outlets, one of each on either
side of his neck; he talked through the outlets and had his scent and
hearing organs in the intakes. The car was air-conditioned, which was a
mercy; an overheated Kwann exhaled through his skin, and surrounded
himself with stenches like an organic chemistry lab. But then, Kwanns
didn't come any closer to him than they could help when he was hot and
sweated, which, lately, had been most of the time.

"A V and a half of air cavalry, circling around," Heshto said. "Making
sure nobody got away. And a combat car at a couple of hundred feet and
another one just at treetop level."

He rose and went to the seat next to the pilot, pulling down the
binoculars that were focused for his own eyes. With them, he could see
the air cavalry--egg-shaped things just big enough for a seated man,
with jets and contragravity field generators below and a bristle of
machine gun muzzles in front. A couple of them jetted up for a look at
him and then went slanting down again, having recognized the Kwannon
Planetwide News Service car.

The village was typical enough to have been an illustration in a
sociography textbook--fields in a belt for a couple of hundred yards
around it, dome-thatched mud-and-wattle huts inside a pole stockade with
log storehouses built against it, their flat roofs high enough to
provide platforms for defending archers, the open oval gathering-place
in the middle. There was a big hut at one end of this, the khamdoo, the
sanctum of the adult males, off limits for women and children. A small
crowd was gathered in front of it; fifteen or twenty Terran air
cavalrymen, a couple of enlisted men from the Second Kwannon Native
Infantry, a Terran second lieutenant, and half a dozen natives. The rest
of the village population, about two hundred, of both sexes and all
ages, were lined up on the shadier side of the gathering-place, most of
them looking up apprehensively at the two combat cars which were
covering them with their guns.

Miles got to his feet as the car lurched off contragravity and the
springs of the landing-feet took up the weight. A blast of furnacelike
air struck him when he opened the door; he got out quickly and closed it
behind him. The second lieutenant had come over to meet him; he extended
his hand.

"Good day, Mr. Gilbert. We all owe you our thanks for the warning. This
would have been a real baddie if we hadn't caught it when we did."

He didn't even try to make any mod