'd
pronounce it!"

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

*