the ship?”

Bordman flushed. He wouldn’t. But he said doggedly;

“I can order you sent on board, and your cousin will carry out the order!”

“I doubt it very much,” said Aletha pleasantly.

She returned to her task.

There were crunching footsteps outside the hulk. Bordman winced a little. With insulated sandals, it[29] was normal for these colonists to move from one part of the colony to another in the open, even by daylight. He, Bordman, couldn’t take out-of-doors at night! His lips twisted bitterly.

[29]

Men came in. There were dark men with rippling muscles under glistening skin, and bronze Amerinds with coarse straight hair. Ralph Redfeather was with them. Dr. Chuka came in last of all.

“Here we are,” said Redfeather. “These are our foremen. Among us, I think we can answer any questions you want to ask.”

He made introductions. Bordman didn’t try to remember the names. Abeokuta and Northwind and Sutata and Tallgrass and T’ckka and Spottedhorse and Lewanika—— They were names which in combination would only be found in a very raw, new colony. But the men who crowded into the office were wholly at ease, in their own minds as well as in the presence of a senior Colonial Survey officer. They nodded as they were named, and the nearest shook hands. Bordman knew that he’d have liked their looks under other circumstances. But he was humiliated by the conditions on this planet. They were not. They were apparently only sentenced to death by them.

“I have to leave a report,” said Bordman curtly—and he was somehow astonished to know that he did expect to leave a report rather than make one; he accepted the hopelessness of the colony’s future—“on the degree-of-completion of the work here. But since there’s an emergency, I have also to leave a report on the measures taken to meet it.”

The report would be futile, of course. As futile as the coup-records Aletha was compiling, which would be read only after everybody on the planet was dead. But Bordman knew he’d write it. It was unthinkable that he 

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