"They're all ready for you to push the button. If the scanner can read
them, it will. I got all that speech the chief, or king, or whatever
he was, made just before we left."

"Good, very good!" In the light of the portable lamp by Soriki's com,
Lablet settled down, plugged the scanner tubes in his ears, absently
accepting a ration bar the captain handed him to chew on while he
listened to the playback of the record the com-tech had made that
afternoon.

Hobart turned to Raf. "You went off with that officer. What did he
have to show you?"

The pilot described the globe and the body he had been shown and then
added what he had deduced from the sketchy explanations he had been
given. The captain nodded.

"Yes, they have aircraft, have been using them, too. But I think that
there's only one of the big ones. And they're fighting a war all
right. We didn't see the whole colony, but I'll wager that there are
only a handful of them left. They're holed up here, and they need help
or the barbarians will finish them off. They talked a lot about that."

Lablet pulled the ear plugs from his ears. In the lamplight there was
an excited expression on his face. "You were entirely right, Captain!
They were offering us a bargain there at the last! They are offering
us the accumulated scientific knowledge of this world!"

"What?" Hobart sounded bewildered.