Andy laughed, relaxed now, and picked up the pig. Conan gathered up the somewhat cumbersome mats and followed him back into the hut. The hot, close sun was already burning his shoulders. The plants were green and healthy looking, and the air was a trifle fresher in the growing field.

  “Now what?” Andy asked, standing outside the hut and letting the faint breeze cool him off as best it could.

  “I figure we’re about ready for an overt contact,” Conan Lang said. “Everything has checked out beautifully so far, and the natives don’t seem to be suspicious or hostile. We might as well get the ball rolling.”

  “The green branch, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right”

  They still did not get a glimpse of the natives throughout the steaming day, and that night they placed a single mat on the platform. On top of the mat they put a slim branch of green leaves, twisted around back on itself and tied loosely to form a circle. The green branch was by no means a universal symbol of peace, but, in this particular form, it chanced to be so on Sirius Ten. Conan Lang smiled a little. Man had found many curious things among the stars, and most of them were of just this unsensational but very useful sort.

  By dawn, the mat and the circle branch were gone and the natives had left them nothing in return.

  “Today’s the day,” Conan Lang said, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes. “They’ll either give us the works or accept our offer. Nothing to do now but wait.”

  They picked up their hoes and went back into the field. Waiting can be the most difficult of all things, and the long, hot morning passed without incident. The two men ate their lunch in silence, thankful for the odorless injection that kept the swarming insects away from them. Late in the afternoon, when the long blue shadows of evening were already touching the green plants and the clean, flowing water, the natives came.

  There were five of them and they appeared to be unarmed. One man walked slightly in advance of the others, a circular branch of green leaves in his hand. Conan Lang waited for them, with Andy standing by at his side. It was moments like this, he thought, that made you suddenly realize that you were all alone and a long, long way from friends. The natives came on steadily. Conan felt a surge of admiration for the young man who led them. From his point of view, he was walking into a situation filled with the terror of the supernatural, which was a very real part of his fife. His steps did not falter. He would, Conan supposed, be the eldest son of the most powerful chief.

  The natives stopped when they were three paces away. Their leader extended the circular green branch. “We would serve you, fathers from the mountains,” the native said in his own tongue.

  Conan Lang stepped forward and received the branch. “We are brothers,” he replied in the same language, “and we would be your friends.”

  The native smiled, his teeth very white. “I am Ren,” he said. “I am your brother.”

  Conan Lang kept his face expressionless, but deep within him a dark regret and sadness coursed like ice through his veins.

  It had begun again.

  III.

  For many days, Conan Lang listened to the Oripesh natives preparing for the feast. Their small village, only a quarter of a mile from the field, was alive with excitement. The women prepared great piles of the staple ricefruit and broiled river fish in great green leaves on hot coals. The men chanted and danced interminably, cleansing the village by ritual for the coming visitation, while the children, forgotten for once, played on the banks of the river. On the appointed day, Conan Lang walked into the village with Andy Irvin at his side.

  It was a crude village, necessarily so because of its transient nature. But it was not dirty. The natives watched the two men with awe, but they did not seem unfriendly. The supernatural was for them always just on the other side of the hill, hidden in the night, and now it was among them, in the open. That was all. And what, after all, thought Conan Lang, could have seemed more supernatural to them than a silver ship that dropped out of the stars? What was supernatural depended on one’s point of view—and on how much one happened to know about what was natural.

  The box he carried was heavy, and it took both arms to handle it. He watched Andy puffing at his side and smiled.

  “Stick with it, kid,” he said, walking steadily through the watching natives. “You may earn your pay yet.”

  Andy muttered something under his breath and blinked to get the sweat out of his eyes.

  When they reached the clearing in the center of the village, they stopped and put their boxes down. Ren, the eldest son of the chief Ra Renne, approached them at once and offered them a drink from a large wooden bowl. Conan drank and passed the container on to Andy, who grinned broadly and took a long swallow of the warm fluid. It was sweet, although not too sweet, and it burned pleasantly on the way down. It was, Conan decided instantly, a great improvement over some native fermented horrors he had been subjected to in times past

  The natives gathered around them in a great circle. There must have been nearly five hundred of them—far more than the small village could accommodate for any length of time.

  “We’re celebrities,” Conan Lang whispered out of the side of his mouth as he waited to be presented ceremonially to the chiefs.

  “You want my autograph?” asked Andy, his face just a trifle flushed from the drink he had taken. “I make a real fine X.”

  The feast followed a pattern familiar to Conan Lang. They were presented ceremonially to the tribe, having identified themselves as ancestors of four generations ago, thus making themselves kin to virtually all the tribe with their complicated lineage system, and also making refutation impossible since no one remembered that far back. They were seated with the chiefs, and ate the ritual feast rapidly. The food was good, and Conan Lang was interested in getting a good taste of the ricefruit plant, which was the basic food staple of the Oripesh.

  After the eating came the drinking, and after the drinking the dancing. The Oripesh were not a musical people, and they had no drums. The men and the women danced apart from each other, each one doing an individual dance—which he owned, just as the men from Earth owned material property—to his own rhythm pattern. Conan Lang and Andy Irvin contented themselves with watching, not trusting themselves to improvise an authentic dance. They were aware that their conduct was at variance with the somewhat impulsive conduct usually attributed to ancestors in native folklore, but that was a chance they had to take. Conan was very conscious of one old chief who watched him closely with narrowed eyes.

  Conan ignored him, enjoying the dancers. The Oripesh seemed to be a happy people, although short on material wealth. Conan Lang almost envied them as they danced—envied them for their simple lives and envied them their ability to enjoy it, an ability that civilized man had left by the wayside in his climb up the ladder. Climb—or descent? Conan Lang sometimes wondered.

  Ren came over, his color high with the excitement of the dance. Great fires were burning now, and Conan noticed with surprise that it was night.

  “That is Loe,” he said, pointing. “My amren, my bride-to-be.” His voice was filled with pride.

  Conan Lang followed his gesture and saw the girl. Her name was a native word roughly translatable as fawn, and she was well named. Loe was a slim, very shy girl of really striking beauty. She danced with diffidence, looking into Ren’s eyes. The two were obviously, almost painfully, in love—love being a part of the culture of the Oripesh. It was difficult to realize, sometimes, even after years of personal experience, that there were whole worlds of basically humanoid peoples where the very concept of romantic love did not exist. Conan Lang smiled. Loe was, if anything, a trifle too beautiful for his taste. Dancing there, with the yellow moon in her hair, moving gracefully with the leaping shadows from the crackling fires, she was ethereal, a fantasy, like a painting of a woman from another, unattainable century.

  “We would give gifts to the chiefs,” Conan Lang said finally. “Your Loe—she is very beautiful.”

  Ren smiled, quickly grateful, and summoned the chiefs. Conan Lang rose to greet them, signaling to Andy to break open the boxes. The chiefs watched intently. Conan Lang did not speak. He waited until Andy had opened both boxes and then pointed to them.

  “They are yours, my brothers,” he said.

  The natives pressed forward. A chief picked the first object out of the box and stared at it in disbelief. The shadows flickered eerily and the night wind sighed through the village. He held the object up to the light and there was a gasp of astonishment.

  The object was a ricefruit—a ricefruit the likes of which had never before been seen on Sirius Ten. It was round, fully a foot in diameter, and of a lush, ripe consistency. It made the potato-sized ricefruits of the Oripesh seem puny by comparison.

  It was then that Conan Lang exploded his bombshell.

  “We have come back to show you, our brothers, how to grow the great ricefruit,” he said. “You can grow them over and over again, in the same field. You will never have to move your village again.”

  The natives stared at him in wonder, moving back a little in fear.

  “It cannot be done,” a chief whispered. “The ricefruit devours the land—every year we must move or perish.”

  “That is over now,” Conan Lang said. “We have come to show you the way.”

  The dancing had stopped. The natives waited, nervous, suddenly uncertain. The yellow moon watched through the trees. As though someone had flipped a switch, sound disappeared. There was silence. The great ricefruit was magic. They looked at the two men as though seeing them for the first time. This was not the way of the past, not the way of the ancestors. This was something completely new, and they found themselves lost, without precedent for action. Ren alone smiled at them, and even he had fear in his eyes.

  Conan Lang waited tensely. He must make no move; this was the crisis point. Andy stood at his side, very still, hardly breathing.

  A native walked solemnly into the silence, carrying a young pig under his arm. Conan Lang watched him narrowly. The man was obviously a shaman, a witch doctor, and his trembling body and too-bright eyes were all too clear an indication of why he had been chosen for his role in the society.

  With a swiftness of motion that was numbing, the shaman slit the pig’s throat with a stone knife. At once he cut the body open. The blood stained his body with crimson. His long, thin hands poked into the entrails. He looked up, his eyes wild.

  “They are not ancestors,” he screamed, his voice high like a hysterical woman’s. “They have come to do us evil!”

  The very air was taut with tension.

  “No,” Conan Lang said loudly, keeping his voice clear and confident. “The barath-tui, the shaman, has been bewitched by sorcerers! Take care that you do not offend your ancestors!”

  Conan Lang stood very still, fighting to keep the alarm off his face. He and Andy were helpless here, and he knew it. They were without weapons of any sort—the native loincloth being a poor place to conceal firearms. There was nothing they could do—they had miscalculated, moved too swiftly, and now they were paying the price.

  "We are your brothers,” he said into the ominous silence. “We are your fathers and your father’s fathers. There are others who watch.”

  The flames leaped and danced in the stillness. An old man stepped forward. It was the chief that Conan had noticed watching him before.

  “You say you are our brothers who have taken the long journey,” the old chief said. “That is good. We would see you walk through the fire.”

  The wind sighed in the trees. Without a moment’s hesitation,

  Conan Lang turned and walked swiftly toward the flames that crackled and hissed in the great stone fire pits.

  There was nothing else in all the world except the flickering tongues of orange flame that licked nearer and nearer to his face. He saw the red, pulsing coals waiting beneath the twisted black branches in the fire and he closed his eyes. The heat singed his eyebrows and he could feel his hair shrivel and start to burn.

  Conan Lang kept moving, and moved fast. He twisted a rigid clamp on his mind and refused to feel pain. He wrenched his mind out of his body, thinking as he had been trained to think, until it was as if his mind floated a thing apart, free in the air, looking down upon the body of Conan Lang walking through hell.

  He knew that one of the attributes of the Oripesh ancestor gods was that they could walk through flame without injury—a fairly common myth pattern. He had known it before he left Earth. He should have been prepared, he knew that. But man was not perfect, which would have been a dangerous flaw had it not been his most valuable characteristic.

  He saw that his legs were black and blistered and he smelled the suffocating smell of burning flesh. The smoke was in his head, in his lungs, everywhere, choking him. Some of the pain was coming through—

  He was out. He felt Andy’s hands beating out the rivulets of flame that clung to his body and he forced the clean, pure air of night into his sick lungs. The pain, the pain—

  “Stick with it, Cone,” Andy whispered in his ear. “Stick with it.”

  Conan Lang managed to open his eyes and stared blankly into a hot-red haze. The haze cleared, and he was faintly surprised to find that he could still see. The natives were awestruck with fear—they had angered their gods, and death was in the air. Conan Lang knew that the shaman who had denounced him would quite probably be dead of fear before the night was over—if he did not die before then of some less subtle malady. He had endangered the tribe without reason, and he would pay with his life.

  Conan Lang kept his face expressionless. Inside, he was on fire. Water, he had to have water, cold water—

  Ren came to him, his eyes filled with pain. “I am sorry, my brother,” he whispered. “For my people, I am sorry.”

  “It is all right, Ren,” Conan Lang heard his voice say steadily. “I am, of course, unharmed.”

  Conan Lang touched Andy’s arm and moved across to the chiefs. He felt Andy standing behind him, ready to catch him, just in case. He could feel nothing in his feet—quite suddenly, he was convinced that he was standing on the charred stumps of his legs and he fought to keep from looking down to make sure he still had feet.

  “You have doubted your brothers who have come far to help their people,” he said quietly, looking directly into the eyes of the old chief who had sent him into the flames. “We are disappointed in our people—there are sorcerers at work among you, and they must be destroyed. We leave you now. If you anger your brothers again, the Oripesh shall cease to be.”

  He did not wait for an answer but turned and started away from the clearing, back through the village. Andy was at his side. Conan Lang set his teeth and moved at a steady pace. He must have no help until they were beyond the village; the natives must not suspect—

  He walked on. The great yellow moon was high in the night sky, and there was the face of Loe with stars in her hair. The moon shuddered and burst into flame, and he heard himself laughing. He bit his bps until the blood came and kept going, into the darkness, into nothing. The pain clawed at his body.

  They were through the village. Something snapped in Conan Lang—the steel clamp that had carried him through the nightmare, parted with a clean ping. There was emptiness, space. Conan Lang collapsed. He felt Andy’s arm around him, holding him up.

  “You’ll have to carry me, kid,” he whispered. “I can’t walk at all.”

  Andy Irvin picked him up in his arms and set out through the night.

  “It should have been me,” he said in bitter self-reproach.

  “It should have been me.”

  Conan Lang closed his eyes, and at last nothing mattered any more, and there was only darkness.

  A week later, Conan Lang stood in the dawn of Sirius Ten, watching the great double sun lift above the horizon and chase the shadows from the green field that they had carved out of the wilderness. He was still a very sick man, but Andy had pulled him through as best he could, and now the star cruiser was coming in to pick him up and leave a replacement with the kid.

  The fresh leaves of the ricefruit plants were shoulder high, and the water in the irrigation trenches chuckled cleanly, waiting for the full fury of the sun. The tenuous, almost hesitant breeze crawled through the still air.

  Conan Lang watched the green plants silently. The words of the dead barath-tui, the shaman, echoed in his brain. They are not ancestors, the man had screamed. They have come to do us evil!

  They have come to do us evil…

  How could he have known—with only a pig and a stone knife? A crazy shaman working the discredited magic of divination—and he had been right. Coincidence? Yes, of course. There was no other way to look at it, no other sane way. Conan Lang smiled weakly. He remembered reading about the Snake Dance of the Hopi, long ago back on Earth. The Snake Dance had been a rain-making ceremonial, and invariably when the very early anthropologists had attended the dance they had got drenched on the way home. It was only coincidence and good timing, of course, but it was difficult to tell yourself that when the rain began to pour.

  “Here she comes,” said Andy Irvin.

  There was a splitting whistle and then a soft hum as a small patrol ship settled down toward the field on her anti-gravs.

  She hung there in the dawn like a little silver fish seen through the glassite walls of a great aquarium, and Conan Lang could sense what he could not see—the massive bulk of the sleek star cruiser waiting out in space.

  The patrol ship came down out of the sky and hovered a few feet off the ground. A man swung down out of the outlift and waved. Conan Lang recognized him as Julio Medina, who had been lifted out of another sector of Sirius Ten to come in and replace him with Andy. The ricefruit was green and fresh in the field, and it hurt Conan to leave his job unfinished. There wasn’t a great deal to do now until the check, of course, and Julio was a very competent and experienced man, but there was still so much that could go wrong, so much that you could never anticipate—