Celestine, and I had decided to emigrate to Mother Earth. Game wardens, foresters, and gardeners were needed for the century-old project of reclaiming that world. There I would find work more pleasant than pursuing things with tentacles, fangs, and maws. Of course, if I failed to earn a large fee from this hunt, we would be unable to go.

My principal difficulty was that Maggie was private. GG had no authority except to send inspection parties. A private planet could not attempt inter-planetary or interstellar flight without GG supervision, nor could it own weapons other than those required for defense against native life. Most private planets had been settled two centuries before, when there were individuals wealthy enough to undertake stellar colonization. Few who tried succeeded. The fifteen or twenty private planets in the Explored Galaxy were all eccentric. Some even advocated capital punishment, an archaic system of killing mental defectives.

The one factor on my side was that no GG citizen could be punished by a private planet—or so Galactic law specified.

IV: FIVEDAY MORNING

Toothies raced for their holes when the Dominant and three guards entered the cell. "Did you get any sleep?" I asked.

The Dominant announced, "Shall see the Jury."

They marched me out into the hot, slanting rays of Joe's Sun. Large, brown-haired, big-nosed pedestrians gawked at me with stolid curiosity. The women carefully kept at a distance of ten foot lengths. We turned a corner and passed a column of varied men and women who did not fall within Maggiese standards. They carried or pushed primitive agricultural tools, such as chain saws, weed burners, and self-propelled soil tillers and sickle bars. Their brooches were inscribed, "Farmer."

We climbed a broad flight of plank steps into a huge log building with wooden pillars and carved friezes. The Dominant said, "Guard him," and passed through one of the many doors in the vestibule.

I examined two flat photographs on the wall. I decided that the Maggiese letters labeled the man as Joe Nordo, and that he had said, "To be alike is to be free." The woman was Maggie Ione Curwen Nordo. Evidently, she had never said anything worth quoting.

Although Maggie was rather pretty, she had features similar to Joe's. Joe was a caricature of most of the natives. His face appeared almost in profile, so that the 

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