The Chamco brothers looked at each other and then at their game to see where they had gotten to in shooting down the live mayflies in the air box. But Terl's next words distracted them again.

"Today," said Terl, brushing Char's push for work aside, "I got a sighting report from a recon drone that recorded only thirty-five men in that valley near that peak." Terl waved his paw westward toward the towering mountain range silhouetted by the moon.

"So?" said Char.

"So I dug up the books out of curiosity. There used to be hundreds in that valley. And furthermore," continued Terl with his professorial ways coming back, "there used to be thousands and thousands of them on this planet."

"You can't believe all you read," said Char heavily. "On my last duty tour-it was Arcturus IV-"

"This book," said Terl, lifting it impressively, "was compiled by the culture and ethnology department of the Intergalactic Mining Company."

The larger Chamco brother batted his eyebones. "I didn't know we had one."

Char sniffed. "It was disbanded more than a century ago. Useless waste of money. Yapping around about ecological impacts and junk like that." He shifted his bulk around to Terl. "Is this some kind of scheme to explain a nonscheduled vacation? You're going to get your butt in a bind. I can see it, a pile of requisitions this high for breathe-gas tanks and scoutcraft. You won't get any of my workers."