welcome extended only to his guest, Dane
regretfully descended to the mess cabin to make unskilled preparations
for supper--though there was not much you could do to foul up
concentrates in an automatic cooker.

"Company?" Tau sat beyond the cooking unit nursing a mug of Terran
coffee. "And do you _have_ to serve music with the meals, especially
that particular selection?"

Dane flushed, stopped whistling in mid-note. "Terra Bound" _was_ old
and pretty well worn out; he didn't know why he always unconsciously
sounded off with that.

"A Chief Ranger from Khatka just came on board," he reported, carefully
offhand, as he busied himself reading labels. He knew better than to
serve fish or any of its derivatives in disguise again.

"Khatka!" Tau sat up straighter. "Now there's a planet worth visiting."

"Not on a Free Trader's pay," commented Dane.

"You can always hope to make a big strike, boy. But what I wouldn't give
to lift ship for there!"

"Why? You're no hunter. How come you want to heat jets for that port?"

"Oh, I don't care about the game preserves, though they're worth seeing,
too. It's the people themselves--"

"But they're Terran settlers, or at least from Terran stock, aren't
they?"

"Sure," Tau sipped his coffee slowly. "But there are settlers and
settlers, son. And a lot depends upon when they left Terra and why, and
who they were--also what happened to them after they landed out here."

"And Khatkans are really special?"

"Well, they have an amazing history. The colony was founded by escaped
prisoners--and just one racial stock. They took off from Earth close to
the end of the Second Atomic War. That was a race war, remember? Which
made it doubly ugly." Tau's mouth twisted in disgust. "As if the color
of a man's skin makes any difference in what lies under it! One side in
that line-up tried to take over Africa--herded most of the natives into
a giant concentration camp and practiced genocide on a grand scale. Then
they were cracked themselves, hard and heavy. During the confusion some
survivors in the camp staged a revolt, helped by the enemy. They
captured an experimental station hidden in the center of the camp and
made a break into space in two ships which had been built there. That
voyage must have been a nightmare, but they were desperate. Somehow they
made it out here to the rim and set down on Khatka without power enough
to take off again--and by then most of them were dead.

"But we