t spaceship it had meant eat or starve. And this
was a like circumstance, since their emergency ration supplies had been
lost in the net. But though he was apprehensive, no ill effects
followed. Torgul had been uncommunicative earlier; now he was looser of
tongue, volunteering that they were almost to their port--the fairing of
Kyn Add.

The Terran had no idea how far he might question the Hawaikan, yet the
fuller his information the better. He discovered that Torgul appeared
willing to accept Ross's statement that he was from a distant part of
the sea and that local customs differed from those he knew.

Living on and by the sea the Rovers were quick-witted, adaptive, with a
highly flexible if loose-knit organization of fleet-clans. Each of these
had control over certain islands which served them as "fairings," ports
for refitting and anchorage between voyages, usually ruggedly wooded
where the sea people could find the raw material for their ships.
Colonies of clans took to the sea, not in the slim, swift cruisers like
the ship Ross was now on, but in larger, deeper vessels providing living
quarters and warehouses afloat. They lived by trade and raiding,
spending only a portion of the year ashore to grow fast-sprouting crops
on their fairing islands and indulge in some manufacture of articles the
inhabitants of the larger and more heavily populated islands were not
able to duplicate.

Their main article of commerce was, however, a sea-dwelling creature
whose supple and well-tanned hide formed their defensive armor and
served manifold other uses. This could only be hunted by men trained and
fearless enough to brave more than one danger Torgul did not explain in
detail. And a cargo of such skins brought enough in trade to keep a
normal-sized fleet-clan for a year.

There was warfare among them. Rival clans tried to jump each other's
hunting territories, raid fairings. But until the immediate past, Ross
gathered, such encounters were relatively bloodless affairs, depending
more upon craft and skillful planning to reduce the enemy to a position
of disadvantage in which he was forced to acknowledge defeat, rather
than ruthless battle of no quarter.

The shore-side Wrecker lords were always considered fair game, and there
was no finesse in Rover raids upon them. Those were conducted with a
cold-blooded determination to strike hard at a long-time foe. However,
within the past year there had been several raids on fairings