Of course, axes and arrows were of small use against flamers. Perhaps Varris could be taken alive, but the patrol would kill him without whiffing very many Thunsban. Captain Thymal settled complacently back to wait for confirmation of his report and the blood money. Nothing ever occurred to him but that the elimination of Varris would be the simplest of routine operations.

Like hell!

* * *

Wing Alak eased his flitter close to the planet. It hung in cloudy splendor against a curtain of hard, needle-shape spatial stars, the Cluster sky. He sat gloomily listening to the click and mutter of instruments as Drogs checked surface conditions.

“Quite terrestroid,” said the Galmathian. His antennae lifted in puzzlement above the round, snouted face and the small black eyes. “Why did you bother testing? It’s listed in the Manual.”

“I have a nasty suspicious mind,” said Alak. “Also an unhappy one.” He was a thin, medium-tall human with the very white skin that often goes with flaming red hair. His Patrol uniform was as dandified as regulations allowed.

Drogs hitched three meters of green, eight-legged body across the cabin. His burly arms reached out to pick up the maps in three-fingered hands “Yes…here’s the Thunsba kingdom and the capital city…what’s it called? …Wainabog. I suppose our quarry is still there; Thymal swore he didn’t alarm him.” He sighed. “Now I have to spend an hour at the telescope and identify which place is what. And you can sit like my wife on an egg thinking beautiful thoughts!”

“The only beautiful concept I have right now is that all of a sudden the Prime Directive was repealed.”

“No chance of that, I’m afraid…not till a less bloodthirsty race than yours gets the leadership of the League.”

“Less? You mean more, don’t you? ‘Under no circumstances whatsoever may the Patrol or any unit thereof kill any intelligent being.’ If you do—” Alak made a rather horrible gesture. “Is that blood-thirsty?”

“Quite. Only a race with as gory a past as the Terrans would go to such extremes of reaction. And only as naturally ferocious a species could think of making such a commandment the Patrol’s great top secret…and bluffing with threats of planetwide slaughter, or using any kind of chicanery to achieve its ends. Now a Galmathian will run down a farstak in his native woods and jump on its back and make a nice lunch while it’s still running…but he wouldn’t be able to imagine cold-bloodedly sterilizing an entire world, so he doesn’t have to ban himself from honest killing even in self-defense.” Drogs’ caterpillar body hunched itself over the telescope.

“Get thee behind me, Satan…and don’t push!” Alak returned murkily to his thoughts. His brain was hypnotically stuffed with all the information three generations of traders had gathered about Thunsba. None of it looked hopeful.

The king was—well, if not an absolute monarch, pretty close to being one, simply because the law had set him over the commons. Like many warlike barbarians, the Thunsbans had a quasi-religious reverence for the letter of the law, if not always for its spirit. The Patrol had run head-on into two items of the code: (a) the king would not yield up a loyal guardsman to an enemy, but would fight to the death instead; (b) if the king fought, so would the whole male population, unmoved by threats to themselves or their mates and cubs. Death before dishonor! Their religion, which they seemed quite fervent about, promised a roisterous heaven to all who fell in a good cause, and suitably gruesome hell for oath-breakers.