t to a gathering of the leading native scholars, who are also the
high-priests of the local religion. Sort of combined Academy of Arts
and Sciences and College of Cardinals. They almost were massacred. As
soon as the assembled pundits saw this thing and grasped its meaning,
they began geeking and skreeking and yorking and squawking and
brandishing knives--it was blasphemous, and sacrilegious, and
undermined the Faith, and invalidated the whole logic-system.

"I was brigadier-general, in command of Konkrook military district,
then--the post Them M'zangwe has now. When I got a riot-call from the
University, I hustled around with a company of Kragans, and we cleared
the hall with the bayonet and ran the reverend professors out onto the
campus, and after we got things in hand, the Kragans crowded around
the orrery, trying to set it up to show the existing position of the
planet relative to the primary and figure out the theory back of it.
They were very much interested; some of them must have sent word home
about it, because Kankad came in on the next ship, wanting to see it.
He was so much taken with it that Sid Harrington gave it to him. It's
one of his most cherished possessions, but the Konkrook pundits bite
all four thumbs and wave their fingers every time they think of it."
He warmed his coffee from a controlled-temperature pot. "You can't use
Kragan thinking on any subject as a criterion of what somebody like
Orgzild's opinions will be."

"I never could understand the admiration some of you military people
have for those cutthroats," Keaveney declared. "Oh, yes, I can. You
like them because they do your dirty work for you."

"He reads Stanley-Browne, too, I'll bet," Hideyoshi O'Leary said.
"Miss Quinton, how did you like your visit to Kankad's Town? Still
think the Kragans are cultural mongrels?"

"Why, they're wonderful! I never expected anything like it. They just
seem to have picked up everything they could from us, and then gone on
from there to develop a culture of their own with our techniques. For
instance, those big guns, the ones they call the Ridge Battery, that
they built for themselves. They aren't copies of Terran guns. They
don't look like our work, or give you the feel our work would. And
that telescope at the observatory," she continued. "Did they build
that, too?"

"Yes, all we furnished was a couple of textbooks on lens-grinding and
telescope-design, and a book on optics. You see, when we made