harlie told Robin. "They're savages. They wouldn't
understand anything like spaceships. They wouldn't want to. If they get
the chance, they'll kill first and ask questions afterwards. We've got
to go to the Wild Country now."

Big and brawny Tashtu was nodding his head earnestly, but Robin seemed
unconvinced. "Why," she said, "there isn't even anything about Wild
Country in the book."

"That's because we made it."

"And besides, the Congressmen are dangerous."

"Congressmen? Don't you mean the Cyclopes?"

"Yes, I'm sorry. The Cyclopes are dangerous."

She couldn't possibly have meant the Congressmen. It was never clear to
either of them precisely what a Congressman did. But there were hundreds
of them on one side of Wild Country and they were forever making
speeches and promises, little round bald men with great, rich voices
and wonderful vocabularies. Charlie loved to hear them speak.

"We go, Lord?" Tashtu asked.

Charlie nodded and went inside swiftly for his rifle. It was modeled
after the most powerful rifle in the encyclopedia and was called a
Mannlicher Elephant Gun. Robin came with her own smaller Springfield
repeater.

"Ready?" Charlie asked.

"Yes. We can think up food along the trail."

"Hurry, Lord," Tashtu urged.

Charlie could hardly contain his excitement. The Wild Country, at last.
And a spaceship.

* * * * *

By the time they were ready to make planetfall on the unexplored world,
Purcell knew his dislike of Glaudot bordered on actual hatred. Purcell,
who was forty-five years old and a bachelor, liked his spacemen tough,
yes: you had to be tough to land on, explore, and subdue a couple of
dozen worlds, as Purcell himself had done. But he also liked his
spacemen with humility: facing the unknown and sometimes the unknowable
at every step of the way, you needed humility.

Glaudot, younger than Purcell by fifteen years, confident, arrogant, a
lean hard man and handsome in a gaunt-cheeked, saturnine way, lacked
humility. For one thing, he treated the crew like dirt and had treated
them that way since blastoff from Earth almost five months before. For
another, he seemed impatient with Purcell's orders, although Purcell was
not a cautious man, and certainly not a timid one. What had been growing
between them flared out into the open moments before planetfall.

"I can't get over it," Purcell said. "I've never seen a world anything
like it." They had made teles