"You don't," Verrill said, boldly. "Though you do wonder a lot about fire that comes out of a rock, with no fuel."

"I don't wonder as much as you think. There's a place, far away from here, where a blaze like that comes from the ground sometimes when a camp fire is built too near it. But the wind whisks the flames out and then there's nothing but a smell."

Verrill had by now revised somewhat his notions on savages. "Then why do you put up with that wild-eyed fanatic?"

Ardelan smiled indulgently. "You people from the outside know many strange things. How to come down from the stars. How to make guns. But the few of you I've talked to are dog-ignorant when it comes to people. The fire god is something our neighbors don't have. It makes us stick together better, and keeps us from fighting among ourselves. Aren't any of your people smart enough to have gods?"

Verrill answered, with feigned humility, "I came to teach you people a few things but it seems I can learn something. Then it will be a fair exchange."

The next day, he had Ardelan send a courier to the trading-post. The man carried an order for a consignment of medical supplies to be sent from the Venusian Domes via the next freighter. There was also a letter for Linda, telling of the success of his first operation, and of Dawson's first move to make trouble. "But Gil was a bit late," he wrote. "I'd already got in pretty solid. That won't keep him from trying something else. He must have talked a good deal before he left. If you hear any gossip as to what he planned to do or how he intended to do it, be sure and write me the details. From all I've seen of Terra so far, they should have bombed it even more than they did. One well-organized Dome is worth a dozen Earths. But the natives don't seem to mind a bit...."

Knife and gunshot wounds and fractures, Verrill reasoned, would make up most of his practice: surgery, that is, in its engineering aspect, rather than as a corrective of ailments. And the centuries, fortunately, had worked to keep his task from being utterly beyond a well-educated layman. Whereas in the twentieth century, there had not been more than two or three specifics, there were now ten times as many. It was a matter of taking the proper bottle, just as, in ancient times, one had reached automatically for quinine, the primitive specific against malaria.

Meanwhile, what had been his prison became his home and his dispensary. During his wait for the 

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