“You talk like a child I” Babla snapped. “What held true on the more than one hundred planets we have occupied most certainly will hold true here. Enough of this nonsense, let’s get moving before darkness or we’ll never get to rendezvous point! Follow me, I think I see a road over there past that grove of trees.”
The two spacemen rose slowly and followed behind Babla as he led the way to the single-lane dirt road ahead.
Mike Honosura sat comfortably in a rocking chair on the front porch of his general store. He puffed lazily at his pipe and blew gray clouds into the dazzling Pacific sunset.
Lovely island, Kauai, he thought. Too bad my honorable grandparents chose to remain in Japan. They would have liked it here.
His flat, Oriental face was turned towards the road; he liked to watch the workers come in from the cane fields at night. Wiamea wasn’t much of a town, even for Kauai; but at least it offered some recreation. The workers liked it. They weren’t anywhere as fussy as the tourists, for which Honosura was most thankful. A movement in the bushes alongside the road caught his eye. He turned in time to see the three aliens step out onto the road. His eyes widened till they threatened to rupture the lids. His pipe fell from his suddenly slack-jawed mouth and clattered unheeded to the floor.
“My most Honorable Ancestral Gods,” he half whispered, “protect me!”
Hitch Pilitrovsky surveyed his little farm from the doorway of his thatched roof hut. The commissar of agriculture had permitted him to keep the land, mainly because it was too isolated on its rocky hillside to have been made part of the collective farm for the district. Ilitch’s arrangement with the State was simple: He did all the work and they shared the crop with him. They let him keep all he could eat. At the moment Hitch was daydreaming about the crop due for harvest. His eyes rested lovingly on the fat, waving grain.
“Ah, they will be proud of me this year,” he mused. “I shall have the biggest crop in the district, now, if only I didn’t have to give so much to the commissar, I could—”
He immediately put up his almost automatic mind censor and looked nervously about as if expecting the secret police to pop out of a haystack.
“Ilitch!” his wife called from inside the hut. “Come in to eat before the soup gets cold. What are you dreaming about out there?”