he had a bit of rotten fish caught in
his mustache.

"We have about eight hundred of them. There were only three hundred
that were any good for work here; we gathered the rest up at villages
along the big river," Spasso was saying.

"How do you get food for them?" Harkaman asked. "Or don't you bother?"

"Oh, we gather that up all over," Valkanhayn told him. "We send
parties out with landing craft. They'll let down on a village, run
the locals out, gather up what's around and bring it here. Once in
a while they put up a fight, but the best they have is a few crossbows
and some muzzle-loading muskets. When they do, we burn the village
and machine-gun everybody we see."

"That's the stuff," Harkaman approved. "If the cow doesn't want to
be milked, just shoot her. Of course, you don't get much milk out of
her again, but--"

The room to which their hosts guided them was at the far end of the
hall. It had probably been a conference room or something of the
sort, and originally it had been paneled, but the paneling had long
ago vanished. Holes had been dug here and there in the walls, and he
remembered having noticed that the door was gone and the metal
groove in which it had slid had been pried out.

There was a big table in the middle, and chairs and couches covered
with colored spreads. All the furniture was handmade, cunningly
pegged together and highly polished. On the walls hung trophies of
weapons--thrusting-spears and throwing-spears, crossbows and quarrels,
and a number of heavy guns, crude things, but carefully made.

"Pick all this stuff up off the locals?" Harkaman asked.

"Yes, we got most of it at a big town down at the forks of the
river," Valkanhayn said. "We shook it down a couple of times. That's
where we recruited the fellows we're using to boss the workers."

Then he picked up a stick with a leather-covered knob and beat on a
gong, bawling for wine. A voice, somewhere, replied, "Yes, master; I
come!" and in a few moments a woman entered carrying a jug in either
hand. She was wearing a blue bathrobe several sizes too large for
her, instead of the poncho things the slaves in the hallway wore.
She had dark brown hair and gray eyes; if she had not been so
obviously frightened she would have been beautiful. She set the jugs
on the table and brought silver cups from a chest against the wall:
when Spasso dismissed her, she went out hastily.

"I suppose it's silly to ask if you're paying these people a