n
introduced the Terrans from the telecast-station. Then Kankad looked
at the watch he was wearing on his lower left wrist.

"We will have plenty of time, before the ship comes, to show Paula the
town," he suggested. "Von, you know better than I do what she would
like to see."

He led the way past a pair of long 90-mm guns to a stone stairway. Von
Schlichten explained, as they went down, that the guns of King
Kankad's Town were the only artillery above 75-mm on Uller in
non-Terran hands. They climbed into an open machine-gun carrier and
strapped themselves to their seats, and for two hours King Kankad
showed her the sights of the town. They visited the school, where
young Kragans were being taught to read Lingua Terra and studied from
textbooks printed in Johannesburg and Sydney and Buenos Aires. Kankad
showed her the repair-shops, where two-score descendants of Kragan
riever-chieftains were working on contragravity equipment, under the
supervision of a Scottish-Afrikaner and his Malay-Portuguese wife; the
small-arms factory, where very respectable copies of Terran rifles and
pistols and auto-weapons were being turned out; the machine-shop; the
physics and chemistry labs; the hospital; the ammunition-loading
plant; the battery of 155-mm Long Toms, built in Kankad's own shops,
which covered the road up the sloping rock-spine behind the city; the
printing-shop and book-bindery; the observatory, with a big telescope
and an ingenious orrery of the Beta Hydrae system; the nuclear-power
plant, part of the original price for giving up brigandage.

Half an hour before the ship from Konkrook was due, they had arrived
at the airport, where a gang of Kragans were clearing a berth for the
_Aldebaran_. From somewhere, Kankad produced two cold bottles of Cape
Town beer for Paula and von Schlichten, and a bowl of some boiling-hot
black liquid for himself. Von Schlichten and Paula lit cigarettes;
between sips of his bubbling hell-brew, Kankad gnawed on the stalk of
some swamp-plant. Paula seemed as much surprised at Kankad's disregard
for the eating taboo as she had been at von Schlichten's open flouting
of the convention of concealment when he had put in his geek-speaker.

"This is the only place on Uller where this happens," von Schlichten
told her. "Here, or in the field when Terran and Kragan soldiers are
together. There aren't any taboos between us and the Kragans."

"No," Kankad said. "We cannot eat each others' food, and be