Joel returned their salute with the full flagon still in his left hand, and then beat Carruthers to the punch. "All right, so we've hit it one more time! Bully for us--" He drained the flagon, reached for the bottle. Without Carruthers, there would have been an awkward silence. But after twenty-two years, Sam knew his man. "Ahh, you've shown us more than this, Skipper. I suppose it is a little better than our prelim reports indicate, if you want to get technical. The people want to co-operate. They're intelligent, healthy, and friendly and they realize fully what we're trying to do. They want to help us, and say we're welcome to all the mneurium-4 we want. 'Course there's only a few hundred pure megatons of it lying around, but, if you want to get technical--" "Go to hell," Joel said, and poured his flagon half full. He felt a little better, but it would take more than a half-bottle of Martian Colony Bond and Sam's wise answers to change things. "Go right straight to hell!" He sniffed at the Bond. "So the long arm of Superior Civilization has reached out its clanking claws again to make the Universe a Better Place to Live in, has it? God help 'em if they _believed_ all the hog-wash you fed 'em, Sam." The thin face sobered. "I spoke to them in good faith, Nicholas, and they did believe me. The fact is, they--" "All right, I get your point! Got my mind made up, so don't start confusing me with facts." He transfixed the three of them with a restless look; a look they had grown used to. It was a gaze that matched the rest of him; the unruly, untrimmed black hair, the short, thick beard which was unneeded on a chin and jaw as big and square as Joel's, the careless, unmilitary carriage of his thick shoulders and blocky body, the blood-shot metal-blue eyes themselves. But during the split-second the gaze was upon them, they knew pages were flipping in Joel's massive head. Pages of regulations, procedures, memorized down to the last foot-note. "Let's go in order with your reports," Joel snapped. Southard stepped forward. "Constellation Boötis, Arcturus, planet IV. Preliminary analysis of ore-samples indicate rich lodes of mneurium-4, relatively close to the surface, and in unprecedentedly great number. Purity is unbelievably high, with--" "All right, Southard, good report. Dobermann." "Minimum of linguistic difficulty, coupled with a surprisingly high aptitude on the natives' part for language learning. In the seventeen days I had with them, I'm almost certain those with whom I worked learned at least half as much English as I did of their tongue," the German said. He added, simply, as though the seventeen days of exhausting gesticulating, diagramming, systematizing, learning, recording, had never existed, "There will be no language difficulty, sir." "Good. Now you, Sam, and no schmaltz!" "Healthy people, no cancer, no TB, no coronary troubles--" "The mneurium-4, I know. Go on."