MANNERS AND CUSTOMS OF THE THRID

BY MURRAY LEINSTER

The Thrid were the wisest creatures in space—they even said so themselves!

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, September 1963. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

I

The real trouble was that Jorgenson saw things as a business man does. But also, and contradictorily, he saw them as right and just, or as wrong and intolerable. As a business man, he should have kept his mind on business and never bothered about Ganti. As a believer in right and wrong, it would have been wiser for him to have stayed off the planet Thriddar altogether. Thriddar was no place for him, anyhow you look at it. On this particular morning it was especially the wrong place for him to be trying to live and do business.

He woke up thinking of Ganti, and in consequence he was in a bad mood right away. Most humans couldn't take the sort of thing that went on on Thriddar. Most of them wanted to use missile weapons—which the Thrid did not use—to change the local social system. Most humans got off Thriddar—fast! And boiling mad.

Jorgenson had stood it longer than most because in spite of their convictions he liked the Thrid. Their minds did do outside loops, and come up with intolerable convictions. But they were intelligent enough. They had steam-power and even steam-driven atmosphere fliers, but they didn't have missile weapons and they did have a social system that humans simply couldn't accept—even though it applied only to Thrid. The ordinary Thrid, with whom Jorgenson did business, weren't bad people. It was the officials who made him grind his teeth. And though it was his business only to run the trading post of the Rim Stars Trading Corporation, sometimes he got fed up.

This morning was especially beyond the limit. There was a new Grand Panjandrum—the term was Jorgenson's own for the supreme ruler over all the Thrid—and when Jorgenson finished his breakfast a high Thrid official waited in the trading-post compound. Around him clustered other Thrid, wearing the formal headgear that said they were Witnesses to an official act.

Jorgenson went out, scowling, and 

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