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.
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