Paula Quinton on Ullr as field-agent
for the Extraterrestrials' Rights Association; now was no time to stir
up trouble among the natives, unless his hunch was wrong.

He shrugged it aside and climbed into the command-car, followed by
M'zangwe and O'Leary. Sergeant Harry Quong and Corporal Hassan
Bogdanoff took their places in the front seat; the car lifted, turned
to nose into the wind, and rose in a slow spiral.

"Where now, sir?" Quong asked.

"Back to Konkrook; to the island."

* * * * *

The nose of the car swung east by south; the cold-jet rotors began
humming, and the hot-jets were cut in. The car turned from the fort
and the mountains and shot away over the foothills toward the coastal
plains. Below were forests, yellow-green with new foliage of the
second growing-season of the equatorial year, veined with narrow dirt
roads and spotted with occasional clearings. Farther east, the dirty
gray woodsmoke of Ullr marked the progress of the charcoal-burnings.
That was the only natural fuel on Ullr; there was too much silica on
Ullr and not enough of anything else; what would be coal-seams on
Terra were strata of silicified wood. And, of course, there was no
petroleum. There was less charcoal being burned now than formerly; the
Ullr Company had been bringing in great quantities of synthetic
thermoconcentrate-fuel, and had been setting up nuclear furnaces and
nuclear-electric power-plants, wherever they gained a foothold on the
planet.

As planets went, Ullr was no bargain, he thought sourly. At times, he
wished he had never followed the lure of rapid promotion and
fanatically high pay and left the Federation regulars for the army of
the Ullr 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 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.

Ahead, the city of Konkrook sprawled along the delta of the Konk river
and extended itself inland. The river was dry, now. Except in Spring,
when it was a red-brown torrent,