on the job. Saving their strength
for the trek. And he said they had a shoonoo among them. He's probably
the lad who started it. Had a dream from the Gone Ones, I suppose."

"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