“You mean, like this fellow here?” the lieutenant asked. “What are they, Mr. Gilbert; priests?”
He looked quickly at the lieutenant’s collar-badges. Yellow trefoil for Third Fleet-Army Force, Roman IV for Fourth Army, 907 for his regiment, with C under it for cavalry. That outfit had only been on Kwannon for the last two thousand hours, but somebody should have briefed him better than that.
He shook his head. “No, they’re magicians. Everything these Kwanns do involves magic, and the shoonoon are the professionals. When a native runs into something serious, that his own do-it-yourself magic can’t cope with, he goes to the shoonoo. And, of course, the shoonoo works all the magic for the community as a whole—rain-magic, protective magic for the village and the fields, that sort of thing.”
The lieutenant mopped his face on a bedraggled handkerchief. “They’ll have to struggle along somehow for a while; we have orders to round up all the shoonoon and send them in to Bluelake.”
“Yes.” That hadn’t been General Maith’s idea; the governor had insisted on that. “I hope it doesn’t make more trouble than it prevents.”
The lieutenant was still mopping his face and looking across the gathering-place toward Alpha, glaring above the huts.
“How much worse do you think this is going to get?” he asked.
“The heat, or the native troubles?”
“I was thinking about the heat, but both.”
“Well, it’ll get hotter. Not much hotter, but some. We can expect storms, too, within twelve to fifteen hundred hours. Nobody has any idea how bad they’ll be. The last periastron was ninety years ago, and we’ve only been here for sixty-odd; all we have is verbal accounts from memory from the natives, probably garbled and exaggerated. We had pretty bad storms right after transit a year ago; they’ll be much worse this time. Thermal convections; air starts to cool when it gets dark, and then heats up again in double-sun daylight.”
It was beginning, even now; starting to blow a little after Alpha-rise.
“How about the natives?” the lieutenant asked. “If they can get any crazier than they are now—”
“They can, and they probably will. They think this is the end of the world. The Last Hot Time.” He used the native expression, and then translated it into Lingua Terra. “The Sky Fire—that’s Alpha—will burn up the whole world.”
“But this happens every ninety years. Mean they always acted this way at periastron?”
He shook his head. “Race would have exterminated itself long ago if they had. No, this is something special. The coming of the Terrans was a sign. The Terrans came and brought oomphel to the world; this a sign that the Last Hot Time is at hand.”
“What the devil is oomphel?” The lieutenant was mopping the back of his neck with one hand, now, and trying to pull his sticky tunic loose from his body with the other. “I hear that word all the time.”
“Well, most Terrans, including the old Kwannon hands, use it to mean trade-goods. To the natives, it means any product of Terran technology, from paperclips to spaceships. They think it’s … well, not exactly supernatural; extranatural would be closer to expressing their idea. Terrans are natural; they’re just a different kind of people. But oomphel isn’t; it isn’t subject to any of the laws of nature at all. They’re all positive that we don’t make it. Some of them even think it makes us.”
When he got back in the car, the native pilot, Heshto, was lolling in his seat and staring at the crowd of natives along the side of the gathering-place with undisguised disdain. Heshto had been educated at one of the Native Welfare Commission schools, and post-graded with Kwannon Planetwide News. He could speak, read and write Lingua Terra. He was a mathematician as far as long division and decimal fractions. He knew that Kwannon was the second planet of the Gettler Beta system, 23,000 miles in circumference, rotating on its axis once in 22.8 Galactic Standard hours and making an orbital circuit around Gettler Beta once in 372.06 axial days, and that Alpha was an M-class pulsating variable with an average period of four hundred days, and that Beta orbited around it in a long elipse every ninety years. He didn’t believe there was going to be a Last Hot Time. He was an intellectual, he was.
He started the contragravity-field generator as soon as Miles was in his seat. “Where now, boss?” he asked.
“Qualpha’s Village. We won’t let down; just circle low over it. I want some views of the ruins. Then to Sanders’ plantation.”
“OK, boss; hold tight.”
He had the car up to ten thousand feet. Aiming it in the map direction of Qualpha’s Village, he let go with everything he had—hot jets, rocket-booster and all. The forest landscape came hurtling out of the horizon toward them.
Qualpha’s was where the trouble had first broken out, after the bug-out from Sanders; the troops hadn’t been able to get there in time, and it had been burned. Another village, about the same distance south of the plantation, had also gone up in flames, and at a dozen more they had found the natives working themselves into frenzies and had had to sleep-gas them or stun them with concussion-bombs. Those had been the villages to which the deserters from Sanders’ had themselves gone; from every one, runners had gone out to neighboring villages—“The Gone
