne," she
said. "His book is practically the sociographers' Koran for this
planet. But I've been checking up, since, and I find that everybody
who's been here any length of time seems to deride it, and it's full
of the most surprising misstatements. I'm either going to make myself
famous or get burned at the stake by the Extraterrestrial Sociographic
Society after I get back to Terra. In the last three months, I've been
really too busy with Ex-Rights work to do much research, but I'm
beginning to think there's a great deal in Stanley-Browne's book that
will have to be reconsidered."

"How'd you get into this, Miss Quinton?" he asked.

"You mean sociography, or Ex-Rights? Well, my father and my
grandfather were both extraterrestrial sociographers--anthropologists
whose subjects aren't anthropomorphic--and I majored in sociography
at the University of Montevideo. And I've always been in sympathy
with extraterrestrial races; one of my great-grandmothers was a
Freyan."

"The deuce; I'd never have guessed that, as small and dark as you
are."

"Well, another of my great-grandmothers was Japanese," she replied.
"The family name's French. I'm also part Spanish, part Russian, part
Italian, part English ... the usual modern Argentine mixture."

"I'm an Argentino, too. From La Rioja, over along the Sierra de
Velasco. My family lived there for the past five centuries. They came
to the Argentine in the Year Three, Atomic Era."

"On account of the Hitler bust-up?"

"Yes. I believe the first one, also a General von Schlichten, was what
was then known as a war-criminal."

"That makes us partners in crime, then," she laughed. "The Quintons
had to leave France about the same time; they were what was known as
collaborationists."

"That's probably why the Southern Hemisphere managed to stay out of
the Third and Fourth World Wars," he considered. "It was full of the
descendants of people who'd gotten the short end of the Second."

"Do you speak the Kragan language, general?" she asked. "I understand
it's entirely different from the other Equatorial Ulleran languages."

"Yes. That's what gives the Kragans an entirely different semantic
orientation. For instance, they have nothing like a subject-predicate
sentence structure. That's why, Stanley-Browne to the contrary
notwithstanding, they are entirely non-religious. Their language
hasn't instilled in them a predisposition to think of everything as
the result of an action performed by an agent. And they have no
definite parts of speech; any word can be used as any part of speech,
depending on context. Tense is applied to words used as nouns, not
words used as verbs; there are four tenses--spatial-temporal present,
things here-and-now; spatial present and temporal remote, things which
were here at some other time; spatial remote and temporal present,
things existing now somewhere else, and spatial-temporal remote,
things somewhere else some other time."

"Why, it's a wonder they haven't developed a Theory of Relativity!"

"They have. It resembles ours about the way the Wright Brothers'
airplane resembles this aircar, but I was explaining the
Keene-Gonzales-Dillingham Theory and the older Einstein Theory to King
Kankad once, and it was beautiful to watch how he picked it up. Half
the time, he was a jump ahead of me."

The aircar began losing altitude and speed as they came in over
Kraggork Swamp; the treetops below blended into a level plain of
yellow-green, pierced by glints of stagnant water underneath and
broken by an occasional low hillock, sometimes topped by a stockaded
village.

"Those are the swamp-savages' homes," he told her. "Most of what you
find in Stanley-Browne about them is fairly accurate. He spent a lot
of time among them. He never seems to have realized, though, that they
are living now as they have ever since the first appearance of
intelligent life on this planet."

"You mean, they're the real aboriginal people of Uller?"

"They and the Jeel cannibals, whom we are doing our best to
exterminate," he replied. "You see, at one time, the dominant type of
mobile land-life was the thing we call a shellosaur, a big thing,
running from five to fifteen tons, plated all over with silicate
shell, till it looked like a six-legged pine-cone. Some were
herbivores and some were carnivores. There are a few left, in remote
places--quite a few in the Southern Hemisphere, which we haven't
explored very much. They were a satisfied life-form. Outside of a
volcano or an earthquake or an avalanche, nothing could hurt a
shellosaur but a bigger shellosaur.

"Finally, of course, they grew beyond their sustenance-limit, but in
the meantime, some of them began specializing on mobility instead of
armor and began excreting waste-matter instead of turning it to shell.
Some of these new species got rid of their shell entirely. _Parahomo
sapiens Ulleris_ is descended from one of these.

"The shellosaurs were still a serious menace, though. The ancestors of
the present Ulleran, the proto-geeks, when they were at about the Java
Ape-Man stage of development, took two divergent courses to escape the
shellosaurs. Some of them took to the swamps, where the shellosaurs
would sink if they tried to follow. Those savages, down there, are
still living in the same manner; they never progressed. Others
encountered problems of survival which had to be overcome by
invention. They progressed to barbarism, like the people of the
fishing-villages, and some of them progressed to civilization, like
the Konkrookans and the Keegarkans.

"Then, there were others who took to the high rocks, where the
shellosaurs couldn't climb. The Jeels are the primitive, original
example of that. Most of the North Uller civilizations developed from
mountaineer-savages, and so did the Zirks and the other northern
plains nomads."

"Well, how about the Kragans?" Paula asked. "Which were they?"

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. That's a
complicated process, involving simultaneous male and female
masturbation, but 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 ridge and stopped," she
said. "Which?"

"Nobody's ever tried to find out. Maybe if you stay on Uller 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 catastrophite, 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 thalassic peoples here
in the Equatorial Zone are fairly good empirical, teaspoon-measure,
chemists. Well, no, alchemists. They found out how to make
nitroglycerine, and use it for blasting and for bombs and mines, and
they screw little capsules of it on the ends of their arrows. Most of
their chemistry, such as it is, was learned in trying to prevent
organic materials, like wood, from petrifying. Up in the north, where
it gets cold, they learned a lot about metallurgy and ceramics, and
about forced-draft pneumatics, from having to keep fires going all
winter to thaw frozen food. They make air-rifles, to shoot metal
darts."

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 Uller, 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. "I make you one of us," he told her. "You
must come back, after the work stops at the mines; if you want to
learn about my people, I'll show you what you want to see, and tell
you what you want to know. But why not stay here? Why bother about
those geeks at the mines; the Company treats them much better than
they deserve. Stay here with us; we will make you happy to be with
us."

Paula replied slowly: "I thank Kankad, but I must go. Those on Terra
who sent me here want me to learn for myself how the workers at the
mines are treated. But I will come back--in a hundred, a hundred and
fifty days."

Kankad's opal-jeweled grin widened. "Good! We'll be waiting for you."
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 Uller 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
riever-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 Uller 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 worksharers, 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.

"I have always wished that some of your people could come to Terra, to
study," von Schlichten said. "I was talking about it with Sid
Harrington, only a short while ago. He thinks it would be a good
thing, for your people and for mine."

"Yes. 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."

"Some day, I am going to return to Terra; I would like to have you
make the trip with me," von Schlichten said.

"That would be wonderful, Von!" Kankad exclaimed. "I want to see your
world, before I die. It must be a wonderful place. A world is what its
people make it, and your people must be able to make anything of your
world that you would want."

"We almost made a lifeless desert, like the poles of Uller, out of our
world, once," von Schlichten told him. "Four hundred and more years
ago, we fought great wars among ourselves, with weapons such as I hope
will never even be thought of on Uller. Our whole Northern Hemisphere,
where our greatest nations were, was devastated; much of it is
wasteland to this day. But we put an end to that folly in time; we
made one nation out of all our people, and swore never to commit such
crimes again, and then we built the ships that took us out to the
stars. But I want you to see our world, and some of the other worlds
that we have visited, I think you would like it."

"I know I would. And with you to tell me what the things I would see
meant...." Kankad was silent for a moment. Then he spoke again,
changing the subject abruptly.

"I hope Paula will pardon me, but isn't Paula the kind of Terran that
bears young?"

"That's right, Kankad. I never bore any, yet, but that's the kind of
Terran I am."

"I like Paula," Kankad said. "She has come all the way from Terra to
help us, and to learn about us. Of course, the Kragans don't need that
kind of help, and the geeks, who would stick a knife in her as soon as
she turned her back on them, don't deserve it. But she wants to learn
about us, just as I want to learn about Terra. Von, why don't you and
Paula have young?" he asked. "I think that would be fine. Then, Little
Paula-Von and Little Me could be friends, long after the three of us
are dead and gone."




VI.

The Bad News Came After the Coffee


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. Nobody sticks all four thumbs in his mouth and
waves his fingers. Nobody commits nuisance on the sidewalk in front of
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. "You soldiers are all alike--begging your
pardon, General von Schlichten," he nodded in the direction of the
guest of honor. "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. We did catch some of Rakkeed's disciples trying to get in
among the enlisted men of the Tenth N.U.N.I. and the Fifth Zirk
Cavalry and promote disaffection. That was reported at the time, sir."

"And acted upon, as far as the civil administration would permit," von
Schlichten replied. "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.

"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