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Meillard, Dorver, Gofredo and a few others got out of the other vehicle, and unloaded presents. Gofredo did all the talking. The Svants couldn't understand him, but they liked it. They also liked the presents, which included a dozen empty half-gallon rum demijohns, tarpaulins, and a lot of assorted knickknacks. The pipeline went through. He and Sonny got the forge set up. There was no fuel for it.
Luis Gofredo was coming up on the double, followed by three of his riflemen. "What happened, Mark? Trouble?" "All over now." He told Gofredo what had happened. Dorver was still objecting: "... Social precedence; the Svant may have been right, according to local customs." "Local customs be damned!" Gofredo became angry.
Dorver began. "According to their own customs, they had no right to be ahead of those others, and now you've gotten them punished for it." "I'd have done more to that fellow then Mark did, if I'd been there when it happened." The Marine officer turned to Meillard. "Look, this is your show, Paul; how you run it is your job.
Dorver thought the six members of the delegation would be persons of special consequence, and should have something extra. That was probably so. Dorver was as quick to pick up clues to an alien social order as he was, himself, to deduce a culture pattern from a few artifacts. He and Lillian went back to the landing craft to collect the presents.
Karl Dorver was even more convinced than ever of his telepathic hypothesis, and he had completely converted Anna de Jong to it. "Look at that." He pointed at the snooper screen, which gave a view of the plaza from directly above. "They're reaching an agreement already." So they seemed to be, though upon what was less apparent. The horn had stopped, and the noise was diminishing.
"So it is," Dorver, who had been mourning his departed telepathy theory, said brightly. "And look how it explains their society. Peaceful, everybody in quick agreement " He looked at the screen and gulped. The Lord Mayor and his party had formed one clump, and the opposition was grouped at the other side of the plaza; they were screaming in unison at each other.
If they use adobe, or sun-dried brick, houses would start to crumble in a few years, and they would be pulled down and the rubble shoved aside to make room for a new house. The village has been rising on its own ruins, probably shifting back and forth from one end of that mound to the other." "If that's it, they've been there a long time," Karl Dorver said. "And how far have they advanced?"
Bennet Fayon was still insisting that the Svants had a perfectly comprehensible language to other Svants. Anna de Jong had started to veer a little away from the Dorver Hypothesis.
After dinner, he and Karl and Paul went into a huddle on what sort of gifts to give the natives, and the advisability of trading with them, and for what. Nothing too far in advance of their present culture level. Wheels; they could be made in the fabricating shop aboard the ship. "You know, it's odd," Karl Dorver said.
"Mark, you shouldn't have done that," Dorver was expostulating. "We don't know...." The Svant sat up, shaking his head groggily. Then he realized what had been done to him. With a snarl of rage, he was on his feet, his knife in his hand. It was a Terran bowie knife. Without conscious volition, Howell's pistol was out and he was thumbing the safety off.
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