"We sleep on it," Wright said. "Long journey. We're tired. We'll go there in the morning. With our weapons of course, but...."
Mijok said softly, "First-light is a good time."
"I think there won't be any fighting," Miniaan said, and she relaxed and leaned happily against Muson's plump knee and ate the meal Arek had ready for her in fastidious birdlike bites. "If they're troubled by the rumors I scattered they'll slip away and hide, not fight. They're weary, bewildered, disillusioned people—at least that is the temper of the city as I felt it."
Nisana murmured, "With Spearman's bodyguard it could be different."
"Why," said Wright, "he'd never turn them against us. Not if he's the man I used to know, or anything like that man. He came a long way with us once." But Paul had to wonder: Was he ever with us?
There were six giants in the party: Mijok, Arek, Muson, Elis, Sears-Danik, Dunin. Elis was the year's Governor at Adelphi, but Dorothy had held that position the year before and would assume its simple duties in his absence. Nisana's eldest twin daughters had wanted to come, but Nisana had not allowed it, requiring them to stay in school under Brodaa's temperate discipline; the only pygmies here were herself, Pakriaa, and Miniaan. The group had come 120 miles overland, after Argo IV set them on a beach north of the coastal range: this had seemed better than taking the sloop south, where harbor would be uncertain and the winds and currents unknown. The first twenty miles ashore had been a retracing of Abara's long-ago journey with the olifants, through swampy and treacherous jungle. After rounding the range they could follow the eastern edge of the grassland that spread on its lee side, traveling in the open only at night, to avoid omasha. For all of one day they were bedeviled by a swarm of biting flies, and since there were brown wings circling they could not escape into full sunlight, where the flies would not follow. Eventually Pakriaa found an evil-smelling plant and remembered its use from old times. The juice of the root was a protection; the smell was almost as distressing as the bites but less dangerous. Miniaan of Vestoia had never heard of the plant's use: perhaps that explained why Vestoia had never exploited the otherwise pleasant region due west of Lake Argo.
There was fitful sleep in the daylight following Miniaan's return, and then an evening meal. Arek and Muson and the two young giants seemed untroubled by tomorrow, full of speculative curiosity. Mijok was uneasy, though he would not put it in words; Elis, too, would be remembering. Wright said again, "He came a long way with us.... Jensen chose him—remember that: chose him from among seven hundred other physically fine youths who had the same training, the same kind of courage, who wanted the—privilege, as he did."
"I can always wonder what Jensen himself would have made of Lucifer."
Wright said, almost with reproach, "Jensen was a great engineer, Paul, but he was also a student of history. Compared with what his leadership would have been, mine has been weak, vacillating, academic—it was bound to be. I take credit for some achievements. I've said give protoplasm a chance. We have done that. We've established the climate of liberty under law (for our very small group) and proved that a human mind can by-pass twenty thousand years of blundering, with no other help than a flexible language and the few basic rules of civilized action—as the so-called savages of Earth always proved it whenever they had a chance to secure a genuine education and fair treatment. But—in our material development there must have been a thousand lost opportunities—things Jensen (and probably Ed Spearman) would have seen at once."
Paul laughed. "Ed could have designed a better sloop."