* * * * *

Griffin opened a door in the transparent bubble from which Albanez was
operating the diggers. "Anything?" he inquired.

"Nothing so far," Albanez reported. "What's the score on this job? I
missed the briefing."

"How'd you make out on III, by the way?"

"Same old stuff, pottery shards and the usual junk. See it once and
you've seen it all."

"Well," Griffin began, "it looks like the same thing here again. We've
pretty well covered this system and you know how it is. Rammed earth
walls here and there, pottery shards, flint, bronze and iron artifacts
and that's it. They got to the iron age on every planet and then
blooey."

"Artifacts all made for humanoid hands I suppose. I wonder if they were
close enough to have crossbred with humans."

"I couldn't say," Griffin observed dryly. "From the looks of Old
Pruneface I doubt if we'll ever find a human female with sufficiently
detached attitude to find out."

"Who's Pruneface?"

"He came ambling down out of the hills this morning and walked into
camp."

"You mean you've actually found a live humanoid?"

"There's got to be a first time for everything." Griffin opened the
door and started climbing the hill toward Kung Su and Pruneface.

* * * * *

"Well, have you gotten beyond the 'me, Charlie' stage yet?" Griffin
inquired at breakfast two days later.

Kung Su gave an inscrutable East Los Angeles smile. "As a matter of
fact, I'm a little farther along. Joe is amazingly cooeperative."

"Joe?"

"Spell it Chou if you want to be exotic. It's still pronounced Joe and
that's his name. The language is monosyllabic and tonal. I happen to
know a similar language."

"You mean this humanoid speaks Chinese?" Griffin was never sure whether
Kung was ribbing him or not.

"Not Chinese. The vocabulary is different but the syntax and phonemes
are nearly identical. I'll speak it perfectly in a week. It's just a
question of memorizing two or three thousand new words. Incidentally,
Joe wants to know why you're digging up his bottom land. He was all set
to flood it today."

"Don't tell me he plants rice!" Griffin exclaimed.

"I don't imagine it's rice, but it needs flooding whatever it is."

"Ask him how many humanoids there are on this planet."

"I'm way ahead of you, Griffin. He says there are only a few thousand
left. The rest were all destroyed in a war with the barbarians."