“I’ll go over to that village we saw comin’ down,” said Thistlethwaite importantly, “an’ arrange to send a message to my friends. Then we’ll get down to business. And there’s never been a business like this one before in all the time since us men stopped swappin’ arrowheads! You stay here an’ keep ship.”
He swung the ship’s one weapon, a stun gun, over his shoulder. It gave him a rakish air. He put on a hat.
“Yep. You keep ship till I come back!”
He went down the stairs. Link heard him go down all the levels until he came to the exit port in one of the ship’s landing fins. From the control room he saw Thistlethwaite stride grandly to the top of the nearest hill, look exhaustively from there, and then march away with an air of great and confident composure. He went out of sight beyond the hillcrest.
Link went down to the exit port himself. The air in the opening was fresh and markedly pleasant to breathe. He felt that it was about time that something interesting happened. This wasn’t it. Here was only commonplace landscape, commonplace sky, and commonplace tedium. He sat on the sill of the open exit port and waited without expectation for something interesting to happen.
Presently he heard tiny clickings. Two small animals, very much like pigs in size and appearance, came trotting hurriedly into view. Their hoofs had made the clicking sounds. They saw the ship and stopped short, staring at it. They didn’t look dangerous.
“Hi, there,” said Link companionably.
The small creatures vanished instantly. They plunged behind boulders. Link shrugged. He gazed about him. After a little, he saw an eye peering at him around a boulder. It was the eye of one of the pig-like animals. Link moved abruptly and the eye vanished.
A voice spoke, apparently from nowhere. It was scornful. “Jumpy, huh? Scared?”
“I was startled,” said Link mildly, “but I wouldn’t say I was scared. Should I be?”
The voice said sardonically, “Huh!”
There was silence again. There was stillness. A very sparse vegetation appeared to have existed where the Glamorgan came down on her rockets. Those scattered bits of growing stuff had been burned to ash by the rocket flames, but at the edge of the burned area some few small smoldering fragments sent threads of smoke skyward to be dissipated by wind that came over the hilltops. On a hillcrest itself a tiny sand-devil whirled for a moment and then vanished.
The voice said abruptly and scornfully, “You in the door there! Where’d you come from?”
Link said agreeably, “From Trent.”
“What’s that?” demanded the voice, disparagingly.
“A planet—a world like this,” explained Link.
The voice said, “Huh!” There was a long pause. It said, “Why?”
Link had no idea what or who his unseen questioner might be, but the tone of the questioning was scornful. He felt that a certain impressiveness on his own part was in order. He said, “That is something to be disclosed only to proper authority. The purpose of my companion and myself, however, is entirely admirable. I may say that in time to come it is probable that the anniversary of our landing will be celebrated over the entire planet.”
Having made the statement, he rather admired it. Almost anything could be deduced from it, yet it did not mean a thing.
There was again a silence. Then the voice said cagily, “Celebrated by uffts?”
Here Link made a slight but natural error. The word “uffts,” which was unfamiliar, sounded very much like “us,” and he took it for the latter. He said profoundly, “I would say that that is a reasonable assumption.”
Dead silence once more. It lasted for a long time. Then the same voice said sharply, “Somebody’s coming.”
There came a scurrying behind the boulders. Little clickings sounded. There were flashes of pinkish-white hide. Then the two pig-like creatures darted back into view, galloping madly for the hillcrest over which they’d come. They vanished beyond it. Link spoke again, but there was no reply.
For a long time silence lay over the hollow in which the Glamorgan had come to rest. Link spoke repeatedly—chattily, seriously. The silence seemed almost ominous. He began to realize that Thistlethwaite had been gone for a long time. It was well over an hour, now. He ought to be getting back.
He didn’t come. Link was genuinely concerned when, at least another half-hour later, a remarkably improbable cavalcade came leisurely over the hillcrest, crossed by Thistlethwaite to begin with, and the pig-like animals later. The members of the cavalcade regarded the ship interestedly, and came on at a deliberate and unhurried pace. There were half a dozen men, mounted on large, splay-footed animals which had to be called unicorns, because from the middle of their foreheads drooped flexible, flabby, horn-shaped appendages. The appendages looked discouraged. The facial expression of the animals who wore them was of complete, inquiring idiocy.
That was the first impression. The second was less pleasing. The leader of the riders wore Thistlethwaite’s hat—it was too small for him—and had Thistlethwaite’s stun gun slung over his shoulder. Another rider wore Thistlethwaite’s shirt and a third wore the whiskery man’s pants. A fourth had his shoes dangling as an ornament from his saddle. But of Thistlethwaite himself there was no sign.
All the newcomers carried long spears, lances, and wore at their belts large knives in decorated scabbards half the length of a sword.
The cavalcade came comfortably but ominously toward the Glamorgan. It came to a halt, its members regarding Link with expressions whose exact meaning it was not easy to decide. But Thistlethwaite had marched away from the ship with the only weapon on board, a stun rifle. The leader of this group carried it, but without any sign of familiarity with it. Link considered that he could probably get inside the ship with the port door closed before anything drastic could happen to him. He should, too, find out what had happened to Thistlethwaite.
So he said, “How do you do? Nice weather, isn’t it?”
Chapter 3
There was a movement among the members of the cavalcade. The leader, wearing Thistlethwaite’s hat and carrying his stun rifle, looked significantly at his followers. Then he turned to Link and spoke with a certain painful politeness. There was no irony in it. It was manners. It was the most courteous of greetings.
“I’m pretty good, thank you, suh. And the weather’s pretty good too, only we could do with a mite of rain.” He paused, and said with an elaborate stateliness, “I’m the Householder of the Household over yonder. We heard your ship come down and we wondered about it. An’ then… uh… somethin’ happened and we come to look it over. We never seen a ship like this before, only o’course there’s the tales from old times about ’em.”
His manner was one of vast dignity. He wore Thistlethwaite’s hat, and his companions or followers wore everything else that Thistlethwaite had had on in the Glamorgan. But he ignored the fact. It appeared that he obeyed strict rules of etiquette. And of course, people who follow etiquette are bound by it even in the preliminaries to homicide. Which is important if violence is in the air. Link took advantage of the known fact.
“It’s not much of a ship,” he said deprecatingly, “but such as it is I’m glad to have you see it.”
The leader of the cavalcade was visibly pleased. He frowned, but he said with the same elaborate courtesy:
“My name’s Harl, suh. Would you care to give me a name to call you by? I wouldn’t presume for more than that.”