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Mil. And those innocent creatures roam from one place to another like pleasant dreamers.”
    “Haven’t the Mil bothered them?”
    “Evidently not. They don’t have even an elementary sense of caution or suspicion. They would have fled from our expeditionary ships if they had encountered the Mil. Most of our fleet has been recruited from or designed after Mil ships.”
    “Why are the Tanes trouble then? Can’t you just colonize or mine or . . .”
    Harlan leaned forward, balancing his elbows on knees and slapping one palm into the other to emphasize a statement. Or, which was disconcerting, he would point his tipless finger at me.
    “I don’t know about your world, but here on Lothar we’re crowded. So crowded that every inch of land is either cultivated or catacombed with mines, cities and factories. We run to big families, sort of law of supply and demand. But the Mil don’t harvest us anymore, so every new child crowds his family that much more. There aren’t enough jobs to go around nowadays nor is there enough food as there used to be. We don’t need so many men in active Patrol, but yet we have to train every young man against the day we’re big enough and strong enough to follow the Mil back to their own planet and wipe them off its face.”
    “So,” I interrupted, “everyone who isn’t well off wants a share of one of the Tane planets and to hell with the Tanes.”
    He nodded agreement. “Only it isn’t just those that aren’t well situated. It’s the big landowners, the big industrialists and the big scientists who want priority and mean to get it. And they’ve got all kinds of reasons.”
    “I’ll bet,” and I refrained from giving him a brief account of the American Indian. “And I imagine no one cares what happens to the Tane.”
    My perspicacity pleased him.
    “Council had accepted a plan to allow colonization first for farmers, because our crying need is food. But farmers are conservative and those younger sons, willing to go, those without patrons in Council, are being intimidated or beaten up unless they belong to a certain guild. And the people who lead that guild will buy up the land once the farmers settle on it and that will be the end of individual agricultural expansion. Or, take the small mining outfits. Only a few have dared to apply for permission to work the Tanes. Why? They’ve found their homes ruined, their credit is suddenly destroyed, or their equipment is wrecked just before takeoff.”
    “But surely you’re trying to find out who’s behind it?”
    “It is one group,” Harlan said wearily. “I’d found that much out before this happened to me. There is one man, or a few men, who were guiding the attacks on my colonists. But what baffles me is: why? I mean, for what reason. You see, Lothar has always had just one purpose since we first shook off the yoke of superstition and managed to repel the Mil from landing on our planet. We mean to destroy the Mil completely. Our whole psychology, our whole history, has been directed toward that aim.”
    “Perhaps after . . . how long did you say . . . two thousand years, this purpose is wearing a little thin,” I suggested with the Crusades in mind.
    “It couldn’t,” he said without qualification. “Not when the Mil are always so close.” He frowned. “You see, actually it’s only in the last one hundred and fifty years that we’ve kept them entirely away from our planet. And we couldn’t have done that without Ertoi and Glan.”
    “Who?”
    “Inhabitants of another nearby star. You can see them from here,” he said blandly. He pointed out the window to a pulsating red blink that was the primary of the system.
    “Ertoi and Glan take care of that entire section of space. We’ve been able to push our Perimeter Patrol four light-years beyond our own system. Since then, we have adequate protection against a concerted attack. The first time,” he said with justifiable pride, “we lost all but two