Around the older estates, thick
walls of flint and petrified wood had been built, and wide moats dug,
to keep out the shellosaurs. But now the moats were dry, and the walls
falling into disrepair. Some of the newer farms, land devoted to
agriculture with the declining demand for charcoal, had neither moats
nor walls. That was the Company, too; the huge shell-armored beasts
had become virtually extinct in the Konk Isthmus now, since the
introduction of bazookas and recoilless rifles. There seemed to be
quite a bit of power-equipment working in the fields, and big
contragravity lorries were drifting back and forth, scattering
fertilizer, mainly nitrates from Mimir or Yggdrasill. There were still
a good number of animal-drawn plows and harrows in use, however.

As planets went, Uller was no bargain, he thought sourly. At times, he
wished he had never followed the lure of rapid promotion and
fantastically high pay and left the Federation regulars for the army
of the Uller Company. If he hadn't, he'd probably be a colonel, at
five thousand sols a year, but maybe it would be better to be a
middle-aged colonel on a decent planet--Odin, with its two moons,
Hugin and Munin, and its wide grasslands and its evergreen forests
that looked and even smelled like the pinewoods of Terra, or Baldur,
with snow-capped mountains, and clear, cold lakes, and rocky rivers
dashing under great vine-hung trees, or Freya, where the people were
human to the last degree and the women were so breathtakingly
beautiful--than a Company army general at twenty-five thousand on
this combination icebox, furnace, wind-tunnel and stonepile, where the
water tasted like soapsuds and left a crackly film when it dried;
where the temperature ranged, from pole to pole, between two hundred
and fifty and minus a hundred and fifty Fahrenheit and the
Beaufort-scale ran up to thirty; where nothing that ran or swam or
grew was fit for a human to eat, and where the people....

Of course, there were worse planets than Uller. There was Nidhog, cold
and foggy, its equatorial zone a gloomy marsh and the rest of the planet
locked in eternal ice. There was Bifrost, which always kept the same
face turned to its primary; one side blazingly hot and the other close
to absolute zero, with a narrow and barely habitable twilight zone
between. There was Mimir, swarming with a race of semi-intelligent
quasi-rodents, murderous, treacherous, utterly vicious. Or Niflheim. The
Uller Comp