eir as 'Little Me,' which is a fairly accurate way of putting
it."

He knew what she was seeing through the glasses--a massive butte of
flint, jutting out into the swamp on the end of a sharp ridge, with a
city on top of it. All the buildings were multi-storied, some piling
upward from the top and some clinging to the sides. The high
watchtower at the front now carried a telecast-director, aimed at an
automatic relay-station on an unmanned orbiter two thousand miles
off-planet.

"They're either swamp-people who moved up onto that rock, or they're
mountaineers who came out that far along the ridges and stopped," she
said. "Which?"

"Nobody's ever tried to find out. Maybe if you stay on Ullr long
enough, you can. That ought to be good for about eight to ten honorary
doctorates. And maybe a hundred sols a year in book royalties."

"Maybe I'll just do that, general.... What's that, on the little
island over there?" she asked, shifting the glasses. "A clump of
flat-roofed buildings. Under a red-and-yellow danger-flag."

"That's Dynamite Island; the Kragans have an explosives-plant there.
They make nitroglycerine, like all the thalassic peoples; they also
make TNT and propellants. Learned that from us, of course. They also
manufacture most of their own firearms, some of them pretty
extreme--up to 25-mm. for shoulder rifles. Don't ever fire one; it'd
break every bone in your body."

"Are they that much stronger than us?"

He shook his head. "Just denser; heavier. They're about equal to us in
weight-lifting. They can't run, or jump, as well as we can. We often
come out here for games with the Kragans, where the geeks can't watch
us. And that reminds me--you're right about that being a term of
derogation, because I don't believe I've ever knowingly spoken of a
Kragan as a geek, and in fact they've picked up the word from us and
apply it to all non-Kragans. But as I was saying, our baseball team
has to give theirs a handicap, but their football team can beat the
daylights out of ours. In a tug-of-war, we have to put two men on our
end for every one of theirs. But they don't even try to play tennis
with us."

"Don't the other natives make their own firearms?"

"No, and we're not going to teach them how!"

* * * * *

The aircar came in, circling slowly over the town on the big rock, and
let down on the roof of the castle-like building from which the
watchtower rose. There were a dozen o