Angelo turned his old eyes back upon Tharn, and the ghost of a smile plucked at his white-bearded lips. Tharn colored, suddenly aware of the incongruous picture he presented. Poised with all the drama of a Mark Antony pleading to the populace to sorrow for a Caesar, while rather mundanely bedecked in his paint-spattered working-smock! The high color in his seamed face remained, but he pursued his point as though Angelo had never smiled at all. "They won't be satisfied—"
Angelo got up from the canvas stool before his easel, and the motion itself was enough to halt Tharn in mid-sentence. There was going to be some sort of action, anyway.
"Now look," Angelo said slowly. His voice carried the measured deliberation that its rich, deep timbre complemented so harmoniously. "First of all, Tharn, if we begin showing signs of undue alarm, you know what it will do to our younger men and women. They'll be upset for weeks, and we'll have another one of those terrible Realist periods." Angelo grimaced with his incredibly bushy eyebrows. "Besides that, if you'd take a really careful look at that ship, you'd see in a moment that it's certainly of a type none of us have ever seen. We certainly cannot prevent its landing. We certainly do not have the means to present a hostile front when it does. Therefore, we shall go to the Dell and greet it. I would estimate—" Angelo turned his massive, white head slowly for another glance above the low, alabaster walls of the mosaic-tiled court-yard, "that they will effect a landing within another ten minutes or so. If you'll send an apprentice to go fetch Maler, the Philosopher, and Ghezi, the Semanticist, and—and I think Ojar, the Orator, with word to meet us by the Lesser Amphitheater there, we can be on our way directly. Oh—and Tharn—"
Tharn followed the First-Elder's glance to his paint-smeared smock, colored once more, and immediately erupted into a volcano of action, as though rounding up a young jack-a-napes apprentice and locating and donning a suitable street toga were things that could be simultaneously accomplished.
He exited, mumbling heatedly between cries of "Boy! Boy!" and Angelo smiled again, and prepared his own person for the meeting. He mused that Maler, the Philosopher, commented often in his evening wine that to run was never to escape, only to change the pattern of pursuit, and of course you couldn't argue much with Maler. Not and win,—but then, nobody on Ste. Catherine very often argued to win. Where was the pleasure in that?
There was a great, scorched spot in the soft greenness of the gently-rolling earth, and it widened like an undammed, muddy pool as the thundering, cylinder of steel lowered itself on a pillar of flame.
They kept a respectable distance; Angelo, Tharn, Maler, Ghezi, Ojar, and the several hundred curious and apprehensive of the colony who had followed. Angelo had decided the closest possible spot for waiting, stopped there, and then made no move save to shield his eyes from the terrible glare of the ship's landing-jets as it made its cautious descent. As he had predicted, the chosen landing-spot was at the extreme northern edge of the Dell, near the Lesser Amphitheater. And they had all just arrived in time.
The ship settled; its thunder ceased.
Masters, Students, and apprentices alike unshielded their eyes, and then all were turned in unbroken silence toward Angelo himself. He was Dean. He could deal with this.