OOMPHEL . .. . .. IN THE SKY

By H. BEAM PIPER

+--------------------------------------------------------------+| || Transcriber's Note || || This etext was produced from Analog Science Fact--Science || Fiction, November 1960. Extensive research did not uncover || any evidence that the U. S. Copyright on this publication was || renewed. || |+--------------------------------------------------------------+

[Illustration]

 _Since Logic derives from postulates, it never has, and never will, change a postulate. And a religious belief is a system of postulates . .. So how can a man fight a native superstition with logic? Or anything else. .. ?_

Illustrated by Bernklau

Miles Gilbert watched the landscape slide away below him, its quilt ofrounded treetops mottled red and orange in the double sunlight and, inshaded places, with the natural yellow of the vegetation of Kwannon. Theaircar began a slow swing to the left, and Gettler Alpha came into view, a monstrous smear of red incandescence with an optical diameter of twofeet at arm's length, slightly flattened on the bottom by the westernhorizon. In another couple of hours it would be completely set, but bythat time Beta, the planet's G-class primary, would be at itsmidafternoon hottest. He glanced at his watch. It was 1005, but that wasGalactic Standard Time, and had no relevance to anything that washappening in the local sky. It did mean, though, that it was fiveminutes short of two hours to 'cast-time. 

He snapped on the communication screen in front of him, and Harry Walsh, the news editor, looked out of it at him from the office in Bluelake, halfway across the continent. He wanted to know how things were going. 

"Just about finished. I'm going to look in at a couple more nativevillages, and then I'm going to Sanders' plantation to see Gonzales. Ihope I'll have a personal statement from him, and the finalsituation-progress map, in time for the 'cast. I take it Maith's stillagreeable to releasing the story at twelve-hundred?"

"Sure; he was always agreeable. The Army wants publicity; it wasGovernment House that wanted to sit on it, and they've given that upnow. The story's all over the place here, native city and all. "

"What's the situation in town, now?"

"Oh, it's still going on. Some disorders, mostly just unrest. Lot ofstreet meetings that could have turned into frenzies if the policehadn't broken them up in time. A couple of shootings, somesleep-gassing, and a lot of arrests. Nothing to worry about--at least, not immediately. "

That was about what he thought. "Maybe it's not bad to have a littletrouble in Bluelake, " he considered. "What happens out here in theplantation country the Government House crowd can't see, and it doesn'tworry them. Well, I'll call you from Sanders'. "

He blanked the screen. In the seat in front, the native pilot said:"Some contragravity up ahead, boss. " It sounded like two voices speakingin unison, which was just what it was. "I'll have a look. "

The pilot's hand, long and thin, like a squirrel's, reached up andpulled down the fifty-power binoculars on their swinging arm. Mileslooked at the screen-map and saw a native village just ahead of the dotof light that marked the position of the aircar. He spoke the nativename of the village aloud, and added:

"Let down there, Heshto. I'll see what's going on. "

The native, still looking through the glasses, said, "Right, boss. " Thenhe turned. 

His skin was blue-gray and looked like sponge rubber. He was humanoid, to the extent of being an upright biped, with two arms, a head on top ofshoulders, and a torso that housed, among other oddities, four lungs. His face wasn't even vaguely human. He had two eyes in front, closeenough for stereoscopic vision, but that was a common characteristic ofsapient life forms everywhere. His mouth was strictly for eating; hebreathed through separate intakes and outlets, one of each on eitherside of his neck; he talked through the outlets and had his scent andhearing organs in the intakes. The car was air-conditioned, which was amercy; an overheated Kwann exhaled through his skin, and surroundedhimself with stenches like an organic chemistry lab. But then, Kwannsdidn't come any closer to him than they could help when he was hot andsweated, which, lately, had been most of the time. 

"A V and a half of air cavalry, circling around, " Heshto said. "Makingsure nobody got away. And a combat car at a couple of hundred feet andanother one just at treetop level. "

He rose and went to the seat next to the pilot, pulling down thebinoculars that were focused for his own eyes. With them, he could seethe air cavalry--egg-shaped things just big enough for a seated man, with jets and contragravity field generators below and a bristle ofmachine gun muzzles in front. A couple of them jetted up for a look athim and then went slanting down again, having recognized the KwannonPlanetwide News Service car. 

The village was typical enough to have been an illustration in asociography textbook--fields in a belt for a couple of hundred yardsaround it, dome-thatched mud-and-wattle huts inside a pole stockade withlog storehouses built against it, their flat roofs high enough toprovide platforms for defending archers, the open oval gathering-placein the middle. There was a big hut at one end of this, the khamdoo, thesanctum of the adult males, off limits for women and children. A smallcrowd was gathered in front of it; fifteen or twenty Terran aircavalrymen, a couple of enlisted men from the Second Kwannon NativeInfantry, a Terran second lieutenant, and half a dozen natives. The restof the village population, about two hundred, of both sexes and allages, were lined up on the shadier side of the gathering-place, most ofthem looking up apprehensively at the two combat cars which werecovering them with their guns. 

Miles got to his feet as the car lurched off contragravity and thesprings of the landing-feet took up the weight. A blast of furnacelikeair struck him when he opened the door; he got out quickly and closed itbehind him. The second lieutenant had come over to meet him; he extendedhis hand. 

"Good day, Mr. Gilbert. We all owe you our thanks for the warning. Thiswould have been a real baddie if we hadn't caught it when we did. "

He didn't even try to make any modest disclaimer; that was nothing morethan the exact truth. 

"Well, lieutenant, I see you have things in hand here. " He glanced atthe line-up along the side of the oval plaza, and then at the selectedgroup in front of the khamdoo. The patriarchal village chieftain in aloose slashed shirt; the shoonoo, wearing a multiplicity of amulets andnothing else; four or five of the village elders. "I take it the word ofthe swarming didn't get this far?"

"No, this crowd still don't know what the flap's about, and I couldn'tthink of anything to tell them that wouldn't be worse than noexplanation at all. "

He had noticed hoes and spades flying in the fields, and the cylindricalplastic containers the natives bought from traders, dropped when thetroops had surprised the women at work. And the shoonoo didn't have afire-dance cloak or any other special regalia on. If he'd heard aboutthe swarming, he'd have been dressed to make magic for it. 

"What time did you get here, lieutenant?"

"Oh-nine-forty. I just called in and reported the village occupied, andthey told me I was the last one in, so the operation's finished. "

That had been smart work. He got the lieutenant's name and unit andmentioned it into his memophone. That had been a little under five hourssince he had convinced General Maith, in Bluelake, that the masslabor-desertion from the Sanders plantation had been the beginning of aswarming. Some division commanders wouldn't have been able to get abrigade off the ground in that time, let alone landed on objective. Hesaid as much to the young officer. 

"The way the Army responded, today, can make the people of the Colonyfeel a lot more comfortable for the future. "

"Why, thank you, Mr. Gilbert. " The Army, on Kwannon, was rather moreused to obloquy than praise. "How did you spot what was going on soquickly?"

This was the hundredth time, at least, that he had been asked thattoday. 

"Well, Paul Sanders' labor all comes from neighboring villages. Ifthey'd just wanted to go home and spend the end of the world with theirfamilies, they'd have been dribbling away in small batches for the lastcouple of hundred hours. Instead, they all bugged out in a bunch, theytook all the food they could carry and nothing else, and they didn'tmake any trouble before they left. Then, Sanders said they'd beenbuilding fires out in the fallow ground and moaning and chanting aroundthem for a couple of days, and idling on the job. Saving their strengthfor the trek. And he said they had a shoonoo among them. He's probablythe lad who started it. Had a dream from the Gone Ones, I suppose. "

"You mean, like this fellow here?" the lieutenant asked. "What are they, Mr. Gilbert; priests?"

He looked quickly at the lieutenant's collar-badges. Yellow trefoil forThird Fleet-Army Force, Roman IV for Fourth Army, 907 for his regiment, with C under it for cavalry. That outfit had only been on Kwannon forthe last two thousand hours, but somebody should have briefed him betterthan that. 

He shook his head. "No, they're magicians. Everything these Kwanns doinvolves magic, and the shoonoon are the professionals. When a nativeruns into something serious, that his own do-it-yourself magic can'tcope with, he goes to the shoonoo. And, of course, the shoonoo works allthe magic for the community as a whole--rain-magic, protective magic forthe village and the fields, that sort of thing. "

The lieutenant mopped his face on a bedraggled handkerchief. "They'llhave to struggle along somehow for a while; we have orders to round upall the shoonoon and send them in to Bluelake. "

"Yes. " That hadn't been General Maith's idea; the governor had insistedon that. "I hope it doesn't make more trouble than it prevents. "

The lieutenant was still mopping his face and looking across thegathering-place toward Alpha, glaring above the huts. 

"How much worse do you think this is going to get?" he asked. 

"The heat, or the native troubles?"

"I was thinking about the heat, but both. "

"Well, it'll get hotter. Not much hotter, but some. We can expectstorms, too, within twelve to fifteen hundred hours. Nobody has any ideahow bad they'll be. The last periastron was ninety years ago, and we'veonly been here for sixty-odd; all we have is verbal accounts from memoryfrom the natives, probably garbled and exaggerated. We had pretty badstorms right after transit a year ago; they'll be much worse this time. Thermal convections; air starts to cool when it gets dark, and thenheats up again in double-sun daylight. "

It was beginning, even now; starting to blow a little after Alpha-rise. 

"How about the natives?" the lieutenant asked. "If they can get anycrazier than they are now--"

"They can, and they probably will. They think this is the end of theworld. The Last Hot Time. " He used the native expression, and thentranslated it into Lingua Terra. "The Sky Fire--that's Alpha--will burnup the whole world. "

"But this happens every ninety years. Mean they always acted this way atperiastron?"

He shook his head. "Race would have exterminated itself long ago if theyhad. No, this is something special. The coming of the Terrans was asign. The Terrans came and brought oomphel to the world; this a signthat the Last Hot Time is at hand. "

"What the devil _is_ oomphel?" The lieutenant was mopping the back ofhis neck with one hand, now, and trying to pull his sticky tunic loosefrom his body with the other. "I hear that word all the time. "

"Well, most Terrans, including the old Kwannon hands, use it to meantrade-goods. To the natives, it means any product of Terran technology, from paper-clips to spaceships. They think it's . .. Well, not exactlysupernatural; extranatural would be closer to expressing their idea. Terrans are natural; they're just a different kind of people. Butoomphel isn't; it isn't subject to any of the laws of nature at all. They're all positive that we don't make it. Some of them even think itmakes us. "

When he got back in the car, the native pilot, Heshto, was lolling inhis seat and staring at the crowd of natives along the side of thegathering-place with undisguised disdain. Heshto had been educated atone of the Native Welfare Commission schools, and post-graded withKwannon Planetwide News. He could speak, read and write Lingua Terra. Hewas a mathematician as far as long division and decimal fractions. Heknew that Kwannon was the second planet of the Gettler Beta system, 23, 000 miles in circumference, rotating on its axis once in 22. 8Galactic Standard hours and making an orbital circuit around GettlerBeta once in 372. 06 axial days, and that Alpha was an M-class pulsatingvariable with an average period of four hundred days, and that Betaorbited around it in a long elipse every ninety years. He didn't believethere was going to be a Last Hot Time. He was an intellectual, he was. 

He started the contragravity-field generator as soon as Miles was in hisseat. "Where now, boss?" he asked. 

"Qualpha's Village. We won't let down; just circle low over it. I wantsome views of the ruins. Then to Sanders' plantation. "

"O. K. , boss; hold tight. "

He had the car up to ten thousand feet. Aiming it in the map directionof Qualpha's Village, he let go with everything he had--hot jets, rocket-booster and all. The forest landscape came hurtling out of thehorizon toward them. 

Qualpha's was where the trouble had first broken out, after the bug-outfrom Sanders; the troops hadn't been able to get there in time, and ithad been burned. Another village, about the same distance south of theplantation, had also gone up in flames, and at a dozen more they hadfound the natives working themselves into frenzies and had had tosleep-gas them or stun them with concussion-bombs. Those had been thevillages to which the deserters from Sanders' had themselves gone; fromevery one, runners had gone out to neighboring villages--"The Gone Onesare returning; all the People go to greet them at the Deesha-Phoo. Burnyour villages; send on the word. Hasten; the Gone Ones return!"

Saving some of those villages had been touch-and-go, too; the runners, with hours lead-time, had gotten there ahead of the troops, and therehad been shooting at a couple of them. Then the Army contragravity beganlanding at villages that couldn't have been reached in hours by footmessengers. It had been stopped--at least for the time, and in thisarea. When and where another would break out was anybody's guess. 

The car was slowing and losing altitude, and ahead he could see thinsmoke rising above the trees. He moved forward beside the pilot andpulled down his glasses; with them he could distinguish the ruins of thevillage. He called Bluelake, and then put his face to the view-finderand began transmitting in the view. 

It had been a village like the one he had just visited, mud-and-wattlehuts around an oval gathering-place, stockade, and fields beyond. Heshtobrought the car down to a few hundred feet and came coasting in onmomentum helped by an occasional spurt of the cold-jets. A few sectionsof the stockade still stood, and one side of the khamdoo hadn't fallen, but the rest of the structures were flat. There wasn't a soul, human orparahuman, in sight; the only living thing was a small black-and-grayquadruped investigating some bundles that had been dropped in thefields, in hope of finding something tasty. He got a view ofthat--everybody liked animal pictures on a newscast--and then he wasswinging the pickup over the still-burning ruins. In the ashes of everyhut he could see the remains of something like a viewscreen or anuclear-electric stove or a refrigerator or a sewing machine. He knewhow dearly the Kwanns cherished such possessions. That they haddestroyed them grieved him. But the Last Hot Time was at hand; the wholeworld would be destroyed by fire, and then the Gone Ones would return. 

So there were uprisings on the plantations. Paul Sanders had beenlucky; his Kwanns had just picked up and left. But he had always gottenalong well with the natives, and his plantation house was literally acastle and he had plenty of armament. There had been other planters whohad made the double mistake of incurring the enmity of their nativelabor and of living in unfortified houses. A lot of them weren't around, any more, and their plantations were gutted ruins. 

And there were plantations on which the natives had destroyed the kloobaplants and smashed the crystal which lived symbiotically upon them. Theythought the Terrans were using the living crystals to make magic. Nottoo far off, at that; the properties of Kwannon biocrystals had opened amajor breakthrough in subnucleonic physics and initiated half a dozentechnologies. New kinds of oomphel. And down in the south, where thespongy and resinous trees were drying in the heat, they were startingforest fires and perishing in them in hecatombs. And to the north, theywere swarming into the mountains; building great fires there, too, andattacking the Terran radar and radio beacons. 

Fire was a factor common to all these frenzies. Nothing could happenwithout magical assistance; the way to bring on the Last Hot Time wasPeople. 

Maybe the ones who died in the frenzies and the swarmings were the luckyones at that. They wouldn't live to be crushed by disappointment whenthe Sky Fire receded as Beta went into the long swing toward apastron. The surviving shoonoon wouldn't be the lucky ones, that was for sure. The magician-in-public-practice needs only to make one really badmistake before he is done to some unpleasantly ingenious death by hisclientry, and this was going to turn out to be the biggestmagico-prophetic blooper in all the long unrecorded history of Kwannon. 

A few minutes after the car turned south from the ruined village, hecould see contragravity-vehicles in the air ahead, and then the fieldsand buildings of the Sanders plantation. A lot more contragravity wasgrounded in the fallow fields, and there were rows of pneumaticballoon-tents, and field-kitchens, and a whole park of engineeringequipment. Work was going on in the klooba-fields, too; about threehundred natives were cutting open the six-foot leafy balls and gettingout the biocrystals. Three of the plantation airjeeps, each with a pairof machine guns, were guarding them, but they didn't seem to be havingany trouble. He saw Sanders in another jeep, and had Heshto put the caralongside. 

"How's it going, Paul?" he asked over his radio. "I see you have somehelp, now. "

"Everybody's from Qualpha's, and from Darshat's, " Sanders replied. "TheArmy had no place to put them, after they burned themselves out. " Helaughed happily. "Miles, I'm going to save my whole crop! I thought Iwas wiped out, this morning. "

He would have been, if Gonzales hadn't brought those Kwanns in. Theklooba was beginning to wither; if left unharvested, the biocrystalswould die along with their hosts and crack into worthlessness. Like allthe other planters, Sanders had started no new crystals since the hotweather, and would start none until the worst of the heat was over. He'dneed every crystal he could sell to tide him over. 

[Illustration]

"The Welfarers'll make a big forced-labor scandal out of this, " hepredicted. 

"Why, such an idea. " Sanders was scandalized. "I'm not forcing them toeat. "

"The Welfarers don't think anybody ought to have to work to eat. Theythink everybody ought to be fed whether they do anything to earn it ornot, and if you try to make people earn their food, you're guilty ofeconomic coercion. And if you're in business for yourself and want themto work for you, you're an exploiter and you ought to be eliminated as aclass. Haven't you been trying to run a plantation on this planet, underthis Colonial Government, long enough to have found that out, Paul?"

Brigadier General Ramón Gonzales had taken over the first--countingdown from the landing-stage--floor of the plantation house for hisheadquarters. His headquarters company had pulled out removablepartitions and turned four rooms into one, and moved in enough screensand teleprinters and photoprint machines and computers to have outfittedthe main newsroom of _Planetwide News_. The place had the feel of anewsroom--a newsroom after a big story has broken and the 'cast has goneon the air and everybody--in this case about twenty Terran officers andnon-coms, half women--standing about watching screens and smoking andthinking about getting a follow-up ready. 

Gonzales himself was relaxing in Sanders' business-room, with his beltoff and his tunic open. He had black eyes and black hair and mustache, and a slightly equine face that went well with his Old Terran Spanishname. There was another officer with him, considerably younger--CaptainFoxx Travis, Major General Maith's aide. 

"Well, is there anything we can do for you, Miles?" Gonzales asked, after they had exchanged greetings and sat down. 

"Why, could I have your final situation-progress map? And would you bewilling to make a statement on audio-visual. " He looked at his watch. "We have about twenty minutes before the 'cast. "

"You have a map, " Gonzales said, as though he were walking tiptoe fromone word to another. "It accurately represents the situation as of themoment, but I'm afraid some minor unavoidable inaccuracies may havecrept in while marking the positions and times for the earlier phases ofthe operation. I teleprinted a copy to _Planetwide_ along with the one Isent to Division Headquarters. "

He understood about that and nodded. Gonzales was zipping up his tunicand putting on his belt and sidearm. That told him, before the brigadiergeneral spoke again, that he was agreeable to the audio-visualappearance and statement. He called the recording studio at _Planetwide_while Gonzales was inspecting himself in the mirror and told them to getset for a recording. It only ran a few minutes; Gonzales, speakingwithout notes, gave a brief description of the operation. 

"At present, " he concluded, "we have every native village and everyplantation and trading-post within two hundred miles of the Sandersplantation occupied. We feel that this swarming has been definitelystopped, but we will continue the occupation for at least the nexthundred to two hundred hours. In the meantime, the natives in theoccupied villages are being put to work building shelters for themselvesagainst the anticipated storms. "

"I hadn't heard about that, " Miles said, as the general returned to hischair and picked up his drink again. 

"Yes. They'll need something better than these thatched huts when thestorms start, and working on them will keep them out of mischief. Standard megaton-kilometer field shelters, earth and log construction. Ithink they'll be adequate for anything that happens at periastron. "

Anything designed to resist the heat, blast and radiation effects of amegaton thermonuclear bomb at a kilometer ought to stand up under whatwas coming. At least, the periastron effects; there was another angle toit. 

"The Native Welfare Commission isn't going to take kindly to that. That's supposed to be their job. "

"Then why the devil haven't they done it?" Gonzales demanded angrily. "I've viewed every native village in this area by screen, and I haven'tseen one that's equipped with anything better than those logstorage-bins against the stockades. "

"There was a project to provide shelters for the periastron storms setup ten years ago. They spent one year arguing about how the nativessurvived storms prior to the Terrans' arrival here. According to theolder natives, they got into those log storage-houses you werementioning; only about one out of three in any village survived. I couldhave told them that. Did tell them, repeatedly, on the air. Then, afterthey decided that shelters were needed, they spent another year hasslingover who would be responsible for designing them. Your predecessor here, General Nokami, offered the services of his engineer officers. He wasfrostily informed that this was a humanitarian and not a militaryproject. "

Ramón Gonzales began swearing, then apologized for the interruption. "Then what?" he asked. 

"Apology unnecessary. Then they did get a shelter designed, and startedteaching some of the students at the native schools how to build them, and then the meteorologists told them it was no good. It was a dugoutshelter; the weathermen said there'd be rainfall measured in metersinstead of inches and anybody who got caught in one of those dugoutswould be drowned like a rat. "

"Ha, I thought of that one. " Gonzales said. "My shelters are going to bemounded up eight feet above the ground. "

"What did they do then?" Foxx Travis wanted to know. 

"There the matter rested. As far as I know, nothing has been done on itsince. "

"And you think, with a disgraceful record of non-accomplishment likethat, that they'll protest General Gonzales' action on purelyjurisdictional grounds?" Travis demanded. 

"Not jurisdictional grounds, Foxx. The general's going at this the wrongway. He actually knows what has to be done and how to do it, and he'sgoing right ahead and doing it, without holding a dozen conferences andround-table discussions and giving everybody a fair and equal chance tofoul things up for him. You know as well as I do that that'sundemocratic. And what's worse, he's making the natives build themthemselves, whether they want to or not, and that's forced labor. Thatreminds me; has anybody started raising the devil about those Kwannsfrom Qualpha's and Darshat's you brought here and Paul put to work?"

Gonzales looked at Travis and then said: "Not with me. Not yet, anyhow. "

"They've been at General Maith, " Travis said shortly. After a moment, he added: "General Maith supports General Gonzales completely; that'sfor publication. I'm authorized to say so. What else was there to do?They'd burned their villages and all their food stores. They had to beplaced somewhere. And why in the name of reason should they sit aroundin the shade eating Government native-type rations while Paul Sandershas fifty to a hundred thousand sols' worth of crystals dying on him?"

"Yes; that's another thing they'll scream about. Paul's making a profitout of it. "

"Of course he's making a profit, " Gonzales said. "Why else is he runninga plantation? If planters didn't make profits, who'd grow biocrystals?"

"The Colonial Government. The same way they built those storm-shelters. But that would be in the public interest, and if the Kwanns weren'tpublic-spirited enough to do the work, they'd be made to--at about halfwhat planters like Sanders are paying them now. But don't you realizethat profit is sordid and dishonest and selfish? Not at all like drawinga salary-cum-expense-account from the Government. "

"You're right, it isn't, " Gonzales agreed. "People like Paul Sandershave ability. If they don't, they don't stay in business. You haveability and people who don't never forgive you for it. Your veryexistence is a constant reproach to them. "

"That's right. And they can't admit your ability without admitting theirown inferiority, so it isn't ability at all. It's just dirty underhandedtrickery and selfish ruthlessness. " He thought for a moment. "How didGovernment House find out about these Kwanns here?"

"The Welfare Commission had people out while I was still setting upheadquarters, " Gonzales said. "That was about oh-seven-hundred. "

"This isn't for publication?" Travis asked. "Well, they know, but theycan't prove, that our given reason for moving in here in force is false. Of course, we can't change our story now; that's why thesituation-progress map that was prepared for publication is incorrect asto the earlier phases. They do not know that it was you who gave us ourfirst warning; they ascribe that to Sanders. And they are claiming thatthere never was any swarming; according to them, Sanders' natives arestriking for better pay and conditions, and Sanders got General Maith touse troops to break the strike. I wish we could give you credit forputting us onto this, but it's too late now. "

He nodded. The story was that a battalion of infantry had been sent into rescue a small detail under attack by natives, and that more troopshad been sent in to re-enforce them, until the whole of Gonzales'brigade had been committed. 

"That wasted an hour, at the start, " Gonzales said. "We lost two nativevillages burned, and about two dozen casualties, because we couldn't getour full strength in soon enough. "

"You'd have lost more than that if Maith had told the governor generalthe truth and requested orders to act. There'd be a hundred villages anda dozen plantations and trading posts burning, now, and Lord knows howmany dead, and the governor general would still be arguing about whetherhe was justified in ordering troop-action. " He mentioned several otheroccasions when something like that had happened. "You can't tell thatkind of people the truth. They won't believe it. It doesn't agree withtheir preconceptions. "

Foxx Travis nodded. "I take it we are still talking for nonpublication?"When Miles nodded, he continued: "This whole situation is baffling, Miles. It seems that the government here knew all about the weatherconditions they could expect at periastron, and had made plans for them. Some of them excellent plans, too, but all based on the presumption thatthe natives would co-operate or at least not obstruct. You see what thesituation actually is. It should be obvious to everybody that thebehavior of these natives is nullifying everything the civil governmentis trying to do to ensure the survival of the Terran colonists, theproduction of Terran-type food without which we would all starve, thebiocrystal plantations without which the Colony would perish, and eventhe natives themselves. Yet the Civil Government will not act to stopthese native frenzies and swarmings which endanger everything andeverybody here, and when the Army attempts to act, we must use everysort of shabby subterfuge and deceit or the Civil Government willprevent us. What ails these people?"

"You have the whole history of the Colony against you, Foxx, " he said. "You know, there never was any Chartered Kwannon Company set up toexploit the resources of the planet. At first, nobody realized that therewere any resources worth exploiting. This planet was just a scientificcuriosity; it was and is still the only planet of a binary system with anative population of sapient beings. The first people who came here werescientists, mostly sociographers and para-anthropologists. And most ofthem came from the University of Adelaide. "

Travis nodded. Adelaide had a Federation-wide reputation for left-wingneo-Marxist "liberalism. "

"Well, that established the political and social orientation of theColonial Government, right at the start, when study of the natives wasthe only business of the Colony. You know how these ideological cliquesform in a government--or any other organization. Subordinates are alwayschosen for their agreement with the views of their superiors, and theextremists always get to the top and shove the moderates under or out. Well, the Native Affairs Administration became the tail that wagged theGovernment dog, and the Native Welfare Commission is the big muscle inthe tail. "

His parents hadn't been of the left-wing Adelaide clique. His motherhad been a biochemist; his father a roving news correspondent who haddrifted into trading with the natives and made a fortune in keffa-gumbefore the chemists on Terra had found out how to synthesize hopkinsine. 

"When the biocrystals were discovered and the plantations started, theGovernment attitude was set. Biocrystal culture is just sordid moneygrubbing. The real business of the Colony is to promote the bettermentof the natives, as defined in University of Adelaide terms. That's tosay, convert them into ersatz Terrans. You know why General Maithordered these shoonoon rounded up?"

Travis made a face. "Governor general Kovac insisted on it; GeneralMaith thought that a few minor concessions would help him on his mainobjective, which was keeping a swarming from starting out here. "

"Yes. The Commissioner of Native Welfare wanted that done, mainly at theurging of the Director of Economic, Educational and TechnicalAssistance. The EETA crowd don't like shoonoon. They have been trying, ever since their agency was set up, to undermine and destroy theirinfluence with the natives. This looked like a good chance to get rid ofsome of them. "

Travis nodded. "Yes. And as soon as the disturbances in Bluelakestarted, the Constabulary started rounding them up there, too, and atthe evacuee cantonments. They got about fifty of them, mostly from thecantonments east of the city--the natives brought in from the floodedtidewater area. They just dumped the lot of them onto us. We have thempenned up in a lorry-hangar on the military reservation now. " He turnedto Gonzales. "How many do you think you'll gather up out here, general?"he asked. 

"I'd say about a hundred and fifty, when we have them all. "

Travis groaned. "We can't keep all of them in that hangar, and we don'thave anywhere else--"

Sometimes a new idea sneaked up on Miles, rubbing against him andpurring like a cat. Sometimes one hit him like a sledgehammer. This onejust seemed to grow inside him. 

"Foxx, you know I have the top three floors of the Suzikami Building;about five hundred hours ago, I leased the fourth and fifth floors, directly below. I haven't done anything with them, yet; they're just asthey were when Trans-Space Imports moved out. There are ample water, light, power, air-conditioning and toilet facilities, and they can besealed off completely from the rest of the building. If General Maith'sagreeable, I'll take his shoonoon off his hands. "

"What in blazes will you do with them?"

"Try a little experiment in psychological warfare. At minimum, we mayget a little better insight into why these natives think the Last HotTime is coming. At best, we may be able to stop the whole thing and getthem quieted down again. "

"Even the minimum's worth trying for, " Travis said. "What do you have inmind, Miles? I mean, what procedure?"

"Well, I'm not quite sure, yet. " That was a lie; he was very sure. Hedidn't think it was quite time to be specific, though. "I'll have tosize up my material a little, before I decide on what to do with it. Whatever happens, it won't hurt the shoonoon, and it won't make any moretrouble than arresting them has made already. I'm sure we can learnsomething from them, at least. "

Travis nodded. "General Maith is very much impressed with your grasp ofnative psychology, " he said. "What happened out here this morning wasexactly as you predicted. Whatever my recommendation's worth, you haveit. Can you trust your native driver to take your car back to Bluelakealone?"

"Yes, of course. "

"Then suppose you ride in with me in my car. We'll talk about it on theway in, and go see General Maith at once. "

Bluelake was peaceful as they flew in over it, but it was an uneasypeace. They began running into military contragravity twenty milesbeyond the open farmlands--they were the chlorophyll green of Terranvegetation--and the natives at work in the fields were being watched bymore military and police vehicles. The carniculture plants, whereTerran-type animal tissue was grown in nutrient-vats, were even moreheavily guarded, and the native city was being patroled from above andthe streets were empty, even of the hordes of native children whousually played in them. 

The Terran city had no streets. Its dwellers moved about oncontragravity, and tall buildings rose, singly or in clumps, among thelanding-staged residences and the green transplanted trees. There was atriple wire fence around it, the inner one masked by vines and themiddle one electrified, with warning lights on. Even a governmentdedicated to the betterment of the natives and unwilling to ordermilitary action against them was, it appeared, unwilling to take toomany chances. 

Major General Denis Maith, the Federation Army commander on Kwannon, wasconsiderably more than willing to find a temporary home for his witchdoctors, now numbering close to two hundred. He did insist that they bekept under military guard, and on assigning his aide, Captain Travis, toco-operate on the project. Beyond that, he gave Miles a free hand. 

Miles and Travis got very little rest in the next ten hours. Ahalf-company of engineer troops was also kept busy, as were a number ofKwannon Planetwide News technicians and some Terran and native mechanicsborrowed from different private business concerns in the city. Even themost guarded hints of what he had in mind were enough to get this lastco-operation; he had been running a news-service in Bluelake long enoughto have the confidence of the business people. 

He tried, as far as possible, to keep any intimation of what was goingon from Government House. That, unfortunately, hadn't been far enough. He found that out when General Maith was on his screen, in the middle ofthe work on the fourth and fifth floors of the Suzikami Building. 

"The governor general just screened me, " Maith said. "He's in a tizzyabout our shoonoon. Claims that keeping them in the Suzikami Buildingwill endanger the whole Terran city. "

"Is that the best he can do? Well, that's rubbish, and he knows it. There are less than two hundred of them, I have them on the fifth floor, twenty stories above the ground, and the floor's completely sealed offfrom the floor below. They can't get out, and I have tanks of sleep-gasall over the place which can be opened either individually or alltogether from a switch on the fourth floor, where your sepoys arequartered. "

"I know, Mr. Gilbert; I screen-viewed the whole installation. I've seenregular maximum-security prisons that would be easier to get out of. "

"Governor general Kovac is not objecting personally. He has beenpressured into it by this Native Welfare government-within-the-Government. They don't know what I'm doing with those shoonoon, but whatever it is, they're afraid of it. "

"Well, for the present, " Maith said, "I think I'm holding them off. TheCivil Government doesn't want the responsibility of keeping them incustody, I refused to assume responsibility for them if they were keptanywhere else, and Kovac simply won't consider releasing them, so thatleaves things as they are. I did have to make one compromise, though. "That didn't sound good. It sounded less so when Maith continued: "Theyinsisted on having one of their people at the Suzikami Building as anobserver. I had to grant that. "

"That's going to mean trouble. "

"Oh, I shouldn't think so. This observer will observe, and nothing else. She will take no part in anything you're doing, will voice noobjections, and will not interrupt anything you are saying to theshoonoon. I was quite firm on that, and the governor general agreedcompletely. "

"She?"

"Yes. A Miss Edith Shaw; do you know anything about her?"

"I've met her a few times; cocktail parties and so on. " She was youngenough, and new enough to Kwannon, not to have a completely induratedmind. On the other hand, she was EETA which was bad, and had a master'sin sociography from Adelaide, which was worse. "When can I look forher?"

"Well, the governor general's going to screen me and find out whenyou'll have the shoonoon on hand. "

Doesn't want to talk to me at all, Miles thought. Afraid he might saysomething and get quoted. 

"For your information, they'll be here inside an hour. They will have toeat, and they're all tired and sleepy. I should say 'boutoh-eight-hundred. Oh, and will you tell the governor general to tellMiss Shaw to bring an overnight kit with her. She's going to need it. "

He was up at 0400, just a little after Beta-rise. He might be acivilian big-wheel in an Army psychological warfare project, but hestill had four newscasts a day to produce. He spent a couple of hourschecking the 0600 'cast and briefing Harry Walsh for the indeterminateperiod in which he would be acting chief editor and producer. At 0700, Foxx Travis put in an appearance. They went down to the fourth floor, tothe little room they had fitted out as command-post, control room andoffice for Operation Shoonoo. 

There was a rectangular black traveling-case, initialed E. S. , besidethe open office door. Travis nodded at it, and they grinned at oneanother; she'd come early, possibly hoping to catch them hidingsomething they didn't want her to see. Entering the office quietly, theyfound her seated facing the big viewscreen, smoking and watching acouple of enlisted men of the First Kwannon Native Infantry at work inanother room where the pickup was. There were close to a dozenlipstick-tinted cigarette butts in the ashtray beside her. Her privateface wasn't particularly happy. Maybe she was being earnest andconcerned about the betterment of the underpriviledged, or the satanicmaneuvers of the selfish planters. 

Then she realized that somebody had entered; with a slight start, sheturned, then rose. She was about the height of Foxx Travis, a few inchesshorter than Miles, and slender. Light blond; green suit costume. Sheditched her private face and got on her public one, a pleasant anddeferential smile, with a trace of uncertainty behind it. Milesintroduced Travis, and they sat down again facing the screen. 

It gave a view, from one of the long sides and near the ceiling, of abig room. In the center, a number of seats--the drum-shaped cushions thenatives had adopted in place of the seats carved from sections of treetrunk that they had been using when the Terrans had come toKwannon--were arranged in a semicircle, one in the middle slightly inadvance of the others. Facing them were three armchairs, aremote-control box beside one and another Kwann cushion behind andbetween the other two. There was a large globe of Kwannon, and on thewall behind the chairs an array of viewscreens. 

"There'll be an interpreter, a native Army sergeant, between you andCaptain Travis, " he said. "I don't know how good you are with nativelanguages, Miss Shaw; the captain is not very fluent. "

"Cushions for them, I see, and chairs for the lordly Terrans, " shecommented. "Never miss a chance to rub our superiority in, do you?"

"I never deliberately force them to adopt our ways, " he replied. "Ourchairs are as uncomfortable for them as their low seats are for us. Difference, you know, doesn't mean inferiority or superiority. It justmeans difference. "

"Well, what are you trying to do, here?"

"I'm trying to find out a little more about the psychology back ofthese frenzies and swarmings. "

"It hasn't occurred to you to look for them in the economic wrongs thesepeople are suffering at the hands of the planters and traders, Isuppose. "

"So they're committing suicide, and that's all you can call theseswarmings, and the fire-frenzies in the south, from economic motives, "Travis said. "How does one better oneself economically by dying?"

She ignored the question, which was easier than trying to answer it. 

"And why are you bothering to talk to these witch doctors? They aren'trepresentative of the native people. They're a lot of cynicalcharlatans, with a vested interest in ignorance and superstition--"

"Miss Shaw, for the past eight centuries, earnest souls have beenbewailing the fact that progress in the social sciences has alwayslagged behind progress in the physical sciences. I would suggest thatthe explanation might be in difference of approach. The physicalscientist works _with_ physical forces, even when he is trying, as inthe case of contragravity, to nullify them. The social scientist works_against_ social forces. "

"And the result's usually a miserable failure, even on thephysical-accomplishment level, " Foxx Travis added. "This storm shelterproject that was set up ten years ago and got nowhere, for instance. Ramón Gonzales set up a shelter project of his own seventy-five hoursago, and he's half through with it now. "

"Yes, by forced labor!"

"Field surgery's brutal, too, especially when the anaesthetics run out. It's better than letting your wounded die, though. "

"Well, we were talking about these shoonoon. They are a force among thenatives; that can't be denied. So, since we want to influence thenatives, why not use them?"

"Mr. Gilbert, these shoonoon are blocking everything we are trying to dofor the natives. If you use them for propaganda work in the villages, you will only increase their prestige and make it that much harder forus to better the natives' condition, both economically andculturally--"

"That's it, Miles, " Travis said. "She isn't interested in facts aboutspecific humanoid people on Kwannon. She has a lot of high-orderabstractions she got in a classroom at Adelaide on Terra. "

"No. Her idea of bettering the natives' condition is to rope in a lot ofyoung Kwanns, put them in Government schools, overload them withinformation they aren't prepared to digest, teach them to despise theirown people, and then send them out to the villages, where they behavewith such insufferable arrogance that the wonder is that so few of themstop an arrow or a charge of buckshot, instead of so many. And when thathappens, as it does occasionally, Welfare says they're murdered at theinstigation of the shoonoon. "

"You know, Miss Shaw, this isn't just the roughneck's scorn for theegghead, " Travis said. "Miles went to school on Terra, and majored inextraterrestrial sociography, and got a master's, just like you did. AtMontevideo, " he added. "And he spent two more years traveling on a Paulavon Schlicten Fellowship. "

Edith Shaw didn't say anything. She even tried desperately not to lookimpressed. It occurred to him that he'd never mentioned that fellowshipto Travis. Army Intelligence must have a pretty good _dossier_ on him. Before anybody could say anything further, a Terran captain and a nativesergeant of the First K. N. I. Came in. In the screen, the four sepoys whohad been fussing around straightening things picked up auto-carbines andposted themselves two on either side of a door across from the pickup, taking positions that would permit them to fire into whatever camethrough without hitting each other. 

What came through was one hundred and eighty-four shoonoon. Some worerobes of loose gauze strips, and some wore fire-dance cloaks of red andyellow and orange ribbons. Many were almost completely naked, but theywere all amulet-ed to the teeth. There must have been a couple of milesof brass and bright-alloy wire among them, and half a ton of brightscrap-metal, and the skulls, bones, claws, teeth, tails and othercomponents of most of the native fauna. They debouched into the bigroom, stopped, and stood looking around them. A native sergeant and acouple more sepoys followed. They got the shoonoon over to thesemicircle of cushions, having to chase a couple of them away from thesingle seat at front and center, and induced them to sit down. 

The native sergeant in the little room said something under his breath;the captain laughed. Edith Shaw gaped for an instant and said, "_Muggawsh_!" Travis simply remarked that he'd be damned. 

"They do look kind of unusual, don't they?" Miles said. "I wouldn'tdoubt that this is the biggest assemblage of shoonoon in history. Theyaren't exactly a gregarious lot. "

"Maybe this is the beginning of a new era. First meeting of the KwannonThaumaturgical Society. "

A couple more K. N. I. Privates came in with serving-tables oncontragravity floats and began passing bowls of a frozen native-fooddelicacy of which all Kwanns had become passionately fond since itsintroduction by the Terrans. He let them finish, and then, after theyhad been relieved of the empty bowls, he nodded to the K. N. I. Sergeant, who opened a door on the left. They all went through into the room theyhad been seeing in the screen. There was a stir when the shoonoon sawhim, and he heard his name, in its usual native mispronunciation, repeated back and forth. 

"You all know me, " he said, after they were seated. "Have I ever been anenemy to you or to the People?"

"No, " one of them said. "He speaks for us to the other Terrans. When weare wronged, he tries to get the wrongs righted. In times of famine hehas spoken of our troubles, and gifts of food have come while theGovernment argued about what to do. "

[Illustration]

He wished he could see Edith Shaw's face. 

"There was a sickness in our village, and my magic could not cure it, "another said. "Mailsh Heelbare gave me oomphel to cure it, and told mehow to use it. He did this privately, so that I would not be made tolook small to the people of the village. "

And that had infuriated EETA; it was a question whether unofficial helpto the natives or support of the prestige of a shoonoo had angered themmore. 

"His father was a trader; he gave good oomphel, and did not cheat. Mailsh Heelbare grew up among us; he took the Manhood Test with the boysof the village, " another oldster said. "He listened with respect to thegrandfather-stories. No, Mailsh Heelbare is not our enemy. He is ourfriend. "

"And so I will prove myself now, " he told them. "The Government is angrywith the People, but I will try to take their anger away, and in themeantime I am permitted to come here and talk with you. Here is a chiefof soldiers, and one of the Government people, and your words will beheard by the oomphel machine that remembers and repeats, for theGovernor and the Great Soldier Chief. "

They all brightened. To make a voice recording was a wonderful honor. Then one of them said:

"But what good will that do now? The Last Hot Time is here. Let us bepermitted to return to our villages, where our people need us. "

"It is of that that I wish to speak. But first of all, I must hear yourwords, and know what is in your minds. Who is the eldest among you? Lethim come forth and sit in the front, where I may speak with him. "

Then he relaxed while they argued in respectfully subdued voices. Finally one decrepit oldster, wearing a cloak of yellow ribbons andcarrying a highly obscene and ineffably sacred wooden image, was broughtforward and installed on the front-and-center cushion. He'd come fromsome village to the west that hadn't gotten the word of the swarming;Gonzales' men had snagged him while he was making crop-fertility magic. 

Miles showed him the respect due his advanced age and obviously greatmagical powers, displaying, as he did, an understanding of the regalia. 

"I have indeed lived long, " the old shoonoo replied. "I saw the Hot Timebefore; I was a child of so high. " He measured about two and a half feetoff the floor; that would make him ninety-five or thereabouts. "Iremember it. "

"Speak to us, then. Tell us of the Gone Ones, and of the Sky Fire, andof the Last Hot Time. Speak as though you alone knew these things, andas though you were teaching me. "

Delighted, the oldster whooshed a couple of times to clear his outletsand began:

"In the long-ago time, there was only the Great Spirit. The Great Spiritmade the World, and he made the People. In that time, there were no morePeople in the World than would be in one village, now. The Gone Onesdwelt among them, and spoke to them as I speak to you. Then, as morePeople were born, and died and went to join the Gone Ones, the Gone Onesbecame many, and they went away and build a place for themselves, andbuilt the Sky Fire around it, and in the Place of the Gone Ones, at themiddle of the Sky Fire, it is cool. From their place in the Sky Fire, the Gone Ones send wisdom to the people in dreams. 

"The Sky Fire passes across the sky, from east to west, as theAlways-Same does, but it is farther away than the Always-Same, becausesometimes the Always Same passes in front of it, but the Sky Fire neverpasses in front of the Always-Same. None of the grandfather-stories, noteven the oldest, tell of a time when this happened. 

"Sometimes the Sky Fire is big and bright; that is when the Gone Onesfeast and dance. Sometimes it is smaller and dimmer; then the Gone Onesrest and sleep. Sometimes it is close, and there is a Hot Time;sometimes it goes far away, and then there is a Cool Time. 

"Now, the Last Hot Time has come. The Sky Fire will come closer andcloser, and it will pass the Always-Same, and then it will burn up theWorld. Then will be a new World, and the Gone Ones will return, and thePeople will be given new bodies. When this happens, the Sky Fire will goout, and the Gone Ones will live in the World again with the People; theGone Ones will make great magic and teach wisdom as I teach to you, andwill no longer have to send dreams. In that time the crops will growwithout planting or tending or the work of women; in that time, the gamewill come into the villages to be killed in the gathering-places. Therewill be no more hunger and no more hard work, and no more of the Peoplewill die or be slain. And that time is now here, " he finished. "All thePeople know this. "

"Tell me, Grandfather; how is this known? There have been many Hot Timesbefore. Why should this one be the Last Hot Time?"

"The Terrans have come, and brought oomphel into the World, " the oldshoonoo said. "It is a sign. "

"It was not prophesied beforetime. None of the People had prophesies ofthe coming of the Terrans. I ask you, who were the father of childrenand the grandfather of children's children when the Terrans came; wasthere any such prophesy?"

The old shoonoo was silent, turning his pornographic ikon in his handsand looked at it. 

"No, " he admitted, at length. "Before the Terrans came, there were noprophesies among the People of their coming. Afterward, of course, therewere many such prophesies, but there were none before. "

"That is strange. When a happening is a sign of something to come, it isprophesied beforetime. " He left that seed of doubt alone to grow, andcontinued: "Now, Grandfather, speak to us about what the People believeconcerning the Terrans. "

"The Terrans came to the World when my eldest daughter bore her firstchild, " the old shoonoo said. "They came in great round ships, such ascome often now, but which had never before been seen. They said thatthey came from another world like the World of People, but so far awaythat even the Sky Fire could not be seen from it. They still say this, and many of the People believe it, but it is not real. 

"At first, it was thought that the Terrans were great shoonoon who madepowerful magic, but this is not real either. The Terrans have no magicand no wisdom of their own. All they have is the oomphel, and theoomphel works magic for them and teaches them their wisdom. Even in theschools which the Terrans have made for the People, it is the oomphelwhich teaches. " He went on to describe, not too incorrectly, thereading-screens and viewscreens and audio-visual equipment. "Nor do theTerrans make the oomphel, as they say. The oomphel makes more oomphelfor them. "

"Then where did the Terrans get the first oomphel?"

"They stole it from the Gone Ones, " the old shoonoo replied. "The GoneOnes make it in their place in the middle of the Sky Fire, forthemselves and to give to the People when they return. The Terrans stoleit from them. For this reason, there is much hatred of the Terrans amongthe People. The Terrans live in the Dark Place, under the World, wherethe Sky Fire and the Always-Same go when they are not in the sky. It isthere that the Terrans get the oomphel from the Gone Ones, and now theyhave come to the World, and they are using oomphel to hold back theSky-Fire and keep it beyond the Always-Same so that the Last Hot Timewill not come and the Gone Ones will not return. For this reason, too, there is much hatred of the Terrans among the People. "

"Grandfather, if this were real there would be good reason for suchhatred, and I would be ashamed for what my people had done and weredoing. But it is not real. " He had to rise and hold up his hands toquell the indignant outcry "Have any of you known me to tell not-realthings and try to make the People act as though they were real? Thentrust me in this. I will show you real things, which you will all see, and I will give you great secrets, which it is now time for you to haveand use for the good of the People. Even the greatest secret, " he added. 

There was a pause of a few seconds. Then they burst out, in a hundredand eighty-four--no, three hundred and sixty eight--voices:

_"The Oomphel Secret, Mailsh Heelbare?"_

He nodded slowly. "Yes. The Oomphel Secret will be given. "

He leaned back and relaxed again while they were getting over theexcitement. Foxx Travis looked at him apprehensively. 

"Rushing things, aren't you? What are you going to tell them?"

"Oh, a big pack of lies, I suppose, " Edith Shaw said scornfully. 

Behind her and Travis, the native noncom interpreter was mutteringsomething in his own language that translated roughly as: "This betterbe good!"

The shoonoon had quieted, now, and were waiting breathlessly. 

"But if the Oomphel Secret is given, what will become of the shoonoon?"he asked. "You, yourselves, say that we Terrans have no need for magic, because the oomphel works magic for us. This is real. If the People getthe Oomphel Secret, how much need will they have for you shoonoon?"

Evidently that hadn't occurred to them before. There was a brief flurryof whispered--whooshed, rather--conversation, and then they were silentagain. The eldest shoonoo said:

"We trust you, Mailsh Heelbare. You will do what is best for the People, and you will not let us be thrown out like broken pots, either. "

"No, I will not, " he promised. "The Oomphel Secret will be given to youshoonoon. " He thought for a moment of Foxx Travis' joking remark aboutthe Kwannon Thaumaturgical Society. "You have been jealous of oneanother, each keeping his own secrets, " he said. "This must be put away. You will all receive the Oomphel Secret equally, for the good of all thePeople. You must all swear brotherhood, one with another, and later ifany other shoonoo comes to you for the secret, you must swearbrotherhood with him and teach it to him. Do you agree to this?"

The eldest shoonoo rose to his feet, begged leave, and then led theothers to the rear of the room, where they went into a huddle. Theydidn't stay huddled long; inside of ten minutes they came back and tooktheir seats. 

"We are agreed, Mailsh Heelbare, " the spokesman said. 

Edith Shaw was impressed, more than by anything else she had seen. "Well, that was a quick decision!" she whispered. 

"You have done well, Grandfathers. You will not be thrown out by thePeople like broken pots; you will be greater among them than ever. Iwill show you how this will be. 

"But first, I must speak around the Oomphel Secret. " He groped brieflyfor a comprehensible analogy, and thought of a native vegetable, layeredlike an onion, with a hard kernel in the middle. "The Oomphel Secret islike a fooshkoot. There are many lesser secrets around it, each of whichmust be peeled off like the skins of a fooshkoot and eaten. Then youwill find the nut in the middle. "

"But the nut of the fooshkoot is bitter, " somebody said. 

He nodded, slowly and solemnly. "The nut of the fooshkoot is bitter, " heagreed. 

They looked at one another, disquieted by his words. Before anybodycould comment, he was continuing:

"Before this secret is given, there are things to be learned. You wouldnot understand it if I gave it to you now. You believe many not-realthings which must be chased out of your minds, otherwise they wouldspoil your understanding. "

That was verbatim what they told adolescents before giving them theManhood Secret. Some of them huffed a little; most of them laughed. Thenone called out: "Speak on, Grandfather of Grandfathers, " and they alllaughed. That was fine, it had been about time for teacher to crack hislittle joke. Now he became serious again. 

"The first of these not-real things you must chase from your mind isthis which you believe about the home of the Terrans. It is not realthat they come from the Dark Place under the World. There is no DarkPlace under the World. "

Bedlam for a few seconds; that was a pretty stiff jolt. No Dark Place;who ever heard of such a thing? The eldest shoonoo rose, cradling hisgraven image in his arms, and the noise quieted. 

"Mailsh Heelbare, if there is no Dark Place where do the Sky Fire andthe Always-Same go when they are not in the sky?"

"They never leave the sky; the World is round, and there is skyeverywhere around it. "

They knew that, or had at least heard it, since the Terrans had come. They just couldn't believe it. It was against common sense. The oldestshoonoo said as much, and more:

"These young ones who have gone to the Terran schools have come to thevillages with such tales, but who listens to them? They show disrespectfor the chiefs and the elders, and even for the shoonoon. They mock atthe Grandfather-stories. They say men should do women's work and womendo no work at all. They break taboos, and cause trouble. They arefools. "

"Am I a fool, Grandfather? Do I mock at the old stories, or showdisrespect to elders and shoonoon? Yet I, Mailsh Heelbare, tell youthis. The World is indeed round, and I will show you. "

The shoonoo looked contemptuously at the globe. "I have seen thosethings, " he said. "That is not the World; that is only a make-like. " Heheld up his phallic wood-carving. "I could say that this is a make-likeof the World, but that would not make it so. "

"I will show you for real. We will all go in a ship. " He looked at hiswatch. "The Sky Fire is about to set. We will follow it all around theworld to the west, and come back here from the east, and the Sky Firewill still be setting when we return. If I show you that, will youbelieve me?"

"If you show us for real, and it is not a trick, we will have to believeyou. "

When they emerged from the escalators, Alpha was just touching thewestern horizon, and Beta was a little past zenith. The ship was mooredon contragravity beside the landing stage, her gangplank run out. Theshoonoon, who had gone up ahead, had all stopped short and were staringat her; then they began gabbling among themselves, overcome by thewonder of being about to board such a monster and ride on her. She wasthe biggest ship any of them had ever seen. Maybe a few of them had beenon small freighters; many of them had never been off the ground. Theydidn't look or act like cynical charlatans or implacable enemies ofprogress and enlightenment. They were more like a lot of schoolboyswhose teacher is taking them on a surprise outing. 

"Bet this'll be the biggest day in their lives, " Travis said. 

"Oh, sure. This'll be a grandfather-story ten generations from now. "

"I can't get over the way they made up their minds, down there, " EdithShaw was saying. "Why, they just went and talked for a few minutes andcame back with a decision. "

They hadn't any organization, or any place to maintain on anorganizational pecking-order. Nobody was obliged to attack anybodyelse's proposition in order to keep up his own status. He thought of theColonial Government taking ten years not to build those storm-shelters. 

Foxx Travis was commenting on the ship, now:

"I never saw that ship before; didn't know there was anything like thaton the planet. Why, you could lift a whole regiment, with supplies andequipment--"

"She's been laid up for the last five years, since the heat and thenative troubles stopped the tourist business here. She's the old_Hesperus_. Excursion craft. This sun-chasing trip we're going to makeused to be a must for tourists here. "

"I thought she was something like that, with all the glassedobservation deck forward. Who's the owner?"

"Kwannon Air Transport, Ltd. I told them what I needed her for, and theymade her available and furnished officers and crew and provisions forthe trip. They were working to put her in commission while we werefitting up the fourth and fifth floors, downstairs. "

"You just asked for that ship, and they just let you have it?" EdithShaw was incredulous and shocked. They wouldn't have done that for theGovernment. 

"They want to see these native troubles stopped, too. Bad for business. You know; selfish profit-move. That's another social force it's a goodidea to work with instead of against. "

The shoonoon were getting aboard, now, shepherded by the K. N. I. Officerand a couple of his men and some of the ship's crew. A couple of sepoyswere lugging the big globe that had been brought up from below afterthem. Everybody assembled on the forward top observation deck, and Milescalled for attention and, finally, got it. He pointed out the threeviewscreens mounted below the bridge, amidships. One on the left, wastuned to a pickup on the top of the Air Terminal tower, where the Terrancity, the military reservation and the spaceport met. It showed the viewto the west, with Alpha on the horizon. The one on the right, from thesame point, gave a view in the opposite direction, to the east. Themiddle screen presented a magnified view of the navigational globe onthe bridge. 

Viewscreens were no novelty to the shoonoon. They were a very familiartype of oomphel. He didn't even need to do more than tell them that thelittle spot of light on the globe would show the position of the ship. When he was sure that they understood that they could see what washappening in Bluelake while they were away, he called the bridge andordered Up Ship, telling the officer on duty to hold her at fivethousand feet. 

The ship rose slowly, turning toward the setting M-giant. Somebodycalled attention that the views in the screens weren't changing. Somebody else said:

"Of course not. What we see for real changes because the ship is moving. What we see in the screens is what the oomphel on the big building sees, and it does not move. That is for real as the oomphel sees it. "

"Nice going, " Edith said. "Your class has just discovered relativity. "Travis was looking at the eastward viewscreen. He stepped over besideMiles and lowered his voice. 

"Trouble over there to the east of town. Big swarm of combatcontragravity working on something on the ground. And something's onfire, too. "

"I see it. "

"That's where those evacuees are camped. Why in blazes they had to bringthem here to Bluelake--"

That had been EETA, too. When the solar tides had gotten high enough toflood the coastal area, the natives who had been evacuated from thedistrict had been brought here because the Native Education peoplewanted them exposed to urban influences. About half of the shoonoon whohad been rounded up locally had come in from the tide-inundated area. 

"Parked right in the middle of the Terran-type food production area, "Travis was continuing. 

That was worrying him. Maybe he wasn't used to planets where thebiochemistry wasn't Terra-type and a Terran would be poisoned or, atbest, starve to death, on the local food; maybe, as a soldier he knewhow fragile even the best logistics system can be. It was something toworry about. Travis excused himself and went off in the direction of thebridge. Going to call HQ and find out what was happening. 

Excitement among the shoonoon; they had spotted the ship on which theywere riding in the westward screen. They watched it until it hadvanished from "sight of the seeing-oomphel, " and by then were over theupland forests from whence they had been brought to Bluelake. Now andthen one of them would identify his own village, and that would startmore excitement. 

Three infantry troop-carriers and a squadron of air cavalry were rushingpast the eastward pickup in the right hand screen; another fire hadstarted in the trouble area. 

The crowd that had gathered around the globe that had been broughtaboard began calling for Mailsh Heelbare to show them how they would goaround the world and what countries they would pass over. Edithaccompanied him and listened while he talked to them. She was bubblingwith happy excitement, now. It had just dawned on her that shoonoon werefun. 

None of them had ever seen the mountains along the western side of thecontinent except from a great distance. Now they were passing over them;the ship had to gain altitude and even then make a detour around onesnow-capped peak. The whole hundred and eighty-four rushed to thestarboard side to watch it as they passed. The ocean, half an hourlater, started a rush forward. The score or so of them from theTidewater knew what an ocean was, but none of them had known that therewas another one to the west. Miles' view of the education program of theEETA, never bright at best, became even dimmer. _The young men who havegone to the Terran schools . .. Who listens to them? They are fools. _

There were a few islands off the coast; the shoonoon identified them onthe screen globe, and on the one on deck. Some of them wanted to knowwhy there wasn't a spot of light on this globe, too. It didn't have theoomphel inside to do that; that was a satisfactory explanation. Edithstarted to explain about the orbital beacon-stations off-planet and theradio beams, and then stopped. 

"I'm sorry; I'm not supposed to say anything to them, " she apologized. 

"Oh, that's all right. I wouldn't go into all that, though. We don'twant to overload them. "

She asked permission, a little later, to explain why the triangle tipof the arctic continent, which had begun to edge into sight on thescreen globe, couldn't be seen from the ship. When he told her to goahead, she got a platinum half-sol piece from her purse, held it on theglobe from the classroom and explained about the curvature and told themthey could see nothing farther away than the circle the coin covered. Itwas beginning to look as though the psychological-warfare experimentmight show another, unexpected, success. 

[Illustration]

There was nothing, after the islands passed, but a lot of empty water. The shoonoon were getting hungry, but they refused to go below to eat. They were afraid they might miss something. So their dinner was broughtup on deck for them. Miles and Travis and Edith went to the officers'dining room back of the bridge. Edith, by now, was even more excitedthan the shoonoon. 

"They're so anxious to learn!" She was having trouble adjusting to that;that was dead against EETA doctrine. "But why wouldn't they listen tothe teachers we sent to the villages?"

"You heard old Shatresh--the fellow with the pornographic sculpture andthe yellow robe. These young twerps act like fools, and sensible peopledon't pay any attention to fools. What's more, they've been sent outindoctrinated with the idea that shoonoon are a lot of lying old fakes, and the shoonoon resent that. You know, they're not lying old fakes. Within their limitations, they are honest and ethical professionalpeople. "

"Oh, come, now! I know, I think they're sort of wonderful, but let'sdon't give them too much credit. "

"I'm not. You're doing that. "

"_Huh?_" She looked at him in amazement. "Me?"

"Yes, you. You know better than to believe in magic, so you expect themto know better, too. Well, they don't. You know that under themacroscopic world-of-the senses there exists a complex of biological, chemical and physical phenomena down to the subnucleonic level. Theyrealize that there must be something beyond what they can see andhandle, but they think it's magic. Well, as a race, so did we until onlya few centuries pre-atomic. These people are still lower Neolithic, ahunting people who have just learned agriculture. Where we were twentythousand years ago. 

"You think any glib-talking Kwann can hang a lot of rags, bones and oldiron onto himself, go through some impromptu mummery, and set up asshoonoo? Well, he can't. The shoonoon are a hereditary caste. A shoonoofather will begin teaching his son as soon as he can walk and talk, andhe keeps on teaching him till he's the age-equivalent of a graduate M. D. Or a science Ph. D. "

"Well, what all is there to learn--?"

"The theoretical basis and practical applications of sympathetic magic. Action-at-a-distance by one object upon another. Homeopathic magic: theprinciple that things which resemble one another will interact. Forinstance, there's an animal the natives call a shynph. It has anexcrescence of horn on its brow like an arrowhead, and it arches itsback like a bow when it jumps. Therefore, a shynph is equal to a bow andarrow, and for that reason the Kwanns made their bowstrings out ofshynph-gut. Now they use tensilon because it won't break as easily orget wet and stretch. So they have to turn the tensilon into shynph-gut. They used to do that by drawing a picture of a shynph on the spool, andthen the traders began labeling the spools with pictures of shynph. Ithink my father was one of the first to do that. 

"Then, there's contagious magic. Anything that's been part of anythingelse or come in contact with it will interact permanently with it. Iwish I had a sol for every time I've seen a Kwann pull the wad out of ashot-shell, pick up a pinch of dirt from the footprint of some animalhe's tracking, put it in among the buckshot, and then crimp the wad inagain. 

"Everything a Kwann does has some sort of magical implications. It'sthe shoonoo's business to know all this; to be able to tell just whatmagical influences have to be produced, and what influences must beavoided. And there are circumstances in which magic simply will notwork, even in theory. The reason is that there is some powerfulcounter-influence at work. He has to know when he can't use magic, andhe has to be able to explain why. And when he's theoretically able to dosomething by magic, he has to have a plausible explanation why it won'tproduce results--just as any highly civilized and ethical Terran M. D. Has to be able to explain his failures to the satisfaction of his latepatient's relatives. Only a shoonoo doesn't get sued for malpractice; hegets a spear stuck in him. Under those circumstances, a caste ofhereditary magicians is literally bred for quick thinking. These oldgaffers we have aboard are the intellectual top crust among the natives. Any of them can think rings around your Government school products. Asfor preying on the ignorance and credulity of the other natives, they'reonly infinitesimally less ignorant and credulous themselves. But theywant to learn--from anybody who can gain their respect by respectingthem. "

Edith Shaw didn't say anything in reply. She was thoughtful during therest of the meal, and when they were back on the observation deck henoticed that she seemed to be looking at the shoonoon with new eyes. 

In the screen-views of Bluelake, Beta had already set, and the sky wasfading; stars had begun to twinkle. There were more fires--one, close tothe city in the east, a regular conflagration--and fighting had brokenout in the native city itself. He was wishing now, that he hadn'tthought it necessary to use those screens. The shoonoon were noticingwhat was going on in them, and talking among themselves. Travis, afterone look at the situation, hurried back to the bridge to make ascreen-call. After a while, he returned, almost crackling withsuppressed excitement. 

"Well, it's finally happened! Maith's forced Kovac to declare martialrule!" he said in an exultant undertone. 

"Forced him?" Edith was puzzled. "The Army can't force the CivilGovernment--"

"He threatened to do it himself. Intervene and suspend civil rule. "

"But I thought only the Navy could do that. "

"Any planetary commander of Armed Forces can, in a state of extremeemergency. I think you'll both agree that this emergency is about asextreme as they come. Kovac knew that Maith was unwilling to do it--he'dhave to stand court-martial to justify his action--but he also knew thata governor general who has his Colony taken away from him by the ArmedForces never gets it back; he's finished. So it was just a case of theweaker man in the weaker position yielding. "

"Where does this put us?"

"We are a civilian scientific project. You are under orders of GeneralMaith. I am under your orders. I don't know about Edith. "

"Can I draft her, or do I have to get you to get General Maith to doit?"

"Listen, don't do that, " Edith protested. "I still have to work forGovernment House, and this martial rule won't last forever. They'll allbe prejudiced against me--"

"You can shove your Government job on the air lock, " Miles told her. "You'll have a better one with Planetwide News, at half again as muchpay. And after the shakeup at Government House, about a year from now, you may be going back as director of EETA. When they find out on Terrajust how badly this Government has been mismanaging things there'll be alot of vacancies. "

The shoonoon had been watching the fighting in the viewscreens. Thensomebody noticed that the spot of light on the navigational globe wasapproaching a coastline, and they all rushed forward for a look. 

Travis and Edith slept for a while; when they returned to relieve him, Alpha was rising to the east of Bluelake, and the fighting in the citywas still going on. The shoonoon were still wakeful and interested;Kwanns could go without sleep for much longer periods than Terrans. Thelack of any fixed cycle of daylight and darkness on their planet hadleft them unconditioned to any regular sleeping-and-waking rhythm. 

"I just called in, " Travis said. "Things aren't good, at all. Most ofthe natives in the evacuee cantonments have gotten into the native city, now, and they've gotten hold of a lot of firearms somehow. And they'regetting nasty in the west, beyond where Gonzales is occupying, and inthe northeast, and we only have about half enough troops to cope witheverything. The general wants to know how you're making out with theshoonoon. "

"I'll call him before I get in the sack. "

He went up on the bridge and made the call. General Maith looked assleepy as he felt; they both yawned as they greeted each other. Therewasn't much he could tell the general, and it sounded like the glibreassurances one gets from a hospital about a friend's condition. 

"We'll check in with you as soon as we get back and get our shoonoon putaway. We understand what's motivating these frenzies, now, and in abouttwenty-five to thirty hours we'll be able to start doing something aboutit. "

The general, in the screen, grimaced. 

"That's a long time, Mr. Gilbert. Longer than we can afford to take, I'mafraid. You're not cruising at full speed now, are you?"

"Oh, no, general. We're just trying to keep Alpha level on the horizon. "He thought for a moment. "We don't need to keep down to that. It maymake an even bigger impression if we speed up. "

He went back to the observation deck, picked up the PA-phone, and calledfor attention. 

"You have seen, now, that we can travel around the world, so fast thatwe keep up with the Sky Fire and it is not seen to set. Now we willtravel even faster, and I will show you a new wonder. I will show youthe Sky Fire rising in the west; it and the Always-Same will seem to gobackward in the sky. This will not be for real; it will only be seen sobecause we will be traveling faster. Watch, now, and see. " He called thebridge for full speed, and then told them to look at the Sky-Fire andthen see in the screens where it stood over Bluelake. 

That was even better; now they were racing with the Sky-Fire andcatching up to it. After half an hour he left them still excited andwhooping gleefully over the steady gain. Five hours later, when he cameback after a nap and a hasty breakfast, they were still whooping. EdithShaw was excited, too; the shoonoon were trying to estimate how soonthey would be back to Bluelake by comparing the position of the Sky Firewith its position in the screen. 

General Maith received them in his private office at Army HQ; FoxxTravis mixed drinks for the four of them while the general checked themicrophones to make sure they had privacy. 

"I blame myself for not having forced martial rule on them hundreds ofhours ago, " he said. "I have three brigades; the one General Gonzaleshad here originally, and the two I brought with me when I took overhere. We have to keep at least half a brigade in the south, to keep thetribes there from starting any more forest fires. I can't hold Bluelakewith anything less than half a brigade. Gonzales has his hands full inhis area. He had a nasty business while you were off on that worldcruise--natives in one village caught the men stationed there off guardand wiped them out, and then started another frenzy. It spread to twoother villages before he got it stopped. And we need the Third Brigadein the northeast; there are three quarters of a million natives upthere, inhabiting close to a million square miles. And if anythingreally breaks loose here, and what's been going on in the last few daysis nothing even approaching what a real outbreak could be like, we'llhave to pull in troops from everywhere. We must save the Terran-typecrops and the carniculture plants. If we don't, we all starve. "

Miles nodded. There wasn't anything he could think of saying to that. 

"How soon can you begin to show results with those shoonoon, Mr. Gilbert?" the general asked. "You said from twenty-five to thirty hours. Can you cut that any? In twenty-five hours, all hell could be loose allover the continent. "

Miles shook his head. "So far, I haven't accomplished anythingpositive, " he said. "All I did with this trip around the world wasconvince them that I was telling the truth when I told them there was noDark Place under the World, where Alpha and Beta go at night. " Hehastened, as the general began swearing, to add: "I know, that doesn'tsound like much. But it was necessary. I have to convince them thatthere will be no Last Hot Time, and then--"

The shoonoon, on their drum-shaped cushions, stared at him in silence, aghast. All the happiness over the wonderful trip in the ship, when theyhad chased the Sky Fire around the World and caught it over Bluelake, and even their pleasure in the frozen delicacies they had just eaten, was gone. 

_"No--Last--Hot--Time?"_

"Mailsh Heelbare, this is not real! It cannot be!"

"The Gone Ones--"

"The Always-Cool Time, when there will be no more hunger or hard work ordeath; it cannot be real that this will never come!"

He rose, holding up his hands; his action stopped the clamor. 

"Why should the Gone Ones want to return to this poor world that theyhave gladly left?" he asked. "Have they not a better place in the middleof the Sky Fire, where it is always cool? And why should you want themto come back to this world? Will not each one of you pass, sooner orlater, to the middle of the Sky Fire; will you not there be given newbodies and join the Gone Ones? There is the Always-Cool; there the cropsgrow without planting and without the work of women; there the game comeinto the villages to be killed in the gathering-places, without hunting. There you will talk with the other Gone Ones, your fathers and yourfathers' fathers, as I talk with you. Why do you think this must come tothe World of People? Can you not wait to join the Gone Ones in the SkyFire?"

Then he sat down and folded his arms. They were looking at him inamazement; evidently they all saw the logic, but none of them had everthought of it before. Now they would have to turn it over in their mindsand accustom themselves to the new viewpoint. They began whooshing amongthemselves. At length, old Shatresh, who had seen the Hot Time before, spoke:

"Mailsh Heelbare, we trust you, " he said. "You have told us of wonders, and you have shown us that they were real. But do you know this forreal?"

"Do you tell me that you do not?" he demanded in surprise. "You have hadfathers, and fathers' fathers. They have gone to join the Gone Ones. Whyshould you not, also? And why should the Gone Ones come back and destroythe World of People? Then your children will have no more children, andyour children's children will never be. It is in the World of Peoplethat the People are born; it is in the World that they grow and gainwisdom to fit themselves to live in the Place of the Gone Ones when theyare through with the bodies they use in the World. You should be happythat there will be no Last Hot Time, and that the line of yourbegettings will go on and not be cut short. "

There were murmurs of agreement with this. Most of them were beginningto be relieved that there wouldn't be a Last Hot Time, after all. Thenone of the class asked:

"Do the Terrans also go to the Place of the Gone Ones, or have they aplace of their own?"

He was silent for a long time, looking down at the floor. Then he raisedhis head. 

"I had hoped that I would not have to speak of this, " he said. "But, since you have asked, it is right that I should tell you. " He hesitatedagain, until the Kwanns in front of him had begun to fidget. Then heasked old Shatresh: "Speak of the beliefs of the People about how theWorld was made. "

"The great Spirit made the world. " He held up his carven obscenity. "Hemade the World out of himself. This is a make-like to show it. "

"The Great Spirit made many worlds. The stars which you see in dark-timeare all worlds, each with many smaller worlds around it. The GreatSpirit made them all at one time, and made people on many of them. TheGreat Spirit made the World of People, and made the Always-Same and theSky Fire, and inside the Sky Fire he made the Place of the Gone Ones. And when he made the Place of the Gone Ones, he put an Oomphel-Motherinside it, to bring forth oomphel. "

This created a brief sensation. An Oomphel-Mother was something they hadnever thought of before, but now they were wondering why they hadn't. Ofcourse there'd be an Oomphel-Mother; how else would there be oomphel?

"The World of the Terrans is far away from the World of People, as wehave always told you. When the Great Spirit made it He gave it only anAlways-Same, and no Sky Fire. Since there was no Sky Fire, there was noplace to put a Place of the Gone Ones, so the Great Spirit made theTerrans so that they would not die, but live forever in their ownbodies. The Oomphel-Mother for the World of the Terrans the Great Spirithid in a cave under a great mountain. 

"The Terrans whom the Great Spirit made lived for a long time, and then, one day, a man and a woman found a crack in a rock, and went inside, andthey found the cave of the Oomphel-Mother, and the Oomphel-Mother in it. So they called all the other Terrans, and they brought theOomphel-Mother out, and the Oomphel-Mother began to bring forth Oomphel. The Oomphel-Mother brought forth metal, and cloth, and glass, andplastic; knives, and axes and guns and clothing--" He went on, cataloguing the products of human technology, the shoonoon staring moreand more wide-eyed at him. "And oomphel to make oomphel, and oomphel toteach wisdom, " he finished. "They became very wise and very rich. 

"Then the Great Spirit saw what the Terrans had done, and became angry, for it was not meant for the Terrans to do this, and the Great Spiritcursed the Terrans with a curse of death. It was not death as you knowit. Because the Terrans had sinned by laying hands on theOomphel-Mother, not only their bodies must die, but their spirits also. A Terran has a short life in the body, after that no life. "

"This, then, is the Oomphel Secret. The last skin of the fooshkoot hasbeen peeled away; behold the bitter nut, upon which we Terrans havechewed for more time than anybody can count. Happy people! When you dieor are slain, you go to the Place of the Gone Ones, to join your fathersand your fathers' fathers and to await your children and children'schildren. When we die or are slain, that is the end of us. "

[Illustration]

"But you have brought your oomphel into this world; have you not broughtthe curse with it?" somebody asked, frightened. 

"No. The People did not sin against the Great Spirit; they have not laidhands on an Oomphel-Mother as we did. The oomphel we bring you will dono harm; do you think we would be so wicked as to bring the curse uponyou? It will be good for you to learn about oomphel here; in your Placeof the Gone Ones there is much oomphel. "

"Why did your people come to this world, Mailsh Heelbare?" old Shatreshasked. "Was it to try to hide from the curse?"

"There is no hiding from the curse of the Great Spirit, but we Terransare not a people who submit without strife to any fate. From the time ofthe Curse of Death on, we have been trying to make spirits forourselves. "

"But how can you do that?"

"We do not know. The oomphel will not teach us that, though it teacheseverything else. We have only learned many ways in which it cannot bedone. It cannot be done with oomphel, or with anything that is in ourown world. But the Oomphel-Mother made us ships to go to other worlds, and we have gone to many of them, this one among them, seeking thingsfrom which we try to make spirits. We are trying to make spirits forourselves from the crystals that grow in the klooba plants; we may failwith them, too. But I say this; I may die, and all the other Terrans nowliving may die, and be as though they had never been, but someday wewill not fail. Someday our children, or our children's children, willmake spirits for themselves and live forever, as you do. "

[Illustration]

"Why were we not told this before, Mailsh Heelbare?"

"We were ashamed to have you know it. We are ashamed to be peoplewithout spirits. "

"Can we help you and your people? Maybe our magic might help. "

"It well might. It would be worth trying. But first, you must helpyourselves. You and your people are sinning against the Great Spirit asgrievously as did the Terrans of old. Be warned in time, lest you answerit as grievously. "

"What do you mean, Mailsh Heelbare?" Old Shatresh was frightened. 

"You are making magic to bring the Sky Fire to the World. Do you knowwhat will happen? The World of People will pass whole into the place ofthe Gone Ones, and both will be destroyed. The World of People is aworld of death; everything that lives on it must die. The Place of theGone Ones is a world of life; everything in it lives forever. The twowill strive against each other, and will destroy one another, and therewill be nothing in the Sky Fire or the World but fire. This is wisdomwhich our oomphel teaches us. We know this secret, and with it we makeweapons of great destruction. " He looked over the seated shoonoon, picking out those who wore the flame-colored cloaks of the fire-dance. "You--and you--and you, " he said. "You have been making this dreadfulmagic, and leading your people in it. And which among the rest of youhave not been guilty?"

"We did not know, " one of them said. "Mailsh Heelbare, have we yet timeto keep this from happening?"

"Yes. There is only a little time, but there is time. You have untilthe Always-Same passes across the face of the Sky-Fire. " That would beseven hundred and fifty hours. "If this happens, all is safe. If the SkyFire blots Out the Always Same, we are all lost together. You must goamong your people and tell them what madness they are doing, and commandthem to stop. You must command them to lay down their arms and ceasefighting. And you must tell them of the awful curse that was put uponthe Terrans in the long-ago time, for a lesser sin than they are nowcommitting. "

"If we say that Mailsh Heelbare told us this, the people may not believeus. He is not known to all, and some would take no Terran's word, noteven his. "

"Would anybody tell a secret of this sort, about his own people, if itwere not real?"

"We had better say nothing about Mailsh Heelbare. We will say that theGone Ones told us in dreams. "

"Let us say that the Great Spirit sent a dream of warning to each ofus, " another shoonoo said. "There has been too much talk about dreamsfrom the Gone Ones already. "

"But the Great Spirit has never sent a dream--"

"Nothing like this has ever happened before, either. "

He rose, and they were silent. "Go to your living-place, now, " he toldthem. "Talk of how best you may warn your people. " He pointed to theclock. "You have an oomphel like that in your living-place; when theshorter spear has moved three places, I will speak with you again, andthen you will be sent in air cars to your people to speak to them. "

They went up the escalator and down the hall to Miles' office on thethird floor without talking. Foxx Travis was singing softly, almostinaudibly:

 _"You will eeeeat . .. In the sweeeet . .. Bye-and-bye, You'll get oooom . .. Phel in the sky . .. When you die!"_

Inside, Edith Shaw slumped dispiritedly in a chair. Foxx Travis went tothe coffee-maker and started it. Miles snapped on the communicationscreen and punched the combination of General Maith's headquarters. Assoon as the uniformed girl who appeared in it saw him, her hands movedquickly; the screen flickered, and the general appeared in it. 

"We have it made, general. They're sold; we're ready to start them outin three hours. "

Maith's thin, weary face suddenly lighted. "You mean they are going toco-operate?"

He shook his head. "They think they're saving the world; they thinkwe're co-operating with them. "

The general laughed. "That's even better! How do you want them sentout?"

"The ones in the Bluelake area first. Better have some picked K. N. I. Innative costume, with pistols, to go with them. They'll need protection, till they're able to get a hearing for themselves. After they're allout, the ones from Gonzales' area can be started. " He thought for amoment. "I'll want four or five of them left here to help me when youstart bringing more shoonoon in from other areas. How soon do you thinkyou'll have another class for me?"

"Two or three days, if everything goes all right. We have the villagesand plantations in the south under pretty tight control now; we canstart gathering them up right away. As soon as we get things stabilizedhere, we can send reinforcements to the north. We'll have transport foryou in three hours. "

The general blanked out. He turned from the screen. Travis was laughinghappily. 

"Miles, did anybody ever tell you you were a genius?" he asked. "Thatlast jolt you gave them was perfect. Why didn't you tell us about it inadvance?"

"I didn't know about it in advance; I didn't think of it till I'dstarted talking to them. No cream or sugar for me. "

"Cream, " Edith said, lifelessly. "Why did you do it? Why didn't you justtell them the truth?"

Travis asked her to define the term. She started to say something bitterabout Jesting Pilate. Miles interrupted. 

"In spite of Lord Beacon, Pilate wasn't jesting, " he said. "And hedidn't stay for an answer because he knew he'd die of old age waitingfor one. What kind of truth should I have told them?"

"Why, what you started to tell them. That Beta moves in a fixed orbitand can't get any closer to Alpha--"

"There's been some work done on the question since Pilate's time, "Travis said. "My semantics prof at Command College had the start of ananswer. He defined truth as a statement having a practicalcorrespondence with reality on the physical levels of structure andobservation and the verbal order of abstraction under consideration. "

"He defined truth as a statement. A statement exists only in the mind ofthe person making it, and the mind of the person to whom it is made. Ifthe person to whom it is made can't understand or accept it, it isn'tthe truth. "

"They understood when you showed them that the planet is round, and theyunderstood that tri-dimensional model of the system. Why didn't you letit go at that?"

"They accepted it intellectually. But when I told them that there wasn'tany chance of Kwannon getting any closer to Alpha, they rebelledemotionally. It doesn't matter how conclusively you prove anything, ifthe person to whom you prove it can't accept your proof emotionally, it's still false. Not-real. "

"They had all their emotional capital invested in this Always-CoolTime, " Travis told her. "They couldn't let Miles wipe that out for them. So he shifted it from this world to the next, and convinced them thatthey were getting a better deal that way. You saw how quickly theypicked it up. And he didn't have the sin of telling children there is noEaster Bunny on his conscience, either. "

"But why did you tell them that story about the Oomphel Mother?" sheinsisted. "Now they'll go out and tell all the other natives, andthey'll believe it. "

"Would they have believed it if I'd told them about Terran scientifictechnology? Your people have been doing that for close to half acentury. You see what impression it's made. "

"But you told them--You told them that Terrans have no souls!"

"Can you prove that was a lie?" Travis asked. "Let's see yours. Draw--_soul_! Inspection--_soul_!"

Naturally. Foxx Travis would expect a soul to be carried in a holster. 

"But they'll look down on us, now. They'll say we're just like animals, "Edith almost wailed. 

"Now it comes out, " Travis said. "We won't be the lordly Terrans, anymore, helping the poor benighted Kwanns out of the goodness of ourhearts, scattering largess, bearing the Terran's Burden--new model, agive-away instead of a gun. Now _they'll_ pity _us_; they'll think_we're_ inferior beings. "

"I don't think the natives are inferior beings!" She was almost intears. 

"If you don't, why did you come all the way to Kwannon to try to makethem more like Terrans?"

"Knock it off, Foxx; stop heckling her. " Travis looked faintlysurprised. Maybe he hadn't realized, before, that a boss newsman learnsto talk like a commanding officer. "You remember what Ramón Gonzales wassaying, out at Sanders', about the inferior's hatred for the superior assuperior? It's no wonder these Kwanns resent us. They have a right to;we've done them all an unforgivable injury. We've let them see us doingthings they can't do. Of course they resent us. But now I've given themsomething to feel superior about. When they die, they'll go to the Placeof the Gone Ones, and have oomphel in the sky, and they will liveforever in new bodies, but when we die, we just die, period. So they'llpity us and politely try to hide their condescension toward us. 

"And because they feel superior to us, they'll want to help us. They'llwork hard on the plantations, so that we can have plenty of biocrystals, and their shoonoon will work magic for us, to help us poor benightedTerrans to grow souls for ourselves, so that we can almost be like them. Of course, they'll have a chance to exploit us, and get oomphel from us, too, but the important thing will be to help the poor Terrans. Maybethey'll even organize a Spiritual and Magical Assistance Agency. "

THE END

+---------------------------------------------------------------+| || Errata || || The following typographical errors, which occurred once each, || were corrected in the text. || || || radiaion radiation || plan planet || Biocrysal Biocrystal || Trans-Sapce Trans-Space || institigation instigation || then than || phalic phallic || no not || tide-innundated tide-inundated || ox-planet off-planet || infinitesmally infinitesimally || makelike make-like || |+---------------------------------------------------------------+