Birthright

natives despised humanity so devoutly and so openly that he perforce had very little contact with them.

And, too, there was his collection.

Man had always had the urge to collect things, to surround himself with ordered series of possessions. Possibly it was an intellectualization of the primordial territorial instinct, possibly not. Selimund himself called it the “pack-rat urge,” although no member of that long-extinct species had ever carried the fetish quite so far as Man had done. There was something in his nature that reveled not only in pride of ownership, but in the painstaking formulation of lists of objects to be procured, lists of objects already procured, and the numerical, alphabetical, or other orderly arrangement of both possessions and lists. It wasn't exactly avarice, for most collectors spent enormous amounts of time and capital on the accumulation of objects—or, more often, sets and series of objects—that most other people considered either trivial or worthless.

Collecting, over the eons, had become highly specialized, just as had all other forms of endeavor. There was once an era when it was possible for a man to know, in his own lifetime, the sum total of all scientific knowledge. By the time the race had left its birthplace and begun to permeate the galaxy, no man could even know his own highly specialized field with any degree of completeness, and the concept of the true Renaissance Man was lost forever. So, too, did collections become more and more specialized. It was still possible to collect the entire works of a single author or painter, or representative stamps from every period of a planet's history—but to try to collectall the literary works of a single genre, orall the stamps from a certain point of galactic history, was an out-and-out impossibility. Undaunted, Man continued to yield happily to the joy of ownership, the striving toward completion of some fancy or other which had piqued his imagination or awakened his greed. From stamps and currency to masterpieces of art to any other objects, no matter how unlikely or intrinsically worthless, Man collected.

And very few men collected with the skill, passion, or success of the current governor of Mirzam X. Selimund, whose closest association with military life was the armed guard around his executive mansion, had for reasons probably not even known to himself decided early in life that there was nothing quite so fascinating as the study—and, hence, the collecting—of alien firearms. The production and possession of all such weapons had been strictly prohibited since the inception of the Commonwealth, but that merely made their acquisition all the more challenging. He had begun with handguns from the Canphor Twins and Lodin XI from the Democracy, and had gradually increased his possessions, moving both forward and backward from that historical point in time. He was acknowledged to be the greatest living authority on the weaponry of the late Democratic period, and more than once he had been called in to determine the authenticity of a piece from that era. His collection was on permanent display back on Deluros VIII, and had been willed to the Commonwealth upon his death. Its value had been placed at some 22 million credits, but, like all collectors, the evaluation of his collection was dealt with in terms of emotion rather than currency, for no piece would ever be offered for sale.

Somepieces, however, might well be offered in trade, and it was for this purpose that he had cleared his

desk early this afternoon, and was awaiting the arrival of Baros Durmin, a dealer in antique weaponry who had supposedly come upon an unbelievably valuable cache of ancient firearms. Durmin was finding it harder to replenish his stock, and so he had proposed a trade rather than an out-and-out cash transaction. Selimund didn't know exactly what Durmin had to offer, but the man usually delivered high-quality items, and so the governor was willing at least to take a look at his wares.