"I was rather horrified, Friday afternoon, at the way you and Colonel
O'Leary and Mr. Blount were blaspheming against Stanley-Browne," she
said. "His book is practically the sociographers' Koran for this
planet. But I've been checking up, since, and I find that everybody
who's been here any length of time seems to deride it, and it's full
of the most surprising misstatements. I'm either going to make myself
famous or get burned at the stake by the Extraterrestrial Sociographic
Society after I get back to Terra. In the last three months, I've been
really too busy with Ex-Rights work to do much research, but I'm
beginning to think there's a great deal in Stanley-Browne's book that
will have to be reconsidered."

"How'd you get into this, Miss Quinton?" he asked.

"You mean sociography, or Ex-Rights? Well, my father and my
grandfather were both extraterrestrial sociographers--anthropologists
whose subjects aren't anthropomorphic--and I majored in sociography
at the University of Montevideo. And I've always been in sympathy
with extraterrestrial races; one of my great-grandmothers was a
Freyan."

"The deuce; I'd never have guessed that, as small and dark as you
are."

"Well, another of my great-grandmothers was Japanese," she replied.
"The family name's French. I'm also part Spanish, part Russian, part
Italian, part English ... the usual modern Argentine mixture."

"I'm an Argentino, too. From La Rioja, over along the Sierra de
Velasco. My family lived there for the past five centuries. They came
to the Argentine in the Year Three, Atomic Era."

"On account of the Hitler bust-up?"

"Yes. I believe the first one, also a General von Schlichten, was what
was then known as a war-criminal."

"That makes us partners in crime, then," she laughed. "The Quintons
had to leave France about the same time; they were what was known as
collaborationists."

"That's probably why the Southern Hemisphere managed to stay out of
the Third and Fourth World Wars," he considered. "It was full of the
descendants of people who'd gotten the short end of the Second."

"Do you speak the Kragan language, general?" she asked. "I understand
it's entirely different from the other Equatorial Ulleran languages."

"Yes. That's what gives the Kragans an entirely different semantic
orientation. For instance, they have nothing like a subject-predicate
sentence structure. That's why, Stanley-Browne to the contrary
notwithstanding, they are entire