The Earthman called the town Hirlaj too, because the spaceport was there.  It was a new town, only a few months old, but the gleaming alloys of the buildings were already coated with dirt and pitted by the frequent dust storms that swept through.  Garbage littered the alleys; its odor was strange but still foul in the alien atmosphere.  The small, darting creatures were here too, foraging in the alleys and the outskirts of the town, where the streets ended in garbage heaps and new cemeteries or faded into the trackless flat where the spacers touched down.

The Earthmen filled the streets ... drinking, fighting, laughing and cursing, arguing over money or power or, sometimes, women.  The women here were hard and self-sufficient, following the path of Terran expansion in the stars and taking what they felt was due them as women or what they could get as men.  Supply houses did a thriving business, their prices high between shipments on the spacers from the inner worlds; bars and gambling houses stayed open all night; rooming houses and restaurants and laundries displayed crude handlettered signs along the streets.

Rynason pushed his way through a jostling crowd outside the door of a bar.  He was supposed to meet the head of his Survey team here—­Rice Manning, who had been pushing the survey as hard as he could since the day they’d set foot on Hirlaj.  Manning was hard and ambitious—­a leader of men, Rynason thought sardonically as he surveyed the tables in the dim interior.  The floor of the bar was a dirty plastic-metal alloy, already scuffed and in places bloodstained.  The tables were of the cheap, light metals so common on the spacer-supplied worlds of the Edge, and they wobbled.

The low-ceilinged room was crowded with men.  Rynason didn’t know many of them by name, but he recognized a lot of the faces.  The men of the Edge, though they lacked money, education, often brains and usually ethics, at least had the quality of distinctiveness:  they didn’t fit the half-dozen convenient molds which the highly developed culture of the inner worlds fitted over the more civilized citizens of the Terran Federation.  These men were too self-interested to follow the group-thoughts which controlled the centers of empire, and the seams and wrinkles of their faces stamped a rough kind of individuality even more visually upon them.

Of them all, the man who was instantly recognizable in any crowd like this was Rene Malhomme; Rynason immediately saw the man in one corner of the room.  He stood six and a half feet tall, heavily muscled and a bit wild-eyed; his greying hair fell in disorder over his dirty forehead and sprayed out over his ears.  He was surrounded by laughing and shouting men; Rynason couldn’t tell from this distance whether he was engaged in one of his usual heated arguments on religion or in his other avocation of recounting stories of the women he had “converted”.  He waved a black-lettered sign saying repent! over his head—­but then, he always did.