. They could see the two
turtle-shaped landing-craft, and the combat car, that had been
circling over the mound, landing beside them, and, sometimes,
a glint of sunlight from the snooper that had taken its place.

The snooper was also transmitting in, to another screen, from
two hundred feet above the village. From the sound outlet came an
incessant gibber of native voices. There were over a hundred houses,
all small and square, with pyramidal roofs. On the end of the mound
toward the Terran camp, animals of at least four different species
were crowded, cattle that had been herded up from the meadows at
the first alarm. The open circle in the middle of the village was
crowded, and more natives lined the low palisade along the edge
of the mound.

"Well, we're going to stay here till we learn the language,"
Meillard was saying. "This is the best place for it. It's completely
isolated, forests on both sides, and seventy miles to the nearest
other village. If we're careful, we can stay here as long as we want
to and nobody'll find out about us. Then, after we can talk with
these people, we'll go to the big town."

* * * * *

The big town was two hundred and fifty miles down the valley,
at the forks of the main river, a veritable metropolis of almost
three thousand people. That was where the treaty would have to
be negotiated.

[Illustration: "... But no two of them speak the same language!"]

"You'll want more huts. You'll want a water tank, and a pipeline
to that stream below you, and a pump," Questell said. "You think
a month?"

Meillard looked at Lillian Ransby. "What do you think?"

"_Poodly-doodly-oodly-foodle_," she said. "You saw how far we didn't
get this afternoon. All we found out was that none of the standard
procedures work at all." She made a tossing gesture over her shoulder.
"There goes the book; we have to do it off the cuff from here."

"Suppose we make another landing, back in the mountains, say two or
three hundred miles south of you," Vindinho said. "It's not right
to keep the rest aboard two hundred miles off planet, and you won't
be wanting liberty parties coming down where you are."

"The country over there looks uninhabited," Meillard said.
"No villages, anyhow. That wouldn't hurt, at all."

"Well, it'll suit me," Charley Loughran, the xeno-naturalist, said.
"I want a chance to study the life-forms in a state of nature."

Vindinho nodded. "Luis, do you a