“No. No, you mustn’t do that. You must stay and make this a proud place. It’s a proud place already—the native Indians and the Eskimos.”

“Now wait a minute. They’re nothing but savages. Dirty savages.”

“The Eskimos are a civilized and resourceful people. They do not fight wars, they don’t kill one another. They share.”

“Civilized!”

“Well, perhaps not in our way. In their own way. And how civilized are we, after all?”

Kennedy now laughed, disarmingly, his manner was open and friendly, his eyes were cautious, speculative. “That’s what I always say. Uh, by the way, for all our talking here, and it’s been darn interesting to hear you go on, I don’t know yet what you do. For a living, I mean. What’s your line of work? Back home, I mean.”

“I fish.” Then, at the look of blank disappointment amounting almost to shock in the other man’s face, he added, “I come of sea people. Like yourself. And chiefly I study about people and places, their background and their life today because of that background. And then I write about them.”

“Write! Books, you mean!”

“I’ve written one. Nobody much read it, the first one. I hope to write another someday.”

“Write about this, you mean? Alaska and so on? The gold rush?”

“That’s only a small part of it. An incident, really. Now, the Eskimos—–”

But this was too much. Huffily, and with haste, Kennedy began to backtrack. “Books and Eskimos, they’re not in my line. What you said about millions of salmon in the rivers—and coal—and metals—and so on—that’s different. That’s likely to be important. If you know, that is.” Craftily he tried to gauge this man whose inner quality eluded him. And was this man a babbling fool, with his books and his Vikings and his fish, or did he know? If he actually could prove this knowledge, then what was the basis of the future relation between the two?

Quite simply Storm said, “I know this region, though I never have seen it.”

Suspiciously, “How’s that?”

“There are records and early histories, there are scientific books in the libraries and archives of many cities—Copenhagen and St. Petersburg and New York and others.”

“You’ve seen those!”

“Yes.”

“When?”

“When I was sixteen—eighteen—twenty—all my life.”

“You must have had money to travel and jaunt around like that. Archives.” To this the man said nothing. Kennedy’s face hardened. “I want to know just where I stand,” he said. It was to become a business slogan with him, a safety catch used through future decades in all the preliminaries to his plans and schemings. “I want to know just where I stand. I take it you’ll want your share of anything comes out of this. If we go in business together, that is.” Hastily added.

“Business?” Thor Storm shook his head, a look of amusement lighting his face. “Business is not for me. I know nothing of business.”

“But you just said. Damn it, you said you knew where things could be found.”