"Lose him?"

"Yes, his year's up; he's going back to Ullr on the _Canberra_. He's
from Keegark; claims to be a prince, or something. But he's a damn
good worker. Very smart; picks things up the first time you tell him.
I'll recommend him unqualifiedly for any kind of work with
contragravity or mechanized equipment."

They all had drinks, now, except the chief engineer, who wanted a
rain-check on his.

"Well, here's to us," Murillo said. "The first A-bomb miners in
history...."

II

Carlos von Schlichten, General of the troops on Ullr, threw his
cigarette away and set his monocle more firmly in his eye, stepping
forward to let Brigadier-General Themistocles M'zangwe and little
Colonel Hideyoshi O'Leary follow him out of the fort. On the little
hundred-foot-square parade ground in front of the keep, his aircar was
parked, and the soldiers were assembled.

Ten or twelve of them were Terrans--a couple of lieutenants,
sergeants, gunners, technicians, the sergeant-driver and
corporal-gunner of his own car. The other fifty-odd were Ullrans. They
stood erect on stumpy legs and broad, six-toed feet. They had four
arms apiece, one pair from true shoulders and the other connected to a
pseudo-pelvis midway down the torso. Their skins were slate-gray and
rubbery, speckled with pinhead-sized bits of quartz that had been
formed from perspiration, since their body-tissues were silicone
instead of carbon-hydrogen. Their narrow heads were unpleasantly
saurian; they had small, double-lidded red eyes, and slit-like
nostrils, and wide mouths filled with opalescent teeth. Being
cold-blooded, they needed no clothing, beyond their belts and
equipment, and the emblem of the Chartered Ullr Company painted on
their chests and backs. They had no need for modesty, since all were
of the same gender--true, functional hermaphrodites; any individual
among them could bear young, or fertilize the ova of any other
individual.

Fifteen years before, when he had come to Ullr as a newly commissioned
colonel in the army of the Ullr Company, it had taken him some time to
adjust. But now his mind disregarded them and went on worrying about
the mysterious disappearance of pet animals from Terran homes; there
must be some connection with the subtle change he had noticed in the
attitudes of the natives, but he couldn't guess what. He didn't like
it, though, any more than the beginning of cannibalism among the wild
Jeel tribesmen. Or the visit of