"No," I said.
He grinned at me as if he hadn't heard me. "Well," he said, "this ought to be a big enough batch for you, Mister. Want to capture us all right now and take us back to New Didymus with you?"
"You've got me wrong," I said.
Another man spoke up. He was older, in his late forties, I thought. His hair was thin and gray but his face was hard. He had a heater strapped to his side, and he wore a good uniform. "Government men don't come out one at a time, do they, Huey?" he said.
The big man shrugged. "No way to tell," he said. "Maybe Mr. Carson here's got a call-radio for the rest of his boys. Maybe they're all just waiting for us, some place nearby."
"If they're waiting," the other man said, "they'd be here by now. Besides, Huey, he don't look like a Government man."
"Think they all got tails?" Huey asked him.
I judged it was about time to put in a word. "I'm not Government," I said. "I'm from Ancarta. I'm here to help you—if you're the men I think you are."
That started some more discussion. Huey was all for labeling my offer a trick and getting rid of me then and there—after which, I suppose, he was going to clear out my mythical followers in the nearby jungle. But he was pretty well all alone; there's got to be a rotten apple in the best-picked barrel and these boys were smart. The only sensible thing to do was staring them in the face, and it didn't take them long to see it.
"We'll take you back with us," Huey's friend told me. "When we get to a safe place we can sit down and talk this out."