re, who had come along to serve for a
year or so and then hitch a ride home from some base planet and cash
in politically on having been with Lucas Trask.

"For the moment. I'm told that this lot aren't typical."

"I hope not. They're a pack of sadistic brutes, and piggish along
with it."

"Well, brutality and bad manners I can condone, but Spasso and
Valkanhayn are a pair of ignominious little crooks, and stupid along
with it. If Andray Dunnan had gotten here ahead of us, he might have
done one good thing in his wretched life. I can't understand why he
didn't come here."

"I think he still will," Rathmore said. "I knew him and I knew
Nevil Ormm. Ormm's ambitious, and Dunnan is insanely vindictive--"
He broke off with a sour laugh. "I'm telling _you_ that!"

"Why didn't he come here directly, then?"

"Maybe he doesn't want a base on Tanith. That would be something
constructive; Dunnan's a destroyer. I think he took that cargo of
equipment somewhere and sold it. I think he'll wait till he's fairly
sure the other ship is finished. Then he'll come in and shoot the
place up, the way--" He bit that off abruptly.

"The way he did my wedding; I think of it all the time."

* * * * *

The next morning, he and Harkaman took an aircar and went to look
at the city at the forks of the river. It was completely new, in
the sense that it had been built since the collapse of Federation
civilization and the loss of civilized technologies. It was huddled
on a long, irregularly triangular mound, evidently to raise it above
flood-level. Generations of labor must have gone into it. To the
eyes of a civilization using contragravity and powered equipment it
wasn't at all impressive. Fifty to a hundred men with adequate
equipment could have gotten the thing up in a summer. It was only
by forcing himself to think in terms of spadeful after spadeful of
earth, cartload after cartload creaking behind straining beasts,
timber after timber cut with axes and dressed with adzes, stone
after stone and brick after brick, that he could appreciate it. They
even had it walled, with a palisade of tree-trunks behind which
earth and rocks had been banked, and along the river were docks,
at which boats were moored. The locals simply called it Tradetown.

As they approached, a big gong began booming, and a white puff of
smoke was followed by the thud of a signal-gun. The boats, long
canoe-like craft and round-bowed, ma