“No, You’ve all made me responsible for landing operations; I’m not taking down a landing party to have them massacred because my hands are tied by instructions not to use firearms. I’ve seen that happen before. Let’s vote on the motion as presented and seconded.”

  It passed. Zahanov wanted to know what Fitzurse wanted done first.

  “We know that this is, roughly, a Terra-type planet,” Fitzurse said. “We do not know, however, that it will sup-port Terran life. Yggdrasil is inhabited, and the Terran colonists there still have to eat hydroponic vegetables and carniculture meat. For all we know, the animal life here may be silicone instead of carbon-hydrogen. The water may be deuterium-oxygen instead of hydrogen-oxygen. Or there may be fatal allergens. And Charley can tell you about some of the micro-organism possibilities.

  “The first thing will be to make small-party landings, on the apparently uninhabited continents—and keep the ad-verb firmly in mind; you can’t see everything through a telescope, and the woods may be full of characters who throw spears first and yell halt afterward. Then, after we have satisfied ourselves about the chemistry, biology and so forth, we will make a landing in force to contact the inhabitants. This will not

  be anywhere near that big city at the forks of the river. We will land in some isolated district where news will not be likely to leak out too quickly, and we will try to ingratiate ourselves with the people there, learn the language, and find out all we can about the customs, religion, level of technology, social organization, and, above all, the power situation. I don’t mean your kind, Lourenço,” he told the nuclear engineer. “I mean who rules whom and how. You agree, Roger? The actual making of contact will be your job.”

  He nodded. “We certainly don’t want to go blundering into some royal court and wading up to our necks into some high level faction-fight without knowing what it’s all about. Not in the middle of a big city. We don’t have enough machine gun ammunition for that.”

  “Here’s a place I’d had in mind.” Fitzurse put on one of the projection screens. “This is three hundred power telephoto at two hundred miles.”

  It was a wide cultivated valley, hemmed in by mountains on three sides; two small rivers flowed in at one end from opposite directions to form a larger stream. There was a town, and something like a castle on the point of a ridge overlooking it. The distance was still too great for details, but it looked feudal—lord’s castle, market-town, peasant villages, farms; self-contained and apart from everything else. It reminded him of pictures he had seen of Switzer-land and the Tyrol before the Atomic Wars.

  “I think so, Fitz,” he said. “It looks like just the place for us to stay for a while, till we’re ready to move in on the big city. Which way is north, in the picture?”

  “At the top. It’s on the west of the big river valley.” He nodded. There was a road going north, beyond the juncture of the two smaller streams; it crossed the mountains at a pass guarded by another castle. He wondered if that were held by the lord of what he was beginning to think of as “our” valley. If not, mightn’t it be held by an enemy? Better not mention that possibility in Luther Smith’s hearing. It was another road, rutted and dusty, that entered “our” valley from the east; five hundred yards up the slope, it emerged from the woods into a broad meadow. The grass beside it grew almost waist high, topped with silvery plumes that rippled ceaselessly in the wind. Real wind; not fan-stirred ship air recycled thousands of times. And there was a blue sky above, peopled with rolypoly white clouds, and a strange fragrance everywhere. It was all wonderful, after four years of the sealed steel world of the Stellex,

  and six airless, waterless, poisonous and otherwise abominable planets. But a day and a half here, and nothing…

  He turned back to the camp—the seventy foot oval landing-craft, with the marquee-tent in front of it and the lorries and aircars on either side—and as he did, a couple of the others shouted his name. They had all left what they had been doing and were crowding in front of the screen tuned to the pickup on the airjeep in which Dave Mac-Donald and Arthur Muramoto were on watch.

  “They have something,” Reginald Fitzurse told him as he hurried over. “Mounted party—Dave calls it cavalry—about twenty, coming up the road on the other side. He has the pickup at top magnification and centered on a stretch of clear road.”

  Karl Zahanov was talking into the screen to the ship, telling Adriaan de Ruyter. Luther Smith was fussing with the photo reproducer on the jeep screen. Then Arthur Muramoto, who must have been using the binoculars, gave a yell from the screen-speaker.

  “I can see their dust; be along in a couple of minutes. Get set for them.”

  Then, briefly, the cavalcade appeared and passed. The mounts were ungainly things, with bovine heads and short, stumpy legs; he was surprised at their speed until he remembered having seen dachshunds run. These things had the same sort of gait, their short legs blurring till they almost looked like wheels. One of the riders wore a scarlet cloak and a wide plumed hat. The others were in armor, either back-and-breast cuirasses or mail hauberks or plated brigandines, and they wore conical helmets and red-and-blue shoulder capes, and all carried long straight swords. A few had lances; the rest were armed with what looked like muskets.

  Then they were out of sight, and the view shifted to an-other stretch of open road, and Arthur Muramoto’s voice, from the screen-speaker, estimated ten minutes till they reached it. Luther Smith began getting photoprints out of the slot at the bottom of the screen and passing them to the others. Nancy Patterson took one.

  “Why, they’re human!”

  If they weren’t, they’d pass for it. Humanoid form, of course, was to be expected in any sapient race, with variations—the hairy, dog-faced Thorans, the faunlike Lokians, the grotesque but upright and biped natives of Yggdrasil. In this case, the variation wasn’t noticeable, but Charley Clifford was a stickler.

  “Humanoid,” he corrected. “Homoform, approaching tenth degree. But there’ll be all kinds of internal differences, of course.”

  “You can call them cavalry if you want to, Dave; I’ll go along with it,” Fitzurse said. “They’re better than anything I ever saw.”

  All the mounted warriors he had ever seen had been Eurasian barbarians of North Terra, the human debris of the Atomic Wars, against whom he had campaigned to protect the reclamation projects. He began wondering, audibly, what sort of guns they had, and if there weren’t pistol-holsters on the saddles.

  “All right, watch for them!” Muramoto called, and Lu-ther Smith went back to the screen and took the button-cord for the photoprinter.

  They had a better view, this time. Details were clearer, and the riders on the short-legged, broad-tailed animals looked even more human. They were light-skinned and fair; most of them had blond or reddish beards. Almagro became excited.

  “The one in the red cloak; that’s a woman!”

  That could be imagination; Almagro’s ran in that direction. The prints weren’t positive evidence either way; the cloak and the wide-brimmed hat hid too much. Fitzurse was sure the guns were muzzleloaders, probably flintlocks.

  “All right, we’ll give them a fire-power demonstration,” he said. “You all know the drill. Roger, you’d better take over from here.”

  Lourenço Narvaes and Nancy Patterson went to the other airjeep, Nancy at the controls and Lourenço at the twin 15-mm machine guns. Everybody who wasn’t wearing a pistol put one on and everybody got a rifle except Charley Clifford, who had a portable machine gun. They formed a line in front of the camp, with the jeep on the right and Charley on the left. He and Fitzurse took their position slightly front and center. Katherine Gower, at the screen, was giving instructions to the jeep at the top of the mountain.

  Then the riders came out into the meadow, bunching at first and then forming a line of their own, with the red cloak in the middle. Fitzurse raised the binoculars slung around his neck.

  “Gad, it is a woman,” he said. “Beauty, too.” He started to lift the strap over his head, then let go of it and unslung his rifle. “Here they come,” he said.

  The line stirred; the red-and-blue-pennoned lances came down; the musketeers rested the forestocks of their weapons on their bridle-arms. Then the woman in the red cloak flung up her right hand, held it raised for a moment, and then swung it down and forward. The line advanced, first at a walk and then at a slow slope. Half way to the camp, they were at full speed, and the woman was lifting a long pistol from her saddle-bow. He brought his rifle to his shoulder, aiming fifty feet over the heads of the charging cavalry.

  “Ready!” He waited till they were a scant hundred yards away. “Three rounds; fire!”

  The rifle-butt punched his shoulder, and then punched it twice again. Other rifles banged, and the light machine gun chattered, stopped, and chattered again. Then the woman in the cloak flung up her right hand, the gold mountings of her pistol glinting, and pulled her mount back onto its flat beaver-like tail. The whole line piled up backward as the airjeep rose slightly, whizzed past in front of them, and then turned. Its 15-mm’s chugged and the bullets cut a swath through the grass. Then, before the woman and her troop could turn to flee, the other jeep, now directly behind them at a couple of hundred feet, fired a warning burst.

  Angrily, the woman pushed her pistol back into its holster, said something to a man with a drawn sword beside her, and sat staring at them defiantly.

  He handed his rifle to Fitzurse, who slung it, and went forward, his right hand raised in what was a peace-sign on Terra, Thor and Loki and ought to be one here. She was

  a beauty; hardly more than a girl, he guessed. He stopped twenty feet from her, lowered his hand, and bowed. She said something in a sharp, demanding voice. He smiled at her and asked her if she’d ever thought of going into telemovies. She spoke again—different intonation, probably different language. He shook his head and replied from the Iliad

  in the original. She said something exasperated and quite possibly unladylike.

  “Let’s stop this foolishness,” he said. Then he pointed to her and raised one finger. He pointed to the men on either side of her and raised three fingers. Then he dismounted from an imaginary—whatever they were—and pointed back to the striped canopy in front of the landing-craft, and pantomimed sitting down, pouring from a bottle, and drinking healths, wondering if that was one of their customs. Apparently it was; the girl smiled, jerked her chin toward her right shoulder in what looked like a nod, and spoke to the man beside her.

  He and one or two others began raising objections. That convinced her that it was a good idea; kicking her feet out of the stirrups, she sprang to the ground, tossing her reins to one of the troopers, and started to unbuckle a belt on which she carried an unfemininely heavy and serviceable dagger.

  “No! No!” He stopped her with a gesture and signed that she should keep the weapon, touching the butt of the 10-mm Colt-Argentine automatic on his own belt. She smiled and nodded again. That made sense; an armed host should not expect his guests to disarm.

  The man to whom she had first spoken—big and brawny, with a graying yellow beard and a gilded breast-plate whose nicks and bullet-splashes showed that it wasn’t ornamental—dismounted and beckoned to two musketeers, who slung their weapons and got to the ground. There was a general dismounting along the line as the girl and her three companions went over to the marquee.

  They sat down at a trestle-table which was provided with screens and recorders and writing and sketching equipment and a blackboard. Wine, or at least fermented apple-juice, was poured. A five gallon jug of the hydroponic hard cider, to which a half-gallon of pure medical alcohol had been added, was sent out to the troopers. They’d settled the point that the biochemistry of this planet was entirely Terra-type, and any people who had gotten as far as castles, riding animals and firearms must surely have discovered fermentation somewhere along the way.

  It appeared that they had. They all drank with obvious pleasure, surprised at the coolness of the drink. Evidently they hadn’t gotten as far as refrigeration. Then, after everybody had drunk everybody else’s health, they settled down to language-learning.

  He touched himself on the breast and said, “Me.” He tapped Fitzurse on the chest and said, “You,” speaking to him directly. Fitzurse repeated it to Charley Clifford, who passed it on to Margaret Hale, who returned it to point of origin. He turned to the girl, touched himself again, and said:

  “Me Roger Barron. You?”

  “Me Rylla-dad-Hostigos,” she said. “Rylla-dad-Hostigos tsan vovaro.

  Roger Barron domvovaron.”

  That was picking it up smartly enough. There were introductions. The man with the graying beard and the battlemarred cuirass was Chartiphon. He didn’t bother trying to remember the names of the other two; the audiovisual camera had them. They went on from there. Some of it involved moving pictures; they startled the newcomers only at first. After all, if people had things that went up off the ground and guns that kept on shooting, why shouldn’t they have pictures that moved and talked like live? More was done on the blackboard or on sketch-pads, or acted out. The girl thought it was fun. When she wasn’t trying to keep an imperious expression on her face, she was lovely. She had a tilty little nose and a golden dusting of freckles across it.

  Chartiphon and one of the musketeers tagged along faithfully. The third man dropped out, and he and Fitzurse began examining each other’s weapons. Finally they strolled off to have a shooting-match between a 7-mm Sterberg and one of the big flintlocks.

  “Place you come; where?” the girl was finally able to ask.

  “Place name Terra; much far,” he told her. “No word for say.”

  She gave one of her people’s jerky nods. “Me place Hostigos.” She pointed to the west and said something complicated.

  “Place far?”

  She grimaced and made a spread-fingered clawing gesture in front of her face. That was just what she had been trying to tell him. Then she caught up one of the seven-color pens she had learned to use and bent over a sketch-pad. First, a lance, with a red-and-blue pennon; she gave him the word for that. Then numbers. Their numeration was something like the Roman system—dashes for digits from one to four, a half-circle for five, and a circle for ten. Circle with stroke across it, fifty; circle with cross, a hundred. A lance was the unit of measurement, about ten feet, and a hundred lances were a great-lance; the prefix was hos-.

  It figured that she was about forty miles from home. One of the first blessings of Terran culture to be showered on these people would be Arabic numeration, he decided. He took her to the other trestle-table, where the map Lourenço and Luther and Margaret Hale had been making from air photos was thumbtacked out, hoping that she knew what a map was. She did. As soon as she saw it, she clapped her hands delightedly and began babbling in excitement. After she became coherent, she began pointing things out, naming them.

  The whole of “our” valley was Hostigos. So was the town beside the river; the castle on the ridge overlooking it was Tarr-Hostigos. It was her home. She went back to the other table and sat down with a pen, and this time she drew two little pictures, unmistakeably if indelicately masculine and feminine. Evidently prudery wasn’t one of the local shortcomings. She connected them with a horizontal line, dropped a vertical line from the female symbol, and drew another symbol like it.

  “Me, Rylla,” she said. Then she pointed to the male symbol above. “Ptosphes.” He was something-or-other—prince, duke, lord—of Hostigos. She drew a small stylized flame around the mother-symbol and made an equally stylized sound of lamentation. These people cre-mated their dead; her father, Prince Ptosphes of Hostigos, was a widower.

  And they’d hoped to catch some wandering peddler or something of the sort for their first contact!

  He touched the mark that represented the other castle, at the mountain-pass to the north.

  “This Hostigos?”

  “No! Nostor!” she replied. “Belong Prince Gormoth.”

  She used another word, and to explain it grimaced ferociously and drew her dagger in a threatening manner. The word would be enemy. He and Reginald Fitzurse ex-changed glances.

  “You go Tarr-Hostigos now?” he asked.

  “We go Tarr-Hostigos, make talk Prince Ptosphes.”

  “You, me, me people, you people, all go Tarr-Hostigos.” He pointed to the contragravity vehicles.

  “All go up, high; go Tarr-Hostigos fast.”

  Her eyes widened in wonder. “Me? Go up? High?” She pointed to the sky, and then bent, looking down. “See everything, like map?” Then she turned to her bearded henchman Chartiphon and began babbling excitedly again.

  As soon as Chartiphon understood what she was saying, he began protesting. Even the two musketeers joined him, and they all shouted objections. The girl shouted back at them, banging a small and shapely but very firm fist on the table. She must have been taunting them with being afraid; the objections now became indignant denials. Finally she turned to him.

  “We all go Tarr-Hostigos in sky-things,” she told him.

 

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