s eyes, like his hair, were a deep brown--almost black, and they were
set well back beneath heavy brows that tended to frown most of the time.

Primarily, he was a military man. He had no particular flair for
science, and, although he had a firm and deep-seated grasp of the
essential philosophy of the Universal Assembly, he had no inclination
towards the kind of life necessarily led by those who would become
higher officers of the Assembly. It was enough that the Assembly was
behind him; it was enough to know that he was a member of the only race
in the known universe which had a working knowledge of the essential,
basic Truth of the Cosmos. With a weapon like that, even an ordinary
soldier had little to fear, and Commander Frank was far from being an
ordinary soldier.

He had spent nearly forty of his sixty years of life as an
explorer-soldier for the Emperor, and during that time he'd kept his
eyes open for opportunity. Every time his ship had landed, he'd watched
and listened and collected data. And now he knew.

If his data were correct--and he was certain that they were--he had
found his strike. All he needed was the men to take it.

III

The expedition had been poorly outfitted and undermanned from the
beginning. The commander had been short of money at the outset, having
spent almost all he could raise on his own, plus nearly everything he
could beg or borrow, on his first two probing expeditions, neither of
which had shown any real profit.

But they _had_ shown promise; the alien population of the target which
the commander had selected as his personal claim wore gold as ornaments,
but didn't seem to think it was much above copper in value, and hadn't
even progressed to the point of using it as coinage. From the second
probing expedition, he had brought back two of the odd-looking aliens
and enough gold to show that there must be more where that came from.

The old, hopeful statement, "There's gold in them thar hills," should
have brought the commander more backing than he got, considering the
Empire's need of it and the commander's evidence that it was available;
but people are always more ready to bet on a sure thing than to indulge
in speculation. Ten years before, a strike had been made in a sector
quite distant from the commander's own find, and most of the richer
nobles of the Empire preferred to back an established source of the
metal than to sink money into what might turn out to be the pu