to help," Paula began, a trifle defensively.

"Not a very funny joke," von Schlichten told her. "It's been played on
us till it's lost its humor."

"Yes, geek ingratitude's an old story to all of us," Blount agreed.
"You stay on this planet very long and you'll see what I mean."

"You call them that, too?" she asked, as though disappointed in him.
"Maybe if you stopped calling them geeks, they wouldn't resent you the
way they do. You know, that's a nasty name; in the First Century
Pre-Atomic, it designated a degraded person who performed some sort of
revolting public exhibition...."

"Biting off live chickens' heads, in a sideshow wild-man act,"
Hideyoshi O'Leary supplied. "When you get up north, watch how the
peasants kill these little things like six-legged iguanas that they
raise for food."

"That isn't the reason, though," von Schlichten said. "As we use it,
the word's pure onomatopoeia. You've learned some of the languages;
you know what they sound like. _Geek-geek-geek._"

"As far as that goes, you know what the geek name for a Terran is?"
Blount asked. "_Suddabit._"

She looked puzzled for a moment, then slipped in her enunciator. Even
in the absence of any native, she used her handkerchief to mask the
act.

"Suddabit," she said, distinctly. "Sud-da-a-bit." Taking out the
geek-speaker, she put it away. "Why, that's exactly how they'd
pronounce it!"

"And don't tell me you haven't heard it before," O'Leary said. "The
geeks were screaming it at you, over on Seventy-second Street, this
afternoon. _Znidd suddabit_; kill the Terrans. That's Rakkeed the
Prophet's whole gospel."

"So you see," Eric Blount rammed home the moral, "this is just another
case of nobody with any right to call anybody else's kettle black....
Cigarette?"

"Thank you." She leaned toward the lighter-flame O'Leary had snapped
into being. "I suspect that of being a principle you'd like me to bear
in mind at the polar mines, when I see, let's say, some laborer being
beaten by a couple of overseers with three foot lengths of
three-quarter-inch steel cable."

"Well, you could also remember that a native's skin is about half an
inch thick, and a good deal tougher than a human's," von Schlichten
told her. "And it wouldn't hurt any if you found out how these
laborers are treated at home. Mostly they're serfs hired from the big
landowners; it's a fact you can easily verify that permission to join
the labor-companies at the polar mines is