e derision was uncertainty. After all,
von Schlichten had been on Ullr for fifteen years, to his two.

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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