A minute endured like an age, and then another.

“We’ve done our bit,” Napier announced finally. “Let’s go, Vance.”

Garamond turned thankfully and they walked towards Mason, who backed away from them, still holorecording all that was happening. Not until he had reached the car did Garamond look in the direction of the aliens. One of them was moving away towards its city with a complicated ungainly gait; the other was standing exactly where they had left it.

“I’ll drive back,” Napier said, climbing into the car first and experimenting with the simplified controls while the others were taking their seats. He got the vehicle moving, swung it round and set off up the hill at an oblique angle. “We’ll go the long way round in case we run into a crowd following our tracks out.”

Garamond nodded, his thoughts still wholly absorbed by the two creatures on the plain. “There was no arachnid reaction — I suppose that’s something we can feel good about — but I felt totally inadequate. There was no point to it at all. I can’t see us and them ever relating or interacting.”

“I don’t know about relating, Vance, but there’s going to be plenty of interacting.” Napier pointed out through the windshield to the left, where the curve of the hill was falling away to reveal new expanses of prairie. The pale blue buildings of the alien city, instead of thinning out, were spread across the fresh vistas of grassland like flowers in a meadow, seemingly going on for ever.

Mason whistled and raised his recorder. “Do you think it makes a circle outside the hills? Right round our base?”

“It looks that way to me. They must have been here a long time…” Napier allowed his words to tail off, but Garamond knew at once what he was thinking.

Liz Lindstrom had brought a third of a million settlers with her on the very first load, and the big ships would soon be bringing land-hungry humans in batches of a full million or more. Interaction between the two races was bound to take place in the near future, and on a very large scale.

eleven

Rumours of massacre came within a month.

There had. been a short-term lull while the shallow circular basin centred on Beachhead City absorbed the first waves of settlers. During this brief respite a handful of External Affairs representatives arrived, aware of their inadequacy, and ruled that no humans were to go within five kilometres of the alien community until negotiations had been completed for a corridor through to the free territory beyond. A number of factors combined against their efficacy, however. The Government men had been late on the scene, no broadcasting media were available to them, and — most important — there was a widespread feeling among the settlers that attempting diplomatic communication with the Clowns, as they had been unofficially named, would be an exercise in futility.

At first the bright-hued aliens had been approached with caution and respect, then it was learned that they possessed no machines beyond the simplest farming implements. Even their houses were woven from a kind of cellulose rope extruded from their own bodies in roughly the same way that a spider produces its web. When it was further discovered that the Clowns were mute, the assumption of their intelligence was called into question by many of the human settlers. One theory advanced was that they were degenerate descendants of the race which had built the fortifications around the Beachhead City aperture; another that they were little more than domestic animals which had outlived their masters and developed a quasiculture of their own.

Garamond was disturbed by the attitude implicit in the theories, partly because it was a catalyst for certain changes which were taking place in the Earth settlers. The subtle loosening of discipline he had noticed among his own men within minutes of their setting foot on Orbitsville had its counterpart among the immigrants in the form of a growing disregard for authority. Men whose lives had been closely controlled in the tight, compacted society of Earth now regarded themselves as potential owners of continents and were impatient for their new status. All they had to do to transform themselves from clerks to kings was to load up the vehicles provided by the Starflight workshops and set out on their golden journeys. The only directive was that they should travel far, because it was obvious that the further a man went when fanning out from Beachhead City the more land would be available to him.

As the mood took hold of the settlers even the earliest arrivals, who had staked out their plots of land within the circular hills, became uneasily aware of the incoming hordes at their heels and decided to move onwards and outwards.

In a normal planetary situation the population pressures would not have been concentrated so fiercely on one point, but Earth technology was geared to the Assumption of Mediocrity. During the development of the total transport system of flickerwing ships and shuttles it had never occurred to anyone to make provision for an environment in which, for, example, it would not be possible for a ship to gather its own reaction mass. It would have been completely illogical to do so, in the universe as it was then understood — but in the context of Orbitsville a deadly mistake had been made.

Territories of astronomical dimensions were available, but no means of claiming them quickly enough to satisfy the ambitions of men who had crossed space like gods and then found themselves reduced to wheeled transportation. Given time to build or import fleets of wing-borne aircraft, the difficulties could have been lessened but not removed completely. Each family unit or commune had to become self-supporting in the shortest possible time and, even with advanced farming methods and the use of iron cows, this meant claiming possession of large areas without delay.

It was a situation which, classically, had always resulted in man fighting man. Garamond was not surprised therefore when reports began to reach him that the outermost settlers had forced their way through the Clown city in a number of places and were pouring into the prairie beyond. He did not try to visit any of the trouble spots in person, but had no difficulty in visualizing the course of events at each. Still haunted by the sense of having lost his purpose, he devoted most of his time to his family, making only occasional visits to the Bissendorf in his capacity of chief executive. He deliberately avoided watching the newscasts which were piped into his home along the landlines, but other channels were open.

One morning, while he was sleeping off the effects of a prolonged drinking session, he was awakened by the sound of a child’s scream. The sound triggered off a synergistic vision of Harald Lindstrom falling away from the blind face of a statue and, almost in the same instant, came the crushing awareness that he had not been sufficiently on his guard against Elizabeth. Garamond sat up in bed, gasping for air, and lurched to the living-room. Aileen had got there before him and was kneeling with her arms around Christopher. The boy was now sobbing gently, his face buried in her shoulder.

“What happened?” Garamond’s fear was subsiding but his heart was pounding unevenly.

“It was the projector,” Aileen said. “One of those things appeared on it. I turned it off.”

“What things?” Garamond glanced at the projection area of the solid-image television where the faint ghost of a tutor in one of the educational programmes was still dissolving into the air.

Christopher raised a streaked, solemn face. “It was a Crown.”

“He means a Clown.” Aileen’s eyes were slaty with anger.

“A Clown? But… I told you to keep the images fairly diffuse when Chris is watching so that he won’t get confused between what’s real and what isn’t.”