to take kindly to that.
That's supposed to be their job."

"Then why the devil haven't they done it?" Gonzales demanded angrily.
"I've viewed every native village in this area by screen, and I haven't
seen one that's equipped with anything better than those log
storage-bins against the stockades."

"There was a project to provide shelters for the periastron storms set
up ten years ago. They spent one year arguing about how the natives
survived storms prior to the Terrans' arrival here. According to the
older natives, they got into those log storage-houses you were
mentioning; only about one out of three in any village survived. I could
have told them that. Did tell them, repeatedly, on the air. Then, after
they decided that shelters were needed, they spent another year hassling
over who would be responsible for designing them. Your predecessor here,
General Nokami, offered the services of his engineer officers. He was
frostily informed that this was a humanitarian and not a military
project."

Ramon Gonzales began swearing, then apologized for the interruption.
"Then what?" he asked.

"Apology unnecessary. Then they did get a shelter designed, and started
teaching some of the students at the native schools how to build them,
and then the meteorologists told them it was no good. It was a dugout
shelter; the weathermen said there'd be rainfall measured in meters
instead of inches and anybody who got caught in one of those dugouts
would be drowned like a rat."

"Ha, I thought of that one." Gonzales said. "My shelters are going to be
mounded up eight feet above the ground."

"What did they do then?" Foxx Travis wanted to know.

"There the matter rested. As far as I know, nothing has been done on it
since."

"And you think, with a disgraceful record of non-accomplishment like
that, that they'll protest General Gonzales' action on purely
jurisdictional grounds?" Travis demanded.

"Not jurisdictional grounds, Foxx. The general's going at this the wrong
way. He actually knows what has to be done and how to do it, and he's
going right ahead and doing it, without holding a dozen conferences and
round-table discussions and giving everybody a fair and equal chance to
foul things up for him. You know as well as I do that that's
undemocratic. And what's worse, he's making the natives build them
themselves, whether they want to or not, and that's forced labor. That
reminds me; has anybody started raising the devil about