Gribardsun raised his eyes and stared back at the doctor, then made an O with his thumb and first finger and stared at the doctor through that.
The witch doctor became pale.
'When among the Romans, out-Roman them,' Gribardsun said to Silverstein.
He stood up and walked around the fire and seized the doctor by the nose and twisted it.
The doctor yelped with pain and flung his baton across the tent.
Gribardsun released the nose and went to the side of the tent and picked up the baton. It was of carved bone, and the hole in its end was large enough so that the shaft of a spear could be thrust through it. Originally, in the nineteenth century, the scientists had thought that the batons de commandement were for use in magical rites only. Then they had decided, in the twentieth century, that the batons were used to straighten out shafts. The truth, as the expedition had discovered, validated both theories. Some batons were used as physical tools and some as magical tools. In a sense, the magical batons were also shaft straighteners, since they were used by the witch doctors to straighten - or to bend - the invisible shafts that bound the universe together. The witch doctors kept the philosophy of the use of batons as a guild secret, transmitting the knowledge only to their successors. Gribardsun had tried to get Glamug to tell him the arcana of his trade, but Glamug had refused. However, by using a highly sensitive directional microphone, Gribardsun had eavesdropped on the school Glamug conducted for his two sons. He knew that the bone or wood or ivory baton was considered to be powerful. But a doctor who was powerful enough to use his own fingers to form the magical shaft-straightening hole was dreaded. There were very few. In fact, Glamug had never actually seen one. But the great doctor of tribal history - Simaumg - had used only his own fingers.
Gribardsun assumed that this tribe had its equivalent of Simaumg, and that its doctor would be aware of the dangerousness of such a man. He was right. The witch doctor gave way completely. He lowered his baton and stared wide-eyed at Gribardsun. Then he reversed the baton and walked around the fire and handed it to him. The Englishman passed his finger through the hole in it several times and handed it back to the doctor.
Silverstein had watched all this bewildered. Gribardsun explained and then told him to put on his clothes. He doubted that anyone would interfere.
The chief and the witch doctor conferred in low tones for a while on the other side of the fire. Gribardsun got tired of waiting for them to come to a decision. He got up and put on his own clothes and resumed his place by the fire. Silverstein took out his pocket transceiver and soon got into contact with Rachel. He described as best he could their situation and location.
'We were their prisoners, and I suppose we still are,' Drummond said. 'But, somehow, John has gotten the upper hand. I don't know how long he can keep it, though.'
Silverstein confined himself to reporting the situation, though Rachel tried to get him to talk about his running away. Gribardsun gestured, and Silverstein brought the transceiver to him.
'Don't come after us,' he said to Rachel. 'You might upset the rather delicate balance of the situation. We'll keep in touch. I'll report in an hour.'
'And if you don't?' Rachel asked.
'Then you can come after us. But if this tribe loses any more men, it's going to perish.'
That evening the chief, the doctor, the big man (subdued and somewhat banged up), and a white-haired old man ate with the two prisoners in the tent. They tried to carry on a conversation with sign language. The chief managed to get across the idea that they were not prisoners but that the tribe could use the help of the two. By then the firearms had been returned to Gribardsun, who used signs to indicate that he would use his rifle to get meat for them.
Gribardsun also tried to find out from them what had happened to cause them to attack Silverstein, but he failed. Silverstein stuck to his story that they had jumped him, and he had been forced to shoot them. Gribardsun did not say anything about his narrow escape from one of Drummond's bullets. But he did not return the revolver to Drummond, nor did Drummond protest when Gribardsun dismantled the pistol and put the parts in his pack.
He did object when the Englishman said they would spend the night in the tent and perhaps stay for several days.
They'll murder us in our beds!' he said. 'They must be just waiting to catch us off guard. My God, we killed almost half their men!'
'But through what is, to them, magical means,' Gribardsun said. 'So they expect us to reimburse them somehow. We are under obligation to them. At least, that is the feeling I get. And, in a way, we are obligated.'
'But we can't support everyone we run across!' Silverstein protested. 'You've already got Dubhab's family on your hands. In fact, the whole tribe, since they've come to depend more and more on you. Would you add another tribe to your entourage?'
'We are intruders,' Gribardsun said. 'Our presence is unnatural, if anything that exists in nature can be said to be unnatural. We are here to observe and study. But our very intrusion upsets the natural order of things, so that we are not observing things as they would be if we were not here. We constitute an example of Heisenberg's Principle of Uncertainty, but in a social sense. We can't but affect what we would like to see in its natural state. So our observations are necessarily distorted or qualified.'
'I know that!' Silverstein said impatiently.
'Yes, but the point is that if we come to these people and bring catastrophe and ruin, then we must do something to help them. If we could be the ideal observers, invisible, unnoticed, then we would have an obligation not to interfere in the slightest. We could gather valid scientific data about them, and if they flourished or perished, were well or ill, tortured or the torturers, we would be the ideal observers, the unseen camera. But we can't be. To make an intimate study, we have to become intimate with them. And that, to me, involves a certain amount of obligation.'
'I don't see why we should be obligated to people who tried to kill us without reason.'
'I don't know that they had no reason,' Gribardsun said. He turned his large gray eyes on Silverstein, who flushed and chewed savagely on the piece of bison meat he had just put in his mouth.
'I feel I owe some obligations,' Gribardsun said. 'But I'm not neurotic about it. There are limits to what I owe.'
'Are you talking about them or about me?'
'Both.'
A little while later he stretched out on a pile of bison hides and apparently went to sleep almost at once. He did not cover himself with furs, as the natives did, since his thermicron suit kept him warm enough. In fact, he had to open some vents in it against getting too warm. The many bodies in the tent built up the temperature.
Silverstein opened his own suit at many places and took refuge beneath three wolf-skin blankets. But he had trouble getting to sleep. The stench of smoke and unwashed bodies and rotting teeth and chamber pots and the loud snoring of the chief and his old mother and a bite now and then from a louse kept him awake for hours. He had no sooner fallen asleep, or so it seemed to him, than a noise awakened him. He sat up and saw Gribardsun pushing the teenager blonde from him. Evidently she had just come over to him. But Gribardsun was having none of her.
In the morning, Drummond commented on the incident. Gribardsun said, 'I have no moral objection to temporary matings, and I may even have offended her deeply. She probably Wanted to have a child by me because I am a powerful magician and warrior, according to her lights. But I would feel an additional obligation if she had a child by me. I'm not ready for any such thing - yet.'