"Huh! Cables! Braces! No matter when wind-spirits want you," retorted the local humanoid, darting a cowed glance at the sky from beneath his heavy brow-ridge. "They want you stay, we will keep you."
"And I'll be stuck with you forever! Don't you have to make a living?"
"I am appointed. Like Retho, who sleeps at your door in the nights."
Guthrie scowled and examined the sky. It was a clear blue. One of the moons, named Jhux, was a yellow-white disk, faintly blurred at the edge by its thin envelope of air. The spacer wished he had remained on Jhux to do his observing. With an oxygen mask, a man could be fairly comfortable there.
The clear blue sky above him, on the other hand, would be a fearsome sight in a month or so when the storms closed in.
"It is good some spoke for you," said Polf, nodding in quiet satisfaction.
Guthrie frowned at him. Every so often, his companion's thought pattern eluded him. The Skirkhi, as they named themselves, used a typically developed humanoid language, and he had managed to learn enough for communication. It was the way they thought that baffled him.
"Last season was not as bad as some," continued Polf, staring over the flat plain from their trifling eminence on the hill. "Elders say living will be hard this storm. It is a time of heat."
Guthrie also stared off into the distance, toward the seacoast beyond the plain. He tried to show no expression, for he suspected that these people were cunning at reading faces.
His looks, to be sure, must be a handicap to them. He was long and lean of face where they tended to be round and pudgy. His reddish hair and blue eyes were certainly outside their experience, for they had aroused much frightened comment when he had first been discovered near his landing site.