Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

the shoulder. In that the victim

118 James Blish

had been lucky, for a high-velocity missile can kill a man from shock alone,

no matter where it hits him.

Two nights later one of the cattle was dead of the same cause, shot all the

way through the chest. A bigger and faster missile, this time; but no other

clues.

“We will make the obvious assumption,” Ertak said grimly. “There are no

safer ones to make. That is, that there are intelligent natives here after

all-without electricity, but with enough brains to construct missile

weapons of relatively low velocity and accuracy-and that they’re keeping

under cover and sniping at us. I want a doubled guard, and a twenty-four-

hour infra-red watch from the bridge of the Javelin; also radar, sonar,

trip-wires, the works. If anyone sees a native, notify headquarters first;

I’d rather catch one than kill one.”

Within a day, the camp was in a state of siege. Within a week, a woman on

the agronomy team was creased lightly across the back. Two weeks later, an

officer on temporary duty as a lineman, as jorn had been when be bad met

the stuffed tiger, was kiRed, a hole driven right through his skull; it

took most of the day to get his body out of the tree in which he had been

working, but it did not tell them anything they did not know already. Then

there was a lull, which lasted more than a month. It ended when the woman

who had sustained the back crease earlier was brought in with a shattered

knee-cap.

“Their accuracy,” Ertak said, “is improving. And still we haven’t seen a