A ship, men, humans, were coming.
Wherever humans were, there was trouble.
II
"The fools!" he thought. "What do they want here?"
He watched the ship land in a fury of splashing jets, just outside the city, but he did not go to it. He was not in a mood to see his fellowmen. They would come to him in the morning, searching out the lone human in this Martian city. He did not think he would wait for them. In the morning he would take a trip to some outlying settlement where the need of minerals was great: For a few days he would trade there.
He was sitting in his chair outside his store deciding which of the various Martian villages he would visit in the morning when he saw the three humans approaching through the twilight. Astonished, he rose to his feet. They hadn't waited for the morning. They had come to him now, before night.
Three burly spacemen, big enough and obviously willing to cut a throat or rape a woman, were coming toward him. No Martian guided them but they seemed to know where they were going. They came directly toward him. As they approached, he saw they carried Kell guns, the vicious little weapons that spurted a stream of explosive bullets like water out of a hose. The sight of the guns startled him. He had forgotten that such weapons existed, or that men used them.
He heard the voices of the men as they approached. Harsh, brutal voices, the language all rough consonants. He had forgotten too, the sound of men. The language spoken by the Martians was all soft vowel sounds, gentle words breathed so easily that they seemed to brush only the surface of the aural mechanism and hardly seemed ever to reach the mind beneath.
"There he is!" The men saw him now, came straight toward him.
He rose to his feet. He would greet them politely, like a gentleman, if it killed him.