There was a brief scuffle and Jedekiah found himself sprawled on his back.
“Hurry!” Jedekiah shouted. “The natives are revolting!”
An alarm bell from the spaceship began to peal. Sirens wailed in the night. The women and children, long trained for such an emergency, trooped back into the spaceship. The men were issued rifles, machine guns, and hand grenades, and began to advance on Danton.
“It’s just man to man,” Danton called out. “We had a disagreement, that’s all. There’s no natives or anything. Just me.”
The foremost Hutter commanded, “Anita, quick, get back!”
“I didn’t see any natives,” the girl said staunchly. “And it wasn’t really Danta’s fault—”
“Get back!”
She was pulled out of the way. Danton dived into the bushes before the machine guns opened up.
He crawled on all fours for fifty yards, then broke into a dead run.
Fortunately, the Hutters were not pursuing. They were interested only in guarding their ship and holding their beachhead and a narrow stretch of jungle. Danton heard gunfire throughout the night and loud shouts and frantic cries.
“There goes one!”
“Quick, turn the machine gun! They’re behind us!”
“There! There! I got one!”
“No, he got away There he goes ... But look, up in the tree!”
“Fire, man, fire!”
All night, Danton listened as the Hutters repulsed the attacks of imaginary savages.
Toward dawn, the firing subsided. Danton estimated that a ton of lead had been expended, hundreds of trees decapitated, acres of grass trampled into mud. The jungle stank of cordite.
He fell into a fitful slumber.
At midday, he awakened and heard someone moving through the underbrush. He retreated into the jungle and made a meal for himself out of a local variety of bananas and mangoes. Then he decided to think things over.
But no thoughts came. His mind was filled with Anita and with grief over her loss.
All that day, he wandered disconsolately through the jungle, and in the late afternoon heard again the sound of someone moving through the underbrush.
He turned to go deeper into the island. Then he heard someone calling his name.
“Danta! Danta! Wait!”
It was Anita. Danton hesitated, not sure what to do. She might have decided to leave her people, to live in the green jungle with him. But more realistically, she might have been sent out as a decoy, leading a party of men to destroy him. How could he know where her loyalties lay?
“Danta! Where are you?”
Danton reminded himself that there could never be anything between them. Her people had shown what they thought of natives. They would always distrust him, forever try to kill him ...
“Please, Danta!”
Danton shrugged his shoulders and walked toward her voice.
They met in a little clearing. Anita’s hair was disheveled and her khakis were torn by the jungle briars, but for Danton there could never be a lovelier woman. For an instant, he believed that she had come to join him, flee with him.
Then he saw armed men fifty yards behind her.
“It’s all right,” Anita said. “They’re not going to kill you. They just came along to guard me.”
“Guard you? From me?” Danton laughed hollowly.
“They don’t know you as I do,” Anita said. “At the Council meeting today, I told them the truth.”
“You did?”
“Of course. That fight wasn’t your fault, and I told everybody so. I told them you fought only to defend yourself. And Jedekiah lied. No pack of natives attacked him. There was only you, and I told them this.”
“Good girl,” Danton said fervently. “Did they believe you?”
“I think so. I explained that the native attack came later.”
Danton groaned. “Look, how could there be a native attack when there aren’t any natives?”
“But there are,” Anita said. “I heard them shouting.”
“Those were your own people.” Danton tried to think of something that would convince her. If he couldn’t convince this one girl, how could he possibly convince the rest of the Hutters?
And then he had it. It was a very simple proof, but its effect would have to be overwhelming.
“You actually believe there was a full-scale native attack,” Danton stated.
“Of course.”
“How many natives?”
“I heard you outnumbered us by at least ten to one.”
“And we were armed?”
“You certainly were.”
“Then how,” Danton asked triumphantly, “do you account for the fact that not a single Hutter was wounded!”
She stared at him wide-eyed. “But, Danta dear, many of the Hutters were wounded, some seriously. It’s a wonder no one was killed in all that fighting!”
Danton felt as though the ground had been kicked out from under him. For a terrifying minute, he believed her. The Hutters were so certain! Perhaps he did have a tribe, after all, hundreds of bronzed savages like himself, hidden in the jungle, waiting ...
“That trader who taught you English,” Anita said, “must have been a very unscrupulous character. It’s against interstellar law, you know, to sell firearms to natives. Someday he’ll be caught and—”
“Firearms?”
“Certainly. You couldn’t use them very accurately, of course. But Simeon said that sheer firepower—”
“I suppose all your casualties were from gunshot wounds.”
“Yes. The men didn’t let you get close enough to use knives and spears.”
“I see,” Danton said. His proof was utterly demolished. But he felt enormously relieved at having regained his sanity. The disorganized Hutter soldiery had ranged around the jungle, firing at everything that moved—each other. Of course they had gotten into trouble. It was more than a wonder that some of them hadn’t been killed. It was a miracle.
“But I explained that they couldn’t blame you,” said Anita. “You were attacked first, and your own people must have thought you were in danger. The Elders thought this was probable.”
“Nice of them,” Danton said.
“They want to be reasonable. After all, they realize that natives are human beings just like ourselves.”
“Are you sure of that?” Danton asked, with feeble irony.
“Of course. So the Elders held a big meeting on native policy and decided it once and for all. We’re setting aside a thousand acres as a reservation for you and your people. That should be plenty of room, shouldn’t it? The men are putting up the boundary posts now. You’ll live peacefully in your reservation and we’ll live in our own part of the island.”
“What?” Danton said.
“And to seal the pledge,” Anita continued, “the Elders asked you to accept this.” She handed him a roll of parchment.
“What is it?”
“It’s a peace treaty, declaring the end of the Hutter–New Tahitian war, and pledging our respective peoples to eternal amity.”
Numbly, Danton accepted the parchment. He saw that the men who had accompanied Anita were setting red and black striped posts into the ground. They sang as they worked, happy to have reached a solution for the native problem so quickly and easily.
“But don’t you think,” Danton asked, “that perhaps—ah—assimilation might be a better solution?”
“I suggested it,” Anita said, blushing.
“You did? You mean that you would—”
“Of course I would,” said Anita, not looking at him. “I think the amalgamation of two strong races would be a fine and wonderful thing. And, Danta, what wonderful stories and legends you could have told the children!”