"You're sure, Sam, about leaving my guns back at the ship?"
Carruthers just grinned again. And then they turned abruptly, and hauled up in front of a long, low building of flagstone.
"This is it," the surgeon said. "No reporters, no photographers, no autograph seekers, no brass band or politicians. But you're on, Skipper."
Captain Nicholas Joel felt naked without his guns, and he felt off-balance and out of place. Standing in the sedate, oval-shaped council-chamber with these peaceful-looking people confronting him, he felt clumsy in his heavy black leatheroid uniform, big, highly-polished black boots. He felt as if he looked like what he'd been forced to be on other occasions, facing forms of life so alien that no difference counted—like a man-at-arms, like a conqueror.
Suddenly, he was glad Sam had made him leave his guns back at the ship.
"Nicholas Joel, United Americas Intergalactic Exploration Fleet, of the Ship White Whale, commanding!" Carruthers was introducing him in English, and he wished that Sam would have had the good sense to have said "This is Captain Joel" and let it go at that. Didn't the grinning idiot know it must have been an awful pill for these people to swallow all at once? That there were, to begin with, such things as other planets and other galaxies—and that there were, even more incredibly, other creatures that lived on them. And, whether they cared to believe it or not, some of these creatures had just landed among them, and there was nothing they could do about it!
Sam was picking his way along now in their speech, and then at an obvious gesture, Joel knew he was being introduced to their top man. Sam waved an arm toward the tallest of the twelve-man group, who arose from the opposite side of a polished wooden table, and bowed gently from the waist.
"His Excellency and Prime Governor, K'hall-i-k'hall."
Joel hesitated, then returned the bow. He had never bowed in his life, but a salute to somebody dressed in civilian clothes seemed crazy.