A polite cough from behind reminded him that Captain Tahn was still in the cabin. The Kali coughed to express anything from rage to sheer joy, and this one probably meant that Ward's hearing the last verse was an accident. Ward swung around and glanced at him, but the Kali deliberately kept his slitted eyes on the chart before him. Ward was reminded again of the Kali likeness to the long vanished American Indian: black, straight hair; narrowed, snapping black eyes; high, angular cheek bones. But not much beyond that. If you took a fine featured Sioux of long ago ... shortened him about a foot, thinned him down--bones and all, raised his shoulders to a perpetual shrug, stretched his arms so that they still reached his hips, then starved him for a month ... you might be close. But if you took a picture of him then, and looked at it slightly sideways, you would almost have it. An extremely thin, short, shrugging strip of muscled rawhide. Tahn coughed again; the your-attention-please cough. He swung a chart around for Ward to see. It was a rough drawing of Anda-Ke, the largest of the Grimnal Group, and more or less the home island. It looked somewhat like a startled elephant: mouth open, trunk arced out at an angle. The mouth was Anda Bay, and was guarded by Anda Passage where the lower lip came within two miles of the upper. The trunk was Pelo Head, and was broken about halfway down by Pelo Break. The area between the drooping trunk and the neck was the Grimnal Sea. It was into this that the Kali fleet was charging like a peanut sailing for the mouth. Tahn tapped a pencil-like finger at the rearmost reach of Anda Bay. * * * * * "There," he said, in the Kali-Confederation mixture they found to be the shortest distance between two cultures. "Anchored there like marks on a sail. Feeling so safe in their home. Thinking we do not dare come after them. Grimnal rafts just waiting to go to the bottom." "And the gliders?" Ward asked. "Are they returned? We have no information but the tales of two natives." Tahn glanced at a water trickling, time-measuring device hanging from the overhead. "Soon the gliders return, but...." He shrugged, somehow. "And those are not rafts," Ward went on. "The natives said three, two and single gun rows. That means first and second-liners, frigates and probably corvettes. And they said 'many,' which means anywhere from fifty to two hundred." Tahn coughed his agreement. "But with Grimnal stupidity," he said, "they can do no more than run around in terror as we shell the city and fire their ships. We have this won." Ward looked down at his bands, caught a deep breath, and continued. "I have said before. We are not fighting just the Grimnal. We are fighting God Helpers too. Men like myself have come to help the Grimnal." He caught Tahn's flickering glance and added quickly, "Men who are probably better fighters than I am."