Kubala bellowed: "Hola! Silence!" When the noise had quieted a little, he pointed at the old man. "You, monsieur."
Vaud said: "Monsieur, you will naturally address yourself to me, as the duly elected president of Nouvelle-Arcadie, when this cow-head has ceased to push his raucous cries."
The leader of the nudies said: "Monsieur the captain, if you will silence this aged species of camel, I have a matter of the most urgent importance to submit to you."
"Who are you?" said Kubala.
"Me, I am Louis Motta, president of the republic of Liberté."
"He is a demagogue who has seduced some of my poor ones to rebellion," said Vaud. "I am still president of all the human souls on Turania —"
"I treat your claims with scorn!" cried Motta. "Liberté is a free and independent sovereign nation. We don't recognize the authority of this tyrant. But what is more urgent is that we are attacked by Cimbrians —"
"Naturally," said Vaud. "This salaud divides us in the face of peril, forsakes the safety of our island, invades the lands of the Cimbrians and provokes —"
"It's a gratuitous aggression of the Cimbrians!" yelled Motta.
"Wait! Silence!" shouted Kubala. "First, what do you mean by Cimbrians on Turania? Cimbria is ten light-years away."
"Oh, they are here," said Motta. "How or why I know not."
"And second," said Kubala, "Cimbrians are one of the most peaceful and orderly peoples in the Galaxy. They've never bothered anybody."
"You see?" said Vaud. "It's evident that he must have attacked them first."
"It's a lie!" screamed Motta. "They have killed two of our people and wounded five more. They have guns, which we do not. They glide themselves up and shoot us while we are quietly going about our business."
They both shouted until Kubala quieted them with his roar. "Let's do things in order," he said. "First, I am Czeslaw Kubala, captain of the Daedalus, whose tender you see here. This is Arthur Ramaswami, my first officer, and this" (indicating me) "is Gerald Fay of the World News Service. He will visit you until the last departure of the tender."
"He will visit which of us?" said Motta.
"Ask him," said Kubala.
I said: "Messieurs, I'm supposed to find out what's happened in the fifteen years since Nouvelle-Arcadie was founded. I want to visit everybody that time allows."
"Come when you like, my dear sir," said Vaud, "and stay as long as you like. I am naturally ardent that you shall get the correct story."
"You must visit us first, though," said Motta. "It is only logical. Liberté is a short walk from here on the continent, so you need not wait for a favorable wind to go to Nouvelle-Arcadie."
"Well ..." I said, but then one of the women in the naked crowd spoke.
"I pray you, monsieur, visit us first," she said. "We shall be desolated otherwise."
Anybody who has been thrown in with nudists knows that the effect wears off in ten minutes. After that, you don't even have to keep yourself from staring.
This girl, though, I found attractive. She wasn't beautiful; of medium height, rather more sturdy and muscular than we'd consider modish. She was dark, with her hair in a bun and her teeth a little irregular. No beauty, but she shone health, vigor, and personality. She wore sandals and carried a big bag slung over her shoulder by a strap of the bark of the leather tree, Scorteliber lentus.
Well, it's really a man of no strength of character I am. Any circumstance can push me into anything. I said I'd first visit Liberté, and gave my name again.
"Enchanted," she said. "Me, I am Adrienne Herz."
Kubala was asking Vaud: "What in particular do you want?"
"I want assistance in suppressing revolt," said Vaud. "I may exhort you for protection against criminal bands of my own species, isn't it?"
"Criminal bands!" yelled Motta.
Kubala stopped him and said: "I think not, Monsieur Vaud. Your original charter gave Nouvelle-Arcadie complete internal autonomy. These secessionists are all members of your original colony of their children, is it not?"
"But yes," said Vaud.
"Well, if you want to coerce them back into the fold, you must do it yourself."
"But we cannot! It would be against our pacifistic principles!" said Vaud.
Kubala said: "But then how could I —"
"But you are not one of us. You are not held by such principles!"
Kubala growled: "If that's your Latin logic ... All I'll do is to take back to Earth anybody who doesn't like it here.
Now, Monsieur Motta, what do you want? War with these mysterious Cimbrians?"
"Oh, no!" said Motta. "We Passivists are the only sincere pacifists. I wouldn't have you do the Cimbrians ill. What I really want is for you to fly to Cimbria and lodge a complaint with the government there."
"That's absolutely impossible," said Kubala. "Cimbria is almost as far from here as Earth, and I have a scheduled run. What did you say about pacifists being pacifists?"
"Passivists, not pacifists," said Motta. "Vaud's faction call themselves Activists, while we are the Passivists. Vaud has betrayed his original principles."
"How?"
"He has become organization-minded. All we have heard is order, discipline, regulations, and harder work to raise the standard of living. But as soon as one does that, one is on the road to autocracy, war, crime, imperialism, and all the other vices of civilization. So we have gone back to first principles."
Vaud said: "He lies! He is only a clever demagogue, hiding his ambition behind a mask of idealistic primitivism ..."
The shouting started again until Kubala quieted it and said: "Wouldn't you like your mail?"
"But naturally!" cried the Arcadians.
During the talk, the hoist had been running up and down the side of the tender, slung from a boom like a big bucket. On each trip it brought stuff that Vaud had ordered years ago: cloth, matches, razor blades, sheet rubber, paper, photographic supplies, medicines, and so forth.
The crewmen set up a table, and Ramaswami dumped the mailbags out on this. As the mail had all been microfilmed, three bags held it all, though the reading matter represented here was enormous. Ramaswami asked:
"What shall we do with these rolls? Each has letters or pages of printed matter addressed to different people. We thought you'd be one colony, so everybody could read his letters and publications on the viewers as his name came up. But if you're divided into two ..."
After some hemming and hawing, the girl who wanted me to visit Liberté, Adrienne Herz, said: "I suppose each faction will have to take half the rolls at hazard and make enlargements of the pages addressed to people in the other community. Then the Activist mailman and I will make a rendezvous and exchange them."
"You're the mail-girl for the Passivists?" said Kubala.
"That's correct," she said.
Vaud said: "August Zimmerli is acting as mailman for us." He indicated a fat man, and soon Ramaswami was dealing out rolls of microfilm, one to one and one to the other.
The part of Turania where we were is covered with dark forest. The Turanian trees are mostly broad-leaved evergreens, somber-looking save where they burst into flowers. These are sometimes the size of plates. That's because the flying arthropods grow so large, since there are no flying vertebrates to compete with them.
The trees had been cleared from the field in response to the Daedalus' radio-warning of its approach. As we left the field, the leaves closed in over us. A couple of insects the size of pigeons whizzed past us. (It's easier to call them insects than "insect-like Turanian exoskeletal arthropods.")
Adrienne Herz said: "Well, Monsieur Fay, my friends will be wild with jealousy when they see me bringing in the first earthman we've seen in many years."