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Luis Gofredo saw to it that the camp itself would be visible-lighted, and beyond the lights he set up more photoelectric robot sentries and put a couple of snoopers to circling on contragravity, with infra-red lights and receptors. He also insisted that all his own men and all Dave Questell's Navy construction engineers keep their weapons ready to hand.
"Punitive action's unadvisable, but we will show our attitude by taking them in. You tell them, Luis; these people seem to like your voice." Gofredo put a hand on each of their shoulders. "You ... stay ... with us." He pointed around the camp. "You ... stay ... this ... place." Their faces broke into that funny just-before-tears expression that meant happiness with them.
As the jeep circled down to housetop level, the two contending faction-clumps broke apart; their component individuals moved into the center of the plaza and squatted, staring up, letting the delicious waves of sound caress them. "Do we have to send a detail in a jeep to do that twice a day?" Gofredo asked.
The odd thing was that peace was being restored, or was restoring itself, as the uproar had begun outwardly from the center of the plaza to the periphery of the crowd. The same thing had happened when Gofredo had ordered the submachine gun fired, and, now that he recalled, when he had dealt with the line-crasher. "Suppose a few of them, in the middle, are agreed," Anna said.
Major Gofredo, barely over the minimum Service height requirement; his name was Old Terran Spanish, but his ancestry must have been Polynesian, Amerind and Mongolian. Karl Dorver, the sociographer, six feet six, with red hair. Bennet Fayon, the biologist and physiologist, plump, pink-faced and balding. Willi Schallenmacher, with a bushy black beard....
Then he said, "You," to Luis Gofredo. It went around the contact team; when it came to him, he returned it to point of origin. "I don't think they get it at all," he added in a whisper. "They ought to," Lillian said. "Every language has a word for self and a word for person-addressed." "Well, look at them," Karl Dorver invited.
Gofredo called to the Marines to stand fast. Then they were advancing to meet the natives, and when they were twenty feet apart, both groups halted. The horn stopped blowing. The one in the yellow robe lifted his staff and said something that sounded like, "Tweedle-eedle-oodly-eenk." The horn, he saw, was made of strips of leather, wound spirally and coated with some kind of varnish.
Anna de Jong looked at him wide-eyed. He finished his cocktail and poured another. In the snooper screen, what looked like an indignation meeting was making uproar in the village plaza. Gofredo cut the volume of the speaker even lower. "That would explain a lot of things," Meillard said slowly. "How hard it was for them to realize that we didn't understand when they talked to us.
Major Luis Gofredo, the Marine officer, spoke without lowering his binoculars: "They have a tubular thing about twelve feet long; six of them are carrying it on poles, three to a side, and a couple more are walking behind it. Mark, do you think it could be a cannon?"
Luis Gofredo was just as distrustful of them as they were of the Terrans; he kept the camp lighted, a strong guard on the alert, and the area of darkness beyond infra red lighted and covered by photoelectric sentries on the ground and snoopers in the air. Like Paul Meillard, Luis Gofredo was a worrier and a pessimist.
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