Some of these new species got rid of their shell entirely. _Parahomo
sapiens Ulleris_ is descended from one of these.

"The shellosaurs were still a serious menace, though. The ancestors of
the present Ulleran, the proto-geeks, when they were at about the Java
Ape-Man stage of development, took two divergent courses to escape the
shellosaurs. Some of them took to the swamps, where the shellosaurs
would sink if they tried to follow. Those savages, down there, are
still living in the same manner; they never progressed. Others
encountered problems of survival which had to be overcome by
invention. They progressed to barbarism, like the people of the
fishing-villages, and some of them progressed to civilization, like
the Konkrookans and the Keegarkans.

"Then, there were others who took to the high rocks, where the
shellosaurs couldn't climb. The Jeels are the primitive, original
example of that. Most of the North Uller civilizations developed from
mountaineer-savages, and so did the Zirks and the other northern
plains nomads."

"Well, how about the Kragans?" Paula asked. "Which were they?"

Von Schlichten was scanning the horizon ahead. He pulled over a pair
of fifty-power binoculars on a swinging arm and put them where she
could use them.

"Right ahead, there; just a little to the left. See that brown-gray
spot on the landward edge of the swamp? That's King Kankad's Town.
It's been there for thousands of years, and it's always been Kankad's
Town. You might say, even the same Kankad. The Kragan kings have
always provided their own heirs, by self-fertilization. That's a
complicated process, involving simultaneous male and female
masturbation, but the offspring is an exact duplicate of the single
parent. The present Kankad speaks of his heir as 'Little Me,' which is
a fairly accurate way of putting it."

He knew what she was seeing through the glasses--a massive butte of
flint, jutting out into the swamp on the end of a sharp ridge, with a
city on top of it. All the buildings were multi-storied, some piling
upward from the top and some clinging to the sides. The high
watchtower at the front now carried a telecast-director, aimed at an
automatic relay-station on an unmanned orbiter two thousand miles
off-planet.

"They're either swamp-people who moved up onto that rock, or they're
mountaineers who came out that far along the ridge and stopped," she
said. "Which?"

"Nobody's ever tried to find out. Maybe if you st