What had he failed to see?
It was nearly time to be going over to the meeting at HQ. Cautiously Lyubov stood up,
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moving all in one piece so that the right side of his head would not fall off; he approached his desk with the gait of a man underwater, poured out a shot of General Issue vodka, and drank it. It turned him inside out: it extraverted him: it normalized him. He felt better. He went out, and unable to stand the jouncing of bis motorbike, started to walk down the long, dusty main street of Centralville to HQ. Passing the Luau he thought with greed of another vodka; but Captain David-son was just going in the door, and Lyubov went on.
The people from the Shackleton were already in the conference room. Commander Yung, whom he had met before, had brought some new faces down from orbit this time. They were not in Navy .uniform; after a moment Lyubov recognized them, with a slight shock, as non-Terran humans. He sought an introduction at once. One, Mr. Or, was a Hairy Cetian, dark grey, stocky, and dour; and the other, Mr. Lepennon, was tall, white, and comely: a Hainishman. They greeted .Lyubov with interest, and Lepennon said, "I've just been reading your report on the conscious control of paradoxical sleep among the Athsheans, Dr. Lyubov," which was pleasant, and it was pleasant also to be called by his own, earned title of doctor. Their conversation indicated that they had spent some years on Earth, and that they might be hilfers, or something like it; but the Commander, introducing them, had not mentioned (heir status or position.
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The room was filling up. Gosse, the colony ecologist, came in; so did all the high brass; so did Captain Susun, head of Planet Development-logging operations—whose captaincy like Lyu-bov's was an invention necessary to the peace of the military mind. Captain Davidsoo came in alone, straight-backed and handsome, his lean, rugged face calm and rather stem. Guards stood at all the doors.
The Army necks were all stiff as crowbars. Hie conference was plainly an Investigation. Whose fault? My fault, Lyubov thought despairingly; but out of his despair he looked across the table at Captain Don Davidson with detestation and contempt.
Commander Yung had a very quiet voice.' 'As you know, gentlemen, my ship stopped here at World 41 to drop you off a new load of colonists, and nothing more; Shackleton's mission is,to World 88, Prestno, one of the Hainish Group. However, this attack on your outpost camp, since it chanced to occur during our week here, can't be simply ignored; particularly in the light of certain developments which you would have been informed of a little later, in the normal course of events. The fact is that the status of World 41 as an Earth Colony is now subject to revision, and the massacre at your camp may precipitate the Administration's decisions on it. Certainly the decisions we can make must be made quickly, for I can't keep my ship here long. Now first, we wish to make sure that the relevant facts are all in the possession of those present. Captain Davidson's
report on the events at Smith Camp was taped and heard by all of us on ship; by all of you here also? Good. Now if there are questions any of you wish to ask Captain Davidson, go ahead. I have one myself. You returned to the site of the camp the following day, Captain Davidson, in a large hopper with eight soldiers; had you the permission of a senior officer here at Central for that flight?"
Davidson stood up. "I did, sir.**
' * Were you authorized to land and to set fires in the forest near the campside?"
"No, sir."
"You did, however, set fires?"
"I did, sir. I was trying to smoke out the creechies that killed my men."
"Very well. Mr. Lepennon?"
The tall Hainishman cleared his throat. "Captain Davidson," he said, "do you think that the people under your command at Smith Camp were mostly content?"
"Yes, I do."
Davidson's manner was firm and forthright; he seemed indifferent to the fact that he was in trouble. Of course these Navy officers and foreigners had no authority, over him; it was to his own Colonel that he must answer for losing two hundred men and making unauthorized reprisals. But his Colonel was right there, listening.
"They were well fed, well housed, not overworked, then, as well as can be managed in a frontier camp?"
"Yes."
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"Was the discipline maintained very harsh?"
"No, it was not.**
"What, then, do you think motivated the revolt?"
"I don't understand."
"If none of them were discontented, why did some of mem massacre the rest and destroy the camp?" There was a worried silence.
"May I put in a word," Lyubov said. "It was the native hilfs, the Amsheans employed in the camp, who joined with an attack by the forest people against the Terran humans. In his report Captain Davidson referred to the Athsheans as "creechies.* "
Lepennon looked embarrassed and anxious.
"Thank you, Dr. Lyubov. I misunderstood entirely. Actually I took the word 'creechie* to stand for a Terran caste that did rather menial work in the logging camps. Believing, as we all did, mat the Amsheans were intraspecies non-aggressive, I never thought they might be the group meant. In fact I didn't realize that they cooperated with you in your camps.—However, I am more at a loss than ever to understand'what provoked the attack and mutiny."
"I don't know, sir."
"When he said the people under his command were content, did the Captain include native people?** said the Cetian, Or, in a dry mumble. The Hainishman picked it up at once, and asked Davidson, in his concerned, courteous voice.
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"Were the Athsheans living at the camp content, do you think?"
"So far as I know."
"There was nothing unusual in their position there, or the work they had to do?"
Lyubov felt the heightening of tension, one turn of the screw, in Colonel Dongh and his staff, and also in the starship commander. Davidson remained calm and easy. "Nothing unusual."
Lyubov knew now that only his scientific studies had been sent up to the Shackleton; his protests, even his annual assessments of 'Native Adjustment to Colonial Presence* required by the Administration, had been kept in some desk drawer deep in HQ. These two N.-T.H.'s knew nothing about the exploitation of the Athsheans. Commander Yung did, of course; he had been down before today and had probably seen the creechie-pens. In any case a Navy commander on Colony runs wouldn't have much to learn about Terran-hilf relations. Whether or not he approved of how the Colonial Administration ran its business, not much would come as a shock to him. But a Cetian and a Hainishman, how much would they know about Terran colonies, unless chance brought them to one on the way to somewhere else? Lepennon and Or had not intended to come on-planet here at all. Or
possibly they had not been intended to come on-planet, but, hearing of trouble, had insisted. Why had the commander brought them down: his will, or theirs? Whoever they were they had about them a hint of authority,
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a whiff of the dry, intoxicating odor of power. Lyubov's headache had gone, he felt alert and excited, his face was rather hot.' "Captain David-son," he said, "I have a couple of questions, concerning your confrontation with the four natives, day before yesterday. You* re certain that one of them was San, or Selver Thele?"
"I believe so."
"You're aware that he has a personal grudge against you."
"I don't know."
"You don't? Since his wife died in your quarters immediately subsequent to sexual intercourse with you, he holds you responsible for her death; you didn't know that? He attacked you once before, here in Centralville; you had forgotten that? Well, the point is, mat Selver's personal hatred for Captain Davidson may serve as a partial explanation or motivation for mis unprecedented assault. The Athsheans aren't incapable of personal violence, that's never been asserted in any of my studies of them. Adolescents who haven't mastered controlled dreaming or competitive singing do a lot of wrestling and fist-fighting, not all of it good-tempered. But Selver is an adult and an adept; and his first, personal attack on Captain Davidson, which I happened to witness pan of, was pretty certainly an attempt to kill. As was the Captain's retaliation, incidentally. At the time,
I thought that attack an isolated psychotic incident, resulting from grief and stress, not likely to be repeated. I was wrong.—Captain, when the four
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Athsheans jumped you from ambush, as you describe in your report, did you end up prone on the ground?"