d a slightly equine face that went well with his Old Terran Spanish
name. There was another officer with him, considerably younger--Captain
Foxx Travis, Major General Maith's aide.

"Well, is there anything we can do for you, Miles?" Gonzales asked,
after they had exchanged greetings and sat down.

"Why, could I have your final situation-progress map? And would you be
willing to make a statement on audio-visual." He looked at his watch.
"We have about twenty minutes before the 'cast."

"You have a map," Gonzales said, as though he were walking tiptoe from
one word to another. "It accurately represents the situation as of the
moment, but I'm afraid some minor unavoidable inaccuracies may have
crept in while marking the positions and times for the earlier phases of
the operation. I teleprinted a copy to _Planetwide_ along with the one I
sent to Division Headquarters."

He understood about that and nodded. Gonzales was zipping up his tunic
and putting on his belt and sidearm. That told him, before the brigadier
general spoke again, that he was agreeable to the audio-visual
appearance and statement. He called the recording studio at _Planetwide_
while Gonzales was inspecting himself in the mirror and told them to get
set for a recording. It only ran a few minutes; Gonzales, speaking
without notes, gave a brief description of the operation.

"At present," he concluded, "we have every native village and every
plantation and trading-post within two hundred miles of the Sanders
plantation occupied. We feel that this swarming has been definitely
stopped, but we will continue the occupation for at least the next
hundred to two hundred hours. In the meantime, the natives in the
occupied villages are being put to work building shelters for themselves
against the anticipated storms."

"I hadn't heard about that," Miles said, as the general returned to his
chair and picked up his drink again.

"Yes. They'll need something better than these thatched huts when the
storms start, and working on them will keep them out of mischief.
Standard megaton-kilometer field shelters, earth and log construction. I
think they'll be adequate for anything that happens at periastron."

Anything designed to resist the heat, blast and radiation effects of a
megaton thermonuclear bomb at a kilometer ought to stand up under what
was coming. At least, the periastron effects; there was another angle to
it.

"The Native Welfare Commission isn't going