ight men and four women, the
survivors of a trading-station on the eastern shore of Takkad Sea,
reached Konkrook in a lorry; another trading station, on the south
shore, reported by telecast that the natives there had refused to rise
against them, and had crucified five of Rakkeed's disciples who had
come among them preaching _znidd suddabit_.

At 1100, Paula Quinton and Barney Mordkovitz virtually ordered him to
get some sleep. He went to his quarters at Company House, downed a
spaceship-captain's-size drink of honey-rum, and slept until 1600. As
he dressed and shaved, he could hear, through the open window, the
slow sputter of small-arms' fire, punctuated by the occasional
_whump-whump-whump_ of 40-mm auto-cannon or the hammering of a
machine-gun.

Returning to his command-post at the telecast station, the
terrain-board showed that the perimeter of defense had been pushed out
in a bulge at the northwest corner; the TV-screen pictured a crude
breast-work of petrified tree-trunks, sandbags, mining machinery,
packing-cases and odds-and-ends, upon which Wallingsby's native
laborers were working under guard while a skirmish-line of Kragans had
been thrown out another four or five hundred yards and were exchanging
pot-shots with Skilkans on the gullied hillside.

"Where's Colonel Quinton?" he asked. "She ought to be taking a turn in
the sack, now."

"She's taking one," Major Falkenberg, who had commanded the action at
the native-troops barracks and the labor-camp, the night before, told
him. "General Mordkovitz chased her off to bed a couple of hours ago,
called me in to take her place, and then went out to replace me.
Colonel Guilliford's in the hospital; got hit about thirteen hundred.
They're afraid he's going to lose a leg."

"That's a bloody shame!" He pointed to the northwest corner of the
perimeter on the screen. "Whose idea was that?" he asked. "It's a good
one; I ought to have thought of it, myself."

"Your new adjutant," Falkenberg grinned. "She asked somebody what
those big domes, up there, were. When they told her there were ten
thousand tons of thermoconcentrate, five thousand tons of
blasting-explosives, and five tons of plutonium, under them, she
damned near fainted, and then she ordered that, right away."

More reports came in. The entire garrison of the small Residency at
Kwurk, the most northern of the eastern shore Free Cities, had arrived
at Kankad's Town in two hundred-foot contragravity scows