lister walked confidently down the road to town. He congratulated
himself on having learned, also on his wise humility in admitting the
fact of his having learned. He smiled now at the naivete with which he
had approached his first try at establishing a realm for his Ipplinger
Princedom rights.

He had been so full of illusions that he had landed openly, had stepped
right up and announced that he had come to establish his household and
rear his own Princes, who would, in their maturity, leave to win their
own worlds. In addition to their being small-minded on that first world
about his needing five wives for his household, they had nearly managed
to commit him to a lunatic asylum, for he had overlooked, in his
equation, the fact that his first planet, with its two suns and
perpetual daylight, had never known about the stars. There had been no
way to break through their wall of stupidity, and he had left, the
planet's sanity-police close on his heels. Had he used money it would
have been a cinch, he had realized as soon as he was safely in the ship.

That hard-earned lesson he had applied to his second planet, but there
superstition meant more than money, though money had seemed on the
surface to be the answer to everything. On that second planet he had
made the error of buying his way into the half-political, half-religious
temple setup, and had tried to bring the local superstitions into line
with Ipplinger Reality Philosophy. They had lost an officer and three
men when they rescued him from the temple's torture chamber; and none
too soon, for he had been taking quite a stretching when his rescue had
arrived.

Applied on Earth, the superstition equation had not paid off. He had
failed to notice that they didn't really believe in their religions and
superstitions, though they showed every indication of being extremely
devout and credulous. He should have sold Earth, and sold it with sex.

Well, he had learned, all right, and here, on this new world, in this
fresh start, he would show how well he had learned. In the idiom of
Ventura Boulevard, he'd hit 'em with the whole deck, deuces wild. He'd
give 'em sex and money and superstition and to hell with fact and logic.

These primitive worlds had to be brought slowly into a respect for
logic; for Ipplinger logic, the only valid system of logic in the whole
universe.

In the hovering ship, the commander turned to the astrogator and said,
with the bitterness of yesterda