"H. Beam Piper - Naudsonce" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

magnification, gave a maplike view of the broad valley and the uplands and mountain foothills to the
south. It was only by tracing the course of the main river and its tributaries that they could find the tiny
spot of the native village, and they couldn't see the landing craft at all. The other, at a hundred power,
showed the oblong mound, with the village on its flat top, little dots around a circular central plaza. 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.

"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 lifeforms in
a state of nature."

Vindinho nodded. "Luis, do you anticipate any trouble with this crowd here?"

"he asked.

"How about it, Mark? What do they look like to you? Warlike?"

"No." He stated the opinion he had formed. "I had a close look at their weapons when they came in for
their presents. Hunting arms. Most of the spears have cross-guards, usually wooden, lashed on, to
prevent a wounded animal from running up the spear-shaft at the hunter. They made boar-spears like that