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 p.r.o.nounce 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 n.o.body with any right to call anybody else"s kettle black....

Cigarette?"

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

"If you think the natives who work at the mines feel themselves ill-treated, you might propose closing them down entirely and see what the native reaction would be," von Schlichten told her.

"Independently-hired free workers can make themselves rich, by native standards, in a couple of seasons; many of the serfs pick up enough money from us in incentive-pay to buy their freedom after one season."

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

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

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

"The merchants in the North don"t like us; beside spoiling the caravan-trade, we"re spoiling their local business, because the landowning barons, who used to deal with them, are now dealing directly with us. At Skilk, King Firkked"s afraid his feudal n.o.bility is going to force a Runnymede on him, so he"s been currying favor with the urban merchants; that makes him as pro-Rakkeed and as anti-Terran as they are. At Krink, King Jonkvank has the support of his barons, but he"s afraid of his urban bourgeoisie, and we pay him a handsome subsidy, so he"s pro-Terran and anti-Rakkeed. At Skilk, Rakkeed comes and goes openly; at Krink he has a price on his head."

"Jonkvank is not one of the a.s.sets we boast about too loudly,"

Hideyoshi O"Leary said, pausing on his way from the table. "He"s as b.l.o.o.d.y-minded an old murderer as you"d care not to meet in a dark alley."

"We can turn our backs on him and not expect a knife between our shoulders, anyhow," von Schlichten said. "And we can believe, oh, up to eighty per cent of what he tells us, and that"s sixty per cent better than any of the other native princes, except King Kankad, of course. The Kragans are the only real friends we have on this planet."

He thought for a moment. "Miss Quinton, are you doing sociographic research-work here, in addition to your Ex-Rights work?" he asked.

"Well, let me advise you to pay some attention to the Kragans."

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

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

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

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

"Stanley-Browne is one author you can depend on," O"Leary a.s.sured her.

"If you read it in Stanley-Browne, it"s wrong. You know, I don"t think she"s run into many Kragans. We ought to take her over and introduce her to King Kankad."

Von Schlichten allowed himself to be smitten by an idea. "By Allah, so we had!" he exclaimed. "Look, you"re going to Skilk, in the next week, aren"t you? Well, do you think you could get all your end-jobs cleared up here and be ready to leave by 0800 Tuesday? That"s four days from today."

"I"m sure I could. Why?"

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

"Well, general, I"ll take you up," she said. "But I warn you; if this is some scheme to indoctrinate me with the Ullr Company"s side of the case and blind me to unjust exploitation of the natives here, I don"t propagandize very easily."

"Fair enough, as long as you don"t let fear of being propagandized blind you to the good we"re doing here, or impair your ability to observe and draw accurate conclusions. Just stay scientific about it and I"ll be satisfied. Now, let"s take time out for lubrication," he said, filling her gla.s.s and pa.s.sing the jug.

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

Four days later they stood together as the aircar pa.s.sed over the Kraggork Swamps--pleasantly close together, von Schlichten realized.

For the moment, he could almost forget the queer, intangible tension that had been growing steadily, and the feeling that things were nearing a breaking point of some kind.

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

"Right ahead, there; just a little to the left. See that brown-gray spot on the landward edge of the swamp? That"s King Kankad"s Town.

It"s been there for thousands of years, and it"s always been Kankad"s Town. You might say, even the same Kankad. The Kragan kings have always provided their own heirs, by self-fertilization. The offspring is an exact duplicate of the single parent. The present Kankad speaks of his heir as "Little Me," which is a fairly accurate way of putting it."

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

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

"n.o.body"s ever tried to find out. Maybe if you stay on Ullr long enough, you can. That ought to be good for about eight to ten honorary doctorates. And maybe a hundred sols a year in book royalties."

"Maybe I"ll just do that, general.... What"s that, on the little island over there?" she asked, shifting the gla.s.ses. "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 thala.s.sic peoples; they also make TNT and propellants. Learned that from us, of course. They also manufacture most of their own firearms, some of them pretty extreme--up to 25-mm. for shoulder rifles. Don"t ever fire one; it"d break every bone in your body."

"Are they that much stronger than us?"

He shook his head. "Just denser; heavier. They"re about equal to us in weight-lifting. They can"t run, or jump, as well as we can. We often come out here for games with the Kragans, where the geeks can"t watch us. And that reminds me--you"re right about that being a term of derogation, because I don"t believe I"ve ever knowingly spoken of a Kragan as a geek, and in fact they"ve picked up the word from us and apply it to all non-Kragans. But as I was saying, our baseball team has to give theirs a handicap, but their football team can beat the daylights out of ours. In a tug-of-war, we have to put two men on our end for every one of theirs. But they don"t even try to play tennis with us."

"Don"t the other natives make their own firearms?"

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

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

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

"Till the _Aldebaran_ gets in from Konkrook, to pick up the Rifles,"

von Schlichten replied, in Lingua Terra. He looked at his watch. "Two hours and a half.... Kankad, this is Paula Quinton; Paula, King Kankad."

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

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