Nevertheless, though it might mean that they must again pursue their weary hegira, the dominant race did not appear to have crowded the available living space. There might be room for their little colony on those broad continents. If a colony was welcome. . .
“To tell the truth,” Captain King fretted, “I hadn’t expected anything like this. Primitive aborigines perhaps, and we certainly could expect dangerous animals, but I suppose I unconsciously assumed that man was the only really civilized race. We’re going to have to be very cautious.”
King made up a scouting party headed by Lazatus; he had come to have confidence in Lazarus’ practical sense and will to survive. King wanted to head the party himself, but his concept of his duty as a ship’s captain forced him to forego it. But Slayton Ford could go; Lazarus chose him and Ralph Schultz and his lieutenants. The rest of the party were specialists-biochemist, geologist, ecologist, stereographer, several sorts of psychologists and sociologists to study the natives including one authority in McKelvy’s structural theory of communication whose task would be to find some way to talk with the natives.
No weapons.
King flatly refused to arm them. “Your scouting party is expendable, he told Lazarus bluntly; “for we can not risk offending them by any sort of fighting for any reason, even in self-defense. You are ambassadors, not soldiers. Don’t forget it.”
Lazarus returned to his stateroom, came back and gravely delivered to King one blaster. He neglected to mention the one still strapped to his leg under his kilt.
As King was about to tell them to man the boat and carry out their orders they were interrupted by Janice Schmidt, chief nurse to the Families’ congenital defectives. She pushed her way past and demanded the Captain’s attention. –
Only a nurse could have obtained it at that moment; she had professional stubbornness to match his and half a century more practice at being balky. He glared at her. “What’s the meaning of this interruption?”
“Captain, I must speak with you about one of my children.”
“Nurse, you are decidedly out of order. Get out. See me in my office-after taking it up with the Chief Surgeon.”
She put her hands on her hips. “You’ll see me now. This is the landing party, isn’t it? I’ve got something you have to hear before they leave.”
King started to speak, changed his mind, merely said, “Make it brief.”
She did so. Hans Weatheral, a youth of some ninety years and still adolescent in appearance through a hyper-active thymus gland, was one of her charges. He had inferior but not moronic mentality, a chronic apathy, and a neuro-muscular deficiency which made him too weak to feed himself-and an acute sensitivity to telepaths.
He had told Janice that he knew all about the planet around which they orbited. His friends on the planet had told him about it . . . and they were expecting him.
The departure of the landing boat was delayed while King and Lazarus investigated. Hans was matter of fact about his information and what little they could check of what he said was correct. But he was not too helpful about his “friends.” “Oh, just people,” he said, shrugging at their stupidity. “Much like back home. Nice people. Go to work, go to school, go to church. Have kids and enjoy themselves. You’ll like them.”
But he was quite clear about one point: his friends were expecting-him; therefore he must go along.
Against his wishes and his better judgment Lazarus saw added to his party Hans Weatheral, Janice Schmidt, and a stretcher for Hans.
When the party returned three days later Lazarus made a long private report to King while the specialist reports were being analyzed and combined. “It’s amazingly like Earth, Skipper, enough to make you homesick. But it’s also different enough to give you the willies-llke looking at your own face in the mirror and having it turn out to have three eyes and no nose. Unsettling.”
“But how about the natives?”
“Let me tell it. We made a quick swing of the day side, for a bare eyes look. Nothing you haven’t seen through the ‘scopes. Then I put her down where Hans told me to, in a clearing near the center of one of their cities. I wouldn’t have picked the place myself; I would have preferred to land in the bush and reconnoitre. But you told me to play Hans’ hunches.”