ve,
then, to do any laughing."

"You don't really believe that, general?" Keaveney asked. His tone was
still derisive, but under the derision was uncertainty. After all, von
Schlichten had been on Uller 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 hydroponic-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."

"But King Kankad was talking about...." Paula Quinton began.

"We were speaking of geeks, not Kragans." Von Schlichten lit his
cigarette and held his lighter for hers. "You saw that big Beta Hydrae
orrery at Kankad's observatory. Well, there's quite a little story
about that. You know, it's generally realized by the natives here that
Uller is a globe. The North Zirks have ridden all the way around it,
on hipposaur-back, in the high latitudes, and the thalassic peoples at
the Equator have sailed all the five equatorial seas and portaged all
the isthmuses between. But, of course, Uller is the center of the
universe; the sun travels around it, on a rather complicated
double-spiral track. As a theory, it explains most of what they're
able to observe, and any minor effects that don't conform to it are
just ignored. They have a model, a most ingenious affair run by
clockwork, at the University of Konkrook, to show the apparent
movement and position of Beta Hydrae in the sky; it does so fairly
accurately.

"Well, some of our astronomers constructed this orrery, and exhibited
i