“Keep clear!” he bellowed from the airlock, hoping to frighten her.
She saw him for the first time, then. Instead of being frightened, she seemed suddenly relieved. She came out into the open and began walking toward the ship, wearing a smile and gazing up at the lock.
“Go back, you little idiot!”
Her answer was a brief singsong chant and another smile. She kept coming—into the charred area.
The gun exploded in his fist, and the bullet ricocheted from the ground near her feet. She stopped, startled, but not sensing hostility. The gun barked again. The bullet shattered a pebble, and it peppered her legs. She yelped and fled back into the green garden.
He stood there staring after her for a moment, his face working slowly. She had been unable to understand his anger. She saw the ships, and was frightened but curious. She saw a human, and was reassured. Any human. But was what she saw really human any longer, the baron asked himself absently. He grunted scornfully, and went back through the lock.
It was easier, even on the ground, to communicate with the elders of the Geoark by radio, since both parties had set up automatic translators to translate their own tongues into the old Anglo-German which was a mutually recorded dead language.
“We have neutralized a circle of land of thirty-one mile radius,” ven Klaeden reported to the elders. “If our selection of this region is unfortunate, we are open to discussion of alternatives. However, our measurements indicated that the resources of this area make it best for our purposes.”
“Your landing caused only minor damage, brethren,” replied the gentle voice of the Geoark. “You are welcome to remain as you are.”
“Thank you. We consider the occupied area to be under our military jurisdiction, and subject to property seizures. It will be a restricted area, closed to civilian population.”
“But brethren, thousands of people live in the gardens you have surrounded!”
“Evacuate them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Evacuate them. Make them get out.”
“My translator is working badly.”
The baron turned away from the mike for a moment and grunted to the colonel in command of ground operations. “Start clearing the occupied zone. Get the population out unless they’ll work for us.”
“How much notice?”
The baron paused briefly. “Fifty hours to pack up, plus one additional hour for each mile the fellow has to stump it to the outer radius.”
“My translator is working badly,” the voice of the elder was parroting.
“Look,” the baron grunted at the mike. “All we want is to accomplish what we came here for, and then get out—as quickly as possible. We don’t have much time to be polite. I invite the elders of the Geoark to confer in my flagship. We’ll try to make everything clear to you. Is this agreed?”
“My translator is working badly.”
“Aren’t you getting anything?”
A pause, then: “I understand that you wish us to come to the place where the sky-fleet rests.”
“Correct.”
“But what of the welcome we have made for our brethren in the feast-glades?”
“I shall dispatch flyers to pick you up immediately. Unless you have aircraft of your own.”
“We have no machinery but the self-sustaining mechanisms in the Earth.”
“Any of your population understand the mechanisms?”
“Certainly, brother.”
“Then bring technicians. They’ll be best able to understand what we want, and maybe they can make it clear to you.”
“As you wish, brother.”
The baron terminated the contact and turned to his staff with a satisfied smile. “I think we shall have what we need and be gone quickly,” he said.
“The elder took it well. They must be afraid of us.”
“Respectful awe is more like it,” the baron grunted.
“I suggest the answer is in the word ‘brethren,’ ” came a voice from the back of the room.
“Meikl! What are you doing in here?” ven Klaeden barked irritably.
“You called my department for a man. My department sent me. Shall I go back?”
“It’s up to you, Analyst. If you can keep your ideals corked and be useful.”
Meikl bowed stiffly. “Thank you, sir.”
“Having it in mind that our only objective is to go through the tooling-mining-fueling cycle with a minimum of trouble and time—have you got any suggestions?”
“About how to deal with the natives?”
“Certainly … but with the accent on our problems.”
Meikl paused to snap the tip from an olophial and sniffed appreciatively at the mildly alkaloid vapor before replying. “From what we’ve gathered through limited observation, I think we’d better gather some more, and do our suggesting later.”
“That constitutes your entire opinion?”
“Not quite. About the question of recessive kulturverlaengerung. …”
“Our problems, I said!” the commander snapped.
“It’s likely to be our problem, sir.”
“How?”
“In Earth culture at the time of the Exodus, there were some patterns we’d regard as undesirable. We can’t know whether we’re still carrying the recessive patterns or not. And we don’t know whether the patterns are still dominant in the natives. Suppose we get restimulated.”
“What patterns do you mean?”
“The Exodus was a mass-desertion, in one sense, Baron.”
A moment of hush in the room. “I see what you mean,” the commander grunted. “But ‘desertion’ is a pattern of action, not a transmittable determinant.”
Meikl shook his head. “We don’t know what is a transmittable determinant until after it’s happened.” He paused. “Suppose there’s some very simple psychic mechanism behind the ‘pioneer’ impulse. We don’t feel it, but our ancestors did, and we might have recessive traces of it in our kulturverlaengerung lines.”
A wingman coughed raucously. “To be blunt with you, Meikl … I think this is a lot of nonsense. The whole concept is farfetched.”
“What, the kult’laenger lines?”
“Exactly.” The wingsman snorted. “How could things like that get passed along from father to son. If you people’d stop the mystical gibberish, and deal in facts. …”
“Do you regard parent-child rapport as a fact?” Meikl turned to stare absently out a viewing port at the trees.
“You mean the telepathic experiments with infants? I don’t know much about it.”
“Seventy years ago. On Michsa Three. A hundred parents were given intensive lessons and intensive practice in playing a very difficult skill game … before they became parents. They
