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Updated: June 17, 2025
They gave each of them a pair of blankets and a pneumatic mattress, which delighted them, although the cots puzzled them at first. "What do you think about feeding them, Bennet?" Meillard asked, when the two Svants had gone to bed and they were back in the headquarters hut. "You said the food on this planet is safe for Terrans." "So I did, and it is, but the rule's not reversible.
A voice at the telecast station furnished it; he punched it out. "Von Schlichten, right overhead. That you, Major Falkenberg? Nice going, major; how are your casualties?" "Not too bad. Twenty or thirty Kragans and loyal Skilkans, and eight Terrans killed; about as many wounded." "Pretty good, considering what you're running into. Get many of your Kragans mounted on those hipposaurs?"
The Terrans worked in partial shade below a cliff overhang, not only for the protection against the sun's rays, but also as a precaution against any roving Throg air patrol. Under Thorvald's direction the curious shell dragged from the sea if it were a shell, and the texture as well as the general shape suggested that was equipped with a framework to act as a stabilizing outrigger.
Even the vegetation which had showed on shore had vanished. There was an atmosphere of stark abandonment and death which struck the Terrans forcibly. Those pylons, Ross studied them. Something familiar in their construction teased his memory. That refuel planet where the derelict ship had set down twice, on the voyage out and on their return.
Ashe still looked the same, but ... Ross's sense of loss was hurt and anger mingled. What had they done to Gordon, those three? Bewitched? Tales Terrans had accepted as purest fantasy for centuries came into his mind. Could it be that his own world once had its Foanna? Ross scowled. You couldn't refute their "magic," call it by what scientific name you wished hypnotism ... telaporting.
The Terrans had recourse at intervals to their own pungent smelling bottles, merely to clear their heads of the drugging fumes. Luckily, Dane thought as the feast proceeded, that smoke from the braziers went straight up. Had they been in a roofed space they might have been overcome. As it was were they entirely conscious of all that was going on around them?
In the center, a number of seats the drum-shaped cushions the natives had adopted in place of the seats carved from sections of tree trunk that they had been using when the Terrans had come to Kwannon were arranged in a semicircle, one in the middle slightly in advance of the others.
No Salarik appeared for trade in the morning surprising the Terrans. Instead a second delegation, this time of older men and a storm priest, visited the spacer with an invitation to attend Paft's funeral feast, a rite which would be followed by the formal elevation of Groft to his father's position, now that he had revenged that parent.
There was some argument among the aliens, a dispute of sorts over which of those doors was to be opened first, and the Terrans drew a little apart, unable to follow the twittering words and lightning-swift gestures.
And after him followed the other natives, each with a lighted torch in hand the torch they hunkered down to plant firmly in some crevice of the rock before taking a stand beside that beacon. The Terrans, less surefooted in the space boots, picked their way along the same path, wet with spray, wrinkling their noses against the lingering puffs of the stench from the water.
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