pped themselves to their seats, and for two hours King Kankad
showed her the sights of the town. They visited the school, where
young Kragans were being taught to read Lingua Terra and studied from
textbooks printed in Johannesburg and Sydney and Buenos Aires. Kankad
showed her the repair-shops, where two-score descendants of Kragan
river-chieftains were working on contragravity equipment, under the
supervision of a Scottish-Afrikaner and his Malay-Portuguese wife;
the small-arms factory, where very respectable copies of Terran rifles
and pistols and auto-weapons were being turned out; the machine-shop;
the physics and chemistry labs; the hospital; the ammunition-loading
plant; the battery of 155-mm. Long Toms, built in Kankad's own shops,
which covered the road up the sloping rock-spine behind the city; the
printing-shop and book-bindery; the observatory, with a big telescope
and an ingenious orrery of the Beta Hydrae system; the nuclear-power
plant, part of the original price for giving up brigandage.

Half an hour before the ship from Konkrook was due, they had arrived
at the airport, where a gang of Kragans were clearing a berth for the
_Aldebaran_. From somewhere, Kankad produced two cold bottles of Cape
Town beer for Paula and von Schlichten, and a bowl of some boiling-hot
black liquid for himself. Von Schlichten and Paula lit cigarettes;
between sips of his bubbling hell brew, Kankad gnawed on the stalk of
some swamp-plant. Paula seemed as much surprised at Kankad's disregard
for the eating taboo as she had been at von Schlichten's open flouting
of the convention of concealment when he had put in his geek-speaker.

"This is the only place on Ullr where this happens," von Schlichten
told her. "Here, or in the field when Terran and Kragan soldiers are
together. There aren't any taboos between us and the Kragans."

"No," Kankad said. "We cannot eat each others' food, and because our
bodies are different, we cannot be the fathers of each others' young.
But we have been battle-comrades, and work-sharers, and we have
learned from each other, my people more from yours than yours from
mine. Before you came, my people were like children, shooting arrows
at little animals on the beach, and climbing among the rocks at
dare-me-and-I-do, and playing war with toy weapons. But we are growing
up, and it will not be long before we will stand beside you, as the
grown son stands beside his parent, and when that day comes, you will