He had lost pseudomen slaves in this very null and he knew he would probably lose more. Despite the vigilance of the surrogates, they kept slipping across the river and disappearing into that swirling nothingness. And now, with that prominence so close-- He had no guards he could trust to go after the fellows, either. Such herd guards as he had would decide to desert their protector and take up the idle life which their fellow pseudomen had adopted. A few of them had gone out and done just that. Their memories of the protection and privileges granted them were short and undependable. He sighed. "Ungrateful beasts!" Some Master Protectors had little trouble along that line. Others had managed to hire the services of halfmen--weak psionics, too weak to govern and yet strong and able enough to be more than mere pseudomen. These halfmen made superb, loyal guards and overseers--for some--but none had remained at Kira Barra. They had come, to be sure, but they had stayed on for a time, then drifted away. And, he thought angrily, it was illegal to restrain these halfmen in any way. Some soft-headed fool had granted their kind the rights of Commonwealth citizenship. Halfmen had even managed to take service with the fleet during the war with the Fifth Planet. Some of them had even managed somehow to be of small value--and now many of them held the status of veterans of that victorious war--a status he, one of the great landholders, was denied. No, he told himself, until such time as the nulls were solved and eliminated, such pseudomen as managed to cross the northeastern river were safe enough in their unknown land. And, he thought sourly, the scholars had made no progress in their studies of the nulls. Probably they were concerning themselves with studies more likely to give them preferment or more immediate personal gain. Of course, the wasteland wasn't entirely unknown, not to him, at least. He had viewed the area personally. There were hilltops on the Estates from which ordinary eyesight would penetrate far into the dead area, even though the more powerful and accurate parasight was stopped at its borders. Yes, he had seen the affected area. He had noted that much of it had regained a measure of fertility. There was life now--some of it his own meat lizards who had wandered across the river and out of his control. And he had even seen some of the escaped pseudomen slinking through the scrub growth and making their crudely primitive camps. "Savages!" he told himself. "Mere animals. And one can't do a thing about them, so long as they let that dead area persist." Eventually, the scholars had reported, the dead areas would diminish and fade from existence. He smiled bitterly. Here was a nice evasion--a neat excuse for avoiding study and possible, dangerous research. So long as those nulls remained, they would be sources of constant loss of the responsible Master Protectors, and would thus threaten the very foundations of the Commonwealth.