lly ended without any further show of
resistance. That is, it was six hours by Algonian time, but about eight
by Terra standards. For on Algon, while the day had been divided by the
humans into twenty-four hours, the same as on Earth, each hour was
almost seventy-eight minutes long. They divided the year into five day
weeks, though, so it averaged out about the same.

When the siren blew Hanlon smiled happily at his crew as he herded them
together, and made applauding motions with his hands, wondering if they
understood what he meant.

When he had locked the natives in their stockade, he hunted up the
checkers. "How'd I do?" he asked. "Come anywhere near what I was
supposed to get out?"

One of the checkers totalled up his figures, then looked up in surprise.
"Hey, kid, you did all right. Nearly a hundred pounds over the usual
output, and clean, too. That's really okay for a new guard, and then
some. Didn't have any trouble, eh?"

"Trouble?" Hanlon asked naively. "Was I supposed to have some?" Then he
couldn't help grinning. "Thanks for the info," and went to his room,
took a shower to cool off after that muggy heat in the mine, then
tumbled onto his bunk for a nap until dinner-time.

Those first days so thoroughly disgusted George Hanlon as he saw the
continued and senseless brutality the guards used toward their native
"slaves," that he had trouble concealing his feelings. He continued to
treat his Greenies with the respect he felt was due them, and he could
not help but notice they seemed to look on him more and more as their
friend. They always smiled when he looked at them, and before many days
he discovered that his crew was doing more work than any of the others.
His mind-probing had convinced him they were high enough in the scale of
evolution to know the meaning of gratitude, and he could tell they were
repaying his kindness with co-operation.

He had begun to make much more sense out of the pictures he saw in
their minds, and to get some glimmerings of understanding about their
alien concepts. Also, it was increasingly borne in upon him that they
did "talk" to each other, and he guessed shrewdly that the reason
no one could hear them was because their voices were above ... or
below? ... the range of human hearing. "Above," he finally deduced.

That gave him the idea for an experiment, and he started whistling as
loud as he could, gradually raising his tones until he was at the top of
his range. He saw