By the time they were ready to make planetfall on the unexplored world, Purcell knew his dislike of Glaudot bordered on actual hatred. Purcell, who was forty-five years old and a bachelor, liked his spacemen tough, yes: you had to be tough to land on, explore, and subdue a couple of dozen worlds, as Purcell himself had done. But he also liked his spacemen with humility: facing the unknown and sometimes the unknowable at every step of the way, you needed humility.
Glaudot, younger than Purcell by fifteen years, confident, arrogant, a lean hard man and handsome in a gaunt-cheeked, saturnine way, lacked humility. For one thing, he treated the crew like dirt and had treated them that way since blastoff from Earth almost five months before. For another, he seemed impatient with Purcell's orders, although Purcell was not a cautious man, and certainly not a timid one. What had been growing between them flared out into the open moments before planetfall.
"I can't get over it," Purcell said. "I've never seen a world anything like it." They had made telescopic observations from within the atmosphere. "Giants living in caves," Purcell went on. "Sailing ships flying the Jolly Roger. A town consisting of miniature replicas of the White House on Earth. Mermaids."
"Don't tell me you really thought you saw mermaids?" Glaudot asked a little condescendingly.
"All right, I'll admit I only caught a glimpse of them. I thought they were mermaids. But what about the Indians?"
"Yes," Glaudot admitted. "I saw the Indians."
Using their atmospheric rockets, they had flown over the Indian village at an altitude of only a few hundred feet, to see bronze-skinned men rush out of tents and stare up at them in awe. After that, Purcell had decided to find some desolate spot in which to land, in order not to risk a too-sudden encounter with any of the fantastically diversified natives.
Now Glaudot said: "You're taking what we saw too literally, Captain. Why, I remember on Harfonte we had all sorts of hallucinations until Captain Jamison discovered they were exactly that—we'd been hypnotized into seeing the things we most feared by powerless natives who really feared us."
"This isn't Harfonte," Purcell said, a little irritably.
"Yeah, but you weren't there."