sufficiently to come into common use around 2200 A.D. English, while a nightmare of contradictions to baffle a foreigner, had offered these advantages: next to Chinese, no other language was so free of inflections; and it could so readily assimilate all manner of foreign words. Thus, since the tone-deaf Occidental had not been able to master the simplicities of Chinese or other Mongolian tongues, the Asiatics had taken up English, with which had been blended Arabic, Urdu, Malay, and a good deal of Western European; and, while seven centuries of Venusian isolation had made the speech of the people of the Domes diverge from the original international Terrestrian, Verrill had not too much difficulty in making himself understood.

"This black bag," he told a group of the caravan men, "will interest Ardelan—that's your chief's name, isn't it? Let me go into the mountains with you to talk to him."

"You're crazy," a craggy faced fellow with drooping moustaches and hard blue eyes told him, levelly. "You think I'm crazy."

Verrill laid out three daggers. He picked one up, jabbed it into the top of a table cluttered with heaps of goatskins, dried apricots, raisins, and bags of coriander seed. He bent the weapon until the grip touched the table top. He released it. It snapped straight up, with a fine, high pitched spang. He plucked a dagger from the mountaineer's belt, drew the other weapon from the table, and slashed them edge to edge.

He cut shavings from the mountaineer's weapon. Then he stropped his own blade on the palm of his hand for a couple of strokes, and next ran it along his arm. The hairs toppled as he cut them free; there was no drag at all, the edge was so keen.

"Mine are not trade daggers," he said. "Bet you the three that Ardelan will listen to me, and not throw me out."

The Terrestrian's eyes gleamed. "What do I put up for a bet?"

"A pair of those boots you're wearing. Put my knives in your belt now. If I lose my bet, they're yours. If I win, you're welcome to them anyway."

So the caravan men fitted him out with garments and boots like their own; and Verrill went into the mountains with them.

II

The trail snaked along precipices and wound past narrow, hidden valleys. At the foot of a cliff lay the shell of a space-cruiser which had been telescoped from its original 

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