ly regulation map-markers, but I've seen stranger things
used.... Captain Malavez!"

"Yes, sir?" The girl captain, rushing past, her hands full of
teleprint-sheets, stopped in mid-stride.

"What we need," he told her, "is a big TV-screen, and a pickup mounted
on some sort of a contragravity vehicle at about two to five thousand
feet directly overhead, to give us an image of the whole area. Can
do?"

"Can try, sir. We have an eight-foot circular screen that ought to do
all right for two thousand feet. I'll implement that at once."

Going into a temporarily idle telecast booth, he called Konkrook.
First he spoke to a civilian who chewed a dead cigar, and then he got
Themistocles M'zangwe on the screen.

"How is it, now?" he asked.

"Getting a little better," the Graeco-African replied. "Half an hour
ago, we were shooting geeks out the windows, here; now we have them
contained between the spaceport and the native-troops and labor
barracks, and down the east side of the island to the farms. We have
the wire around the farms on the island electrified, and we're using
almost all our combat contragravity to keep the farms on the mainland
clear." He hesitated for a moment. "Did you hear about Eric and
Lemoyne?"

Von Schlichten shook his head.

"We just got a call from Rodolfo MacKinnon. He took a couple of
prisoners and made them talk. The whole party that were at Orgzild's
palace were massacred. Some of them were lucky enough to get killed
fighting. The geeks took Eric and Hendrik alive; rolled them in a
puddle of thermoconcentrate fuel and set fire to them. When we can
spare the contragravity, we're going to drop something on the Kee-geek
embassy, over in town."

"Well, that was what I wanted to call you about--contragravity." He
told M'zangwe about King Kankad's offer. "His crowd ought to be coming
in in a couple of hours. What can you scrape up to send to Kankad's
Town to airlift Kragans in?"

"Well, we have three hundred-and-fifty-foot gun-cutters, one 90-mm gun
apiece. The _Elmoran_, the _Gaucho_, and the _Bushranger_. But they're
not much as transports, and we need them here pretty badly. Then, we
have five fertilizer and charcoal scows, and a lot of heavy transport
lorries, and two one-eighty-foot pickup boats."

"How about the _Piet Joubert_?" von Schlichten asked. "She was due in
Konkrook from the east about 1300 today, wasn't she?"

M'zangwe swore. "She got in, all right. But the geeks boarded her at