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"That'll give us a sanction over them," Gofredo observed. "Extra thugg-thugg if they're very good; shut it off on them if they act nasty. And find out what Lillian has in her voice that the rest of us don't have, and make a good loud recording of that, and stash it away along with the rest of the heavy-weapons ammunition.
"They're probably doing it to encourage themselves," Anna de Jong, the psychologist, said. "I'll bet they're really scared stiff." "I see how they're blowing it," Gofredo said. "The man who's walking behind it has a hand-bellows." He raised his voice. "Fix bayonets! These people don't know anything about rifles, but they know what spears are. They have some of their own." So they had.
The horn was braying in the snooper-screen speaker; somebody wondered what it was for. Gofredo laughed. "I thought, at first, that it was a war-horn. It isn't. It's a peace-horn," he said. "Public tranquilizer. The first day, they brought it out and blew it at us to make us peaceable." "Now I see why Sonny is rejected and persecuted," Anna was saying.
For a moment, the man in the breechclout seemed undecided whether he was more afraid to turn and run than advance. The woman, holding his hand, led him forward. They were both bruised, and both had minor cuts, and neither of them had any of the things that had been given to them that afternoon. "Rest of the gang beat them up and robbed them," Gofredo began angrily. "See what you did?"
The man confined his vocal expressions to his odd ghroogh-ghroogh-ing; the woman twittered joyfully. Gofredo put a hand on the woman's shoulder, pointed to the man and from him back to her. "Unh?" he inquired. The woman put a hand on the man's head, then brought it down to within a foot of the ground.
"Well, our neural structure and theirs won't be nearly alike," Fayon said. "I know, this analogy between telepathy and radio is full of holes, but it's good enough for this. Our wave length can't be picked up with their sets." "The deuce it can't," Gofredo contradicted. "I've been bothered about that from the beginning. These people act as though they got meaning from us.
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.
Sonny managed to reassure her, and insisted on going along, and he insisted on taking his ax with him. That meant doubling the guard, to make sure Sonny didn't lose his self-control when he saw his former persecutors within chopping distance. It went off much better than either Paul Meillard or Luis Gofredo expected.
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.
"Well, what are we going to do for water?" the Navy engineer asked. "Soundproof the pump house. You can do that, can't you?" "Sure. Mound it over with earth. We'll have that done in a few hours." That started Gofredo worrying. "This happens every time we colonize an inhabited planet. We give the natives something new. Then we find out it's bad for them, and we try to take it away from them.
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