ly non-religious. Their language
hasn't instilled in them a predisposition to think of everything as
the result of an action performed by an agent. And they have no
definite parts of speech; any word can be used as any part of speech,
depending on context. Tense is applied to words used as nouns, not
words used as verbs; there are four tenses--spatial-temporal present,
things here-and-now; spatial present and temporal remote, things which
were here at some other time; spatial remote and temporal present,
things existing now somewhere else, and spatial-temporal remote,
things somewhere else some other time."

"Why, it's a wonder they haven't developed a Theory of Relativity!"

"They have. It resembles ours about the way the Wright Brothers'
airplane resembles this aircar, but I was explaining the
Keene-Gonzales-Dillingham Theory and the older Einstein Theory to King
Kankad once, and it was beautiful to watch how he picked it up. Half
the time, he was a jump ahead of me."

The aircar began losing altitude and speed as they came in over
Kraggork Swamp; the treetops below blended into a level plain of
yellow-green, pierced by glints of stagnant water underneath and
broken by an occasional low hillock, sometimes topped by a stockaded
village.

"Those are the swamp-savages' homes," he told her. "Most of what you
find in Stanley-Browne about them is fairly accurate. He spent a lot
of time among them. He never seems to have realized, though, that they
are living now as they have ever since the first appearance of
intelligent life on this planet."

"You mean, they're the real aboriginal people of Uller?"

"They and the Jeel cannibals, whom we are doing our best to
exterminate," he replied. "You see, at one time, the dominant type of
mobile land-life was the thing we call a shellosaur, a big thing,
running from five to fifteen tons, plated all over with silicate
shell, till it looked like a six-legged pine-cone. Some were
herbivores and some were carnivores. There are a few left, in remote
places--quite a few in the Southern Hemisphere, which we haven't
explored very much. They were a satisfied life-form. Outside of a
volcano or an earthquake or an avalanche, nothing could hurt a
shellosaur but a bigger shellosaur.

"Finally, of course, they grew beyond their sustenance-limit, but in
the meantime, some of them began specializing on mobility instead of
armor and began excreting waste-matter instead of turning it to shell.