“I don’t know what those houses are built of. This is all alluvial country; building stone would be almost unobtainable. I don’t see anything like a brick kiln. I don’t see any evidence of irrigation, either, so there must be plenty of rainfall. If they use adobe, or sun-dried brick, houses would start to crumble in a few years, and they would be pulled down and the rubble shoved aside to make room for a new house. The village has been rising on its own ruins, probably shifting back and forth from one end of that mound to the other.”
“If that’s it, they’ve been there a long time,” Karl Dorver said. “And how far have they advanced?”
“Early bronze; I’ll bet they still use a lot of stone implements. Pre-dynastic Egypt, or very early Tigris-Euphrates, in Terran terms. I can’t see any evidence that they have the wheel. They have draft animals; when we were coming down, I saw a few of them pulling pole travoises. I’d say they’ve been farming for a long time. They have quite a diversity of crops, and I suspect that they have some idea of crop-rotation. I’m amazed at their musical instruments; they seem to have put more skill into making them than anything else. I’m going to take a jeep, while they’re all in the village, and have a look around the fields, now.”
Charley Loughran went along for specimens, and, for the ride, Lillian Ransby. Most of his guesses, he found, had been correct. He found a number of pole travoises, from which the animals had been unhitched in the first panic when the landing craft had been coming down. Some of them had big baskets permanently attached. There were drag-marks everywhere in the soft ground, but not a single wheel track. He found one plow, cunningly put together with wooden pegs and rawhide lashings; the point was stone, and it would only score a narrow groove, not a proper furrow. It was, however, fitted with a big bronze ring to which a draft animal could be hitched. Most of the cultivation seemed to have been done with spades and hoes. He found a couple of each, bronze, cast flat in an open-top mold. They hadn’t learned to make composite molds.
There was an even wider variety of crops than he had expected: two cereals, a number of different root-plants, and a lot of different legumes, and things like tomatoes and pumpkins.
“Bet these people had a pretty good life, here—before the Terrans came,” Charley observed.
“Don’t say that in front of Paul,” Lillian warned. “He has enough to worry about now, without starting him on whether we’ll do these people more harm than good.”
Two more landing craft had come down from the Hubert Penrose; they found Dave Questell superintending the unloading of more prefab-huts, and two were already up that had been brought down with the first landing.
A name for the planet had also arrived.
“Svantovit,” Karl Dorver told him. “Principal god of the Baltic Slavs, about three thousand years ago. Guy Vindinho dug it out of the Encyclopedia of Mythology. Svantovit was represented as holding a bow in one hand and a horn in the other.”
“Well, that fits. What will we call the natives; Svantovitians, or Svantovese?”
“Well, Paul wanted to call them Svantovese, but Luis persuaded him to call them Svants. He said everybody’d call them that, anyhow, so we might as well make it official from the start.”
“We can call the language Svantovese,” Lillian decided. “After dinner, I am going to start playing back recordings and running off audiovisuals. I will be so happy to know that I have a name for what I’m studying. Probably be all I will know.”
After dinner, he and Karl and Paul went into a huddle on what sort of gifts to give the natives, and the advisability of trading with them, and for what. Nothing too far in advance of their present culture level. Wheels; they could be made in the fabricating shop aboard the ship.
“You know, it’s odd,” Karl Dorver said. “These people here have never seen a wheel, and, except in documentary or historical-drama films, neither have a lot of Terrans.”
That was true. As a means of transportation, the wheel had been completely obsolete since the development of contragravity, six centuries ago. Well, a lot of Terrans in the Year Zero had never seen a suit of armor, or an harquebus, or even a tinder box or a spinning wheel.
Wheelbarrows; now there was something they’d find useful. He screened Max Milzer, in charge of the fabricating and repair shops on the ship. Max had never even heard of a wheelbarrow.
“I can make them up, Mark; better send me some drawings, though. Did you just invent it?”
“As far as I know, a man named Leonardo da Vinci invented it, in the Sixth Century Pre-Atomic. How soon can you get me half a dozen of them?”
“Well, let’s see. Welded sheet metal, and pipe for the frame and handles. I’ll have some of them for you by noon tomorrow. Now, about hoes; how tall are these people, and how long are their arms, and how far can they stoop over?”
They were all up late, that night. So were the Svants; there was a fire burning in the middle of the village, and watch-fires along the edge of the mound. Luis Gofredo was just as distrustful of them as they were of the Terrans; he kept the camp lighted, a strong guard on the alert, and the area of darkness beyond infra red lighted and covered by photoelectric sentries on the ground and snoopers in the air. Like Paul Meillard, Luis Gofredo was a worrier and a pessimist. Everything happened for the worst in this worst of all possible galaxies, and if anything could conceivably go wrong, it infallibly would. That was probably why he was still alive and had never had a command massacred.
The wheelbarrows, four of them, came down from the ship by midmorning.
