“Let’s get out of here,” Cassirir said raggedly.
“Stand fast,” Oberholzer growled. “If they’re mad at us, I want to know about it right now.”
But the next Callean to pass them, some twenty eternal minutes later, hardly even slowed down. “Keep out of the way,” he said, and streaked away over the dunes. Snarling, Oberholzer caromed a bolt after him, but missed him clean.
“All right,” he said. “Let’s go back. No hitting the canteens till we’re five kilometers past the mid-point cairn.
Marchi”
The men were all on the verge of prostration by the time that point was passed, but Oberholzer never once had to enforce the order. Nobody, it appeared, was eager to come to an end on Calle as a series of butcher’s cuts in the tongs of a squad of huge black beetles.
“I know what they think,” the man from the Assam Dragon said. “I’ve heard them say it often enough.”
He was a personable youngster, perhaps thirty, with blond wavy hair which had been turned almost white by the strong Callean sunlight: his captors had walked him. for three hours every day on the desert. He had once been the Assam Dragon’s radioman, a post which in interstellar flight is a branch of astronomy, not of communications; never-theless, Oberholzer and the marines called him Sparks, in deference to a tradition which, 12-Upjohn suspected, the marines did not even know existed.
“Then why wouldn’t there be a chance of our establishing better relations with the ‘person’ on the fourth planet?” 12-Upjohn said. “After all, there’s never been an Earth landing there.”