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"No," Sheridan said firmly. "We'll try a little longer and we may solve the situation. If not, I face the music."
He scraped his hand across his jaw.
"Maybe," he said, "Nappy and his crap-shooters can turn the trick for us. It's fantastic, sure, but stranger things
have happened."
Napoleon and his pals came back, sheepish and depressed. "They beat the pants off us," the cook told Sheridan in
awe. "Those boys are really naturals. But when we tried to pay our bets, they wouldn't take our stuff!"
"We have to try to arrange a powwow," said Sheridan, "and talk it out with them, although I hold little hope for it. Do
you think, Napoleon, if we came clean and told them what a spot we're in, it would make a difference?'
"No, I don't," Napoleon said.
"If they only had a government," observed Ebenezer, who had been a member of Napoleon's gambling team, "we
might get somewhere with a powwow. Then you could talk with someone who represented the entire population. But
this way you'll have to talk with each village separately and that will take forever."
"We can't help it, Eb," said Sheridan. "It's all we have left."
But before any powwow could be arranged, the podar harvest started. The natives toiled like beavers in the fields,
digging up the tubers, stacking them to dry, packing them in carts and hauling them to the barns by sheer manpower,
for the Garsonians had no draft animals.
They dug them up and hauled them to the barns, the very barns where they'd sworn that they had no podars.
But that was not to wonder at when one stopped to think of it, for the natives had also sworn that they grew no
podars.
They did not open the big barn doors, as one would have normally expected them to do. They simply opened a tiny,
man-size door set into a bigger door and took the podars in that way. And when any of the Earth party hove in sight,
they quickly stationed a heavy guard around the entire square.
"We'd better let them be," Abraham advised Sheridan. "If we try to push them, we may have trouble in our lap."
So the robots pulled back to the base and waited for the harvest to end. Finally it was finished and Sheridan
counseled lying low for a few days more to give the Garsonians a chance to settle back to their normal routine.
Then they went out again and this time Sheridan rode along, on one of the floaters with Abraham and Gideon.
The first village they came to lay quiet and lazy in the sun. There was not a creature stirring.
Abraham brought the floater down into the square and the three stepped off.
The square was empty and the place was silent - a deep and deathly silence.
Sheridan felt the skin crawling up his back, for there was a stealthy, unnatural menace in the noiseless emptiness.
"They may be laying for us," suggested Gideon. "I don't think so," said Abraham. "Basically they are peaceful."
They moved cautiously across the square and walked slowly down a street that opened from the square.
And still there was no living thing in sight. And stranger still - the doors of some of the houses stood open to the
weather and the windows seemed to watch them out of blind eyes, with the colorful crude curtains gone.
"Perhaps," Gideon suggested, "they may have gone away to some harvest festival or something of that nature."
"They wouldn't leave their doors wide open, even for a day," declared Abraham. "I've lived with them for weeks and
I've studied them. I know what they would do. They'd have closed the doors very carefully and tried them to be sure
that they were closed."
"But maybe the wind...?'
"Not a chance," insisted Abraham. "One door, possibly. But I see four of them from here."
"Someone has to take a look," said Sheridan. "It might as well be me."
He turned in at a gate where one of the doors stood open and went slowly up the path. He halted at the threshold
and peered in. The room beyond was empty. He stepped into the house and went from room to room and all the rooms
were empty - not simply of the natives, but of everything. There was no furniture and the utensils and the tools were
gone from hooks and racks. There was no scrap of clothing. There was nothing left behind. The house was dead and
bare and empty, a shabby and abandoned thing discarded by its people.
He felt a sense of guilt creep into his soul. What if we drove them off? What if we hounded them until they'd rather
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