e, but wasn't
the basic similarity there, after all?

He was--how old? He glanced at the Earth calendar dial that was
automatically correlated with the Saarkkadic calendar just above it.
Fifty-nine next week. Fifty-nine years old. And what did he have to show
for it besides flabby muscles, sagging skin, a wrinkled face, and gray
hair?

Well, he had an excellent record in the Corps, if nothing else. One of
the top men in his field. And he had his memories of Diane, dead these
ten years, but still beautiful and alive in his recollections. And--he
grinned softly to himself--he had Saarkkad.

He glanced up at the ceiling, and mentally allowed his gaze to penetrate
it to the blue sky beyond it.

Out there was the terrible emptiness of interstellar space--a great,
yawning, infinite chasm capable of swallowing men, ships, planets, suns,
and whole galaxies without filling its insatiable void.

Malloy closed his eyes. Somewhere out there, a war was raging. He didn't
even like to think of that, but it was necessary to keep it in mind.
Somewhere out there, the ships of Earth were ranged against the ships of
the alien Karna in the most important war that Mankind had yet fought.

And, Malloy knew, his own position was not unimportant in that war. He
was not in the battle line, nor even in the major production line, but
it was necessary to keep the drug supply lines flowing from Saarkkad,
and that meant keeping on good terms with the Saarkkadic government.

The Saarkkada themselves were humanoid in physical form--if one allowed
the term to cover a wide range of differences--but their minds just
didn't function along the same lines.

For nine years, Bertrand Malloy had been Ambassador to Saarkkad, and for
nine years, no Saarkkada had ever seen him. To have shown himself to one
of them would have meant instant loss of prestige.

To their way of thinking, an important official was aloof. The greater
his importance, the greater must be his isolation. The Occeq of Saarkkad
himself was never seen except by a handful of picked nobles, who,
themselves, were never seen except by their underlings. It was a long,
roundabout way of doing business, but it was the only way Saarkkad would
do any business at all. To violate the rigid social setup of Saarkkad
would mean the instant closing off of the supply of biochemical products
that the Saarkkadic laboratories produced from native plants and
animals--products that were vitally necessary