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Updated: June 28, 2025
The snooper over the village reported excitement in the plaza. Bennet Fayon had taken an airjeep to the other camp immediately after lunch. He was back by 1500, accompanied by Loughran. They carried a cloth-wrapped package into Fayon's dissecting-room. At cocktail time, Paul Meillard had to go and get them. "Sorry," Fayon said, joining the group. "Didn't notice how late it was getting.
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.
"It's an addiction," he declared. "Once they hear it, they have no will to resist; they just squat and listen. I don't know what it's doing to them, but I'm scared of it." "I know one thing it's doing," Meillard said. "It's keeping them from their work in the fields. For all we know, it may cause them to lose a crop they need badly for subsistence."
The staff bearer touched himself on the brow. "Fwoonk," he said. Then he pointed to Meillard. "Hoonkle," he said. "They got it!" Lillian was hugging herself joyfully. "I knew they ought to!" Meillard indicated himself and said, "Fwoonk." That wasn't right. The village elder immediately corrected him. The word, it seemed, was, "Fwoonk."
She indicated the neckcloths, and the sheath knife and the other things, and snatched them away too. She made beating motions, and touched her bruises and the man's. All the time, she was talking excitedly, in a high, shrill voice. The man made the same ghroogh-ghroogh noises that he had that afternoon. "No; we can't take any punitive action. Not now," Meillard said.
Several of the locals, including the one with the staff, joined with them; this quick co-operation delighted Meillard. When they had the lorry down and were all out of it, the dignitary with the staff, his scarlet tablecloth over his yellow robe, began an oration, apparently with every confidence that he was being understood.
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.
They were red-brown in color, completely hairless; they had long necks, almost chinless lower jaws, and fleshy, beaklike noses that gave them an avian appearance which was heightened by red crests, like roosters' combs, on the tops of their heads. "Well, aren't they something to see?" Lillian Ransby, the linguist asked. "I wonder how we look to them," Paul Meillard said.
"Nobody's going to hurt you. This is nothing but the great noise-magic of the Terrans...." "Get the presents unloaded," Meillard was saying. "Make a big show of it. The table first." The horn, which had started, stopped blowing. As they were getting off the long table and piling it with trade goods, another lorry came in, disgorging twenty Marine riflemen.
A mob of Svants, seeing its relentless progress toward a field of something like turnips, gathered in front of it, twittering and brandishing implements of agriculture, many of them Terran-made. Paul Meillard was ready for this. Two lorries went out; one loaded with Marines, who jumped off with their rifles ready. By this time, all the Svants knew what rifles would do beside make a noise.
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