ination of monkey and koala; a kind of
large, merry-eyed snake that moved by holding its tail in its mouth and
rolling like a hoop. All had faces that reminded the captain of the work
of the celebrated twentieth-century artist W. Disney.

"By Polaris," he cried in disgust, "I might have known you'd find a
_cute_ planet!"

"Moon, actually," the first officer said, "since it is in orbit around
Virago XI, rather than Virago itself."

"Would you have _wanted_ them to be hostile?" Harkaway asked peevishly.
"Honestly, some people never seem to be satisfied."

From his proprietary airs, one would think Harkaway had created the
natives himself. "At least, with hostile races, you know where you are,"
Iversen said. "I always suspect friendly life-forms. Friendliness simply
isn't a natural instinct."

"Who's being anthropomorphic now!" Harkaway chided.

Iversen flushed, for he had berated the young man for that particular
fault on more than one occasion. Harkaway was too prone to interpret
alien traits in terms of terrestrial culture. Previously, since all
intelligent life-forms with which the _Herringbone_ had come into
contact had already been discovered by somebody else, that didn't matter
too much. In this instance, however, any mistakes of contact or
interpretation mattered terribly. And Iversen couldn't see Harkaway not
making a mistake; the boy simply didn't have it in him.

"You know you're superimposing our attitude on theirs," the junior
officer continued tactlessly. "The Flimbotzik are a simple, friendly,
_shig-livi_ people, closely resembling some of our historical
primitives--in a nice way, of course."

"None of our primitives had space travel," Iversen pointed out.

"Well, you couldn't really call those things spaceships," Harkaway said
deprecatingly.

"They go through space, don't they? I don't know what else you'd call
them."

"One judges the primitiveness of a race by its cultural and
technological institutions," Harkaway said, with a lofty smile. "And
these people are laughably backward. Why, they even believe in
reincarnation--_mpoola_, they call it."

"How do you know all this?" Iversen demanded. "Don't tell me you profess
to speak the language already?"

"It's not a difficult language," Harkaway said modestly, "and I have
managed to pick up quite a comprehensive smattering. I dare-say I
haven't caught all the nuances--_heeka lob peeka_, as the Flimbotzik
themselves say--but they are a very sim