“Those are the swamp-savages’ homes,” he told her. “Most of what you find in Stanley-Browne about them is fairly accurate. He spent a lot of time among them. He never seems to have realized, though, that they are living now as they have ever since the first appearance of intelligent life on this planet.”
“You mean, they’re the real aboriginal people of Uller?”
“They and the Jeel cannibals, whom we are doing our best to exterminate,” he replied. “You see, at one time, the dominant type of mobile land-life was the thing we call a shellosaur, a big thing, running from five to fifteen tons, plated all over with silicate shell, till it looked like a six-legged pine-cone. Some were herbivores and some were carnivores. There are a few left, in remote places—quite a few in the Southern Hemisphere, which we haven’t explored very much. They were a satisfied life-form. Outside of a volcano or an earthquake or an avalanche, nothing could hurt a shellosaur but a bigger shellosaur.
“Finally, of course, they grew beyond their sustenance-limit, but in the meantime, some of them began specializing on mobility instead of armor and began excreting waste-matter instead of turning it to shell. Some of these new species got rid of their shell entirely. Parahomo sapiens Ulleris is descended from one of these.
“The shellosaurs were still a serious menace, though. The ancestors of the present Ulleran, the proto-geeks, when they were at about the Java Ape-Man stage of development, took two divergent courses to escape the shellosaurs. Some of them took to the swamps, where the shellosaurs would sink if they tried to follow. Those savages, down there, are still living in the same manner; they never progressed. Others encountered problems of survival which had to be overcome by invention. They progressed to barbarism, like the people of the fishing-villages, and some of them progressed to civilization, like the Konkrookans and the Keegarkans.
“Then, there were others who took to the high rocks, where the shellosaurs couldn’t climb. The Jeels are the primitive, original example of that. Most of the North Uller civilizations developed from mountaineer-savages, and so did the Zirks and the other northern plains nomads.”
“Well, how about the Kragans?” Paula asked. “Which were they?”
Von Schlichten was scanning the horizon ahead. He pulled over a pair of fifty-power binoculars on a swinging arm and put them where she could use them.
“Right ahead, there; just a little to the left. See that brown-gray spot on the landward edge of the swamp? That’s King Kankad’s Town. It’s been there for thousands of years, and it’s always been Kankad’s Town. You might say, even the same Kankad. The Kragan kings have always provided their own heirs, by self-fertilization. That’s a complicated process, involving simultaneous male and female masturbation, but the offspring is an exact duplicate of the single parent. The present Kankad speaks of his heir as ‘Little Me,’ which is a fairly accurate way of putting it.”
He knew what she was seeing through the glasses—a massive butte of flint, jutting out into the swamp on the end of a sharp ridge, with a city on top of it. All the buildings were multi-storied, some piling upward from the top and some clinging to the sides. The high watchtower at the front now carried a telecast-director, aimed at an automatic relay-station on an unmanned orbiter two thousand miles off-planet.
“They’re either swamp-people who moved up onto that rock, or they’re mountaineers who came out that far along the ridge and stopped,” she said. “Which?”
“Nobody’s ever tried to find out. Maybe if you stay on Uller long enough, you can. That ought to be good for about eight to ten honorary doctorates. And maybe a hundred sols a year in book royalties.”
“Maybe I’ll just do that, general. … What’s that, on the little island over there?” she asked, shifting the glasses. “A clump of flat-roofed buildings. Under a red-and-yellow danger-flag.”
“That’s Dynamite Island; the Kragans have an explosives-plant there. They make nitroglycerine, like all the thalassic peoples; they also make T.N.T. and catastrophite, and propellants. Learned that from us, of course. They also manufacture most of their own firearms, some of them pretty extreme—up to 25 mm for shoulder rifles. Don’t ever fire one; it’d break every bone in your body.”
“Are they that much stronger than us?”
He shook his head. “Just denser, heavier. They’re about equal to us in weightlifting. They can’t run, or jump, as well as we can. We often come out here for games with the Kragans, where the geeks can’t watch us. And that reminds me—you’re right about that being a term of derogation, because I don’t believe I’ve ever knowingly spoken of a Kragan as a geek, and in fact they’ve picked up the word from us and apply it to all non-Kragans. But as I was saying, our baseball team has to give theirs a handicap, but their football team can beat the daylights out of ours. In a tug-of-war, we have to put two men on our end for every one of theirs. But they don’t even try to play tennis with us.”
“Don’t the other natives make their own firearms?”
“No, and we’re not going to teach them how. The thalassic peoples here in the Equatorial Zone are fairly good empirical, teaspoon-measure, chemists. Well, no, alchemists. They found out how to make nitroglycerine, and use it for blasting and for bombs and mines, and they screw little capsules of it on the ends of their arrows. Most of their chemistry, such as it is, was learned in trying to prevent organic materials, like wood, from petrifying. Up in the north, where it gets cold, they learned a lot about metallurgy and ceramics, and about forced-draft pneumatics, from having to keep fires going all winter to thaw frozen food. They make air-rifles, to shoot metal darts.”
The aircar came in, circling slowly over the town on the big rock, and let down on the roof of the castle-like building from
