Sands? He looked about with a start. Until that moment the Callean had so hypnotized his attention that he had for-gotten to look at the landscape, but his unconscious had registered it. Sand, and nothing but sand. If there were better parts of Calle than this desert, they were not visible from here, all the way to the horizon.
“What do you propose to do with us?” he said at last There was really nothing else to say; cut off in every possible sense from his home world, he no longer had any base from which to negotiate.
“Nothing,” the Callean said. “You are free to come and go as you please.”
“You’re no longer afraid of us?”
“No. When you came to kill me I prevented you, but you can no longer do that.”
“There you’ve made a mistake, all right,” Oberholzer said, lifting his rifle toward the multicolored, glittering jewels of the Callean’s eyes. “You know what this isthey must have had them on the Dragon.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Sergeant,” 12-Upjohn said sharply.
“We’re in no position to make any threats.” Nor, he added silently, should the Marine have called attention to his gun before the Callean had taken any overt notice of it.
“I know what it is,” the creature said. “You cannot kill me with that. You tried it often before and found you could not. You would remember this if you were not sick.”
“I never saw anything that I couldn’t kill with a Sussmann flamer,” Oberholzer said between his teeth. “Let me try it on the bastard, Your Excellency.”
“Wait a minute,” Robin One said, to 12-Upjohn’s astonish-ment. “I want to ask some questionsif you don’t mind, Your Excellency?”