hes of searchlights fingering about in the sky. When von
Schlichten turned on the outside sound-pickup, he could hear the
distant tom-tomming of heavy guns, and the crash of shells and bombs.
Keeping the car high enough to be above the trajectories of incoming
shells, Harry Quong circled over the city while Hassan Bogdanoff
talked to Gongonk Island on the radio.

The city was in a bad way. There were seventy-five to a hundred big
fires going, and a new one started in a rising ball of thermoconcentrate
flame while they watched. The three gun-cutters, _Elmoran_, _Gaucho_,
and _Bushranger_, and about fifty big freight lorries converted to
bombers, were shuttling back and forth between the island and the city.
The Royal Palace was on fire from end to end, and the entire waterfront
and industrial district were in flames. Combat-cars and airjeeps were
diving in to shell and rocket and machine-gun streets and buildings. He
saw six big bomber-lorries move in dignified procession to unload, one
after the other, on a row of buildings along what the Terrans called
South Tenth Street, and on the roofs of buildings a block away, red and
blue flares were burning, and he could see figures, both human and
Ulleran, setting up mortars and machine-guns.

Landing on the top stage of Company House, on the island, they were
met by a Terran whom von Schlichten had seen, a few days ago, bossing
native-labor at the spaceport, but who was now wearing a major's
insignia. He greeted von Schlichten with a salute which he must have
learned from some movie about the ancient French Foreign Legion. Von
Schlichten seriously returned it in kind.

"Everybody's down in the Governor-General's office, sir," he said.
"Your office, that is. King Kankad's here with us, too."

He accompanied them to the elevator, then turned to a telephone; when
von Schlichten and Paula reached the office, everybody was crowded at
the door to greet them: Themistocles M'zangwe, his arm in a sling;
Hans Meyerstein, the Johannesburg lawyer, who seemed to have even more
Bantu blood than the brigadier-general; Morton Buhrmann, the
Commercial Superintendent; Laviola, the Fiscal Secretary; a dozen or
so other officers and civil administrators. There was a hubbub of
greetings, and he was pleased to detect as much real warmth from the
civil administration crowd as from the officers.

"Well, I'm glad to be back with you," he replied, generally. "And let
me present Colonel Paula Quint