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“Mr. Gilbert, these shoonoon are blocking everything we are trying to do for the natives. If you use them for propaganda work in the villages, you will only increase their prestige and make it that much harder for us to better the natives’ condition, both economically and culturally–“

“That’s it, Miles,” Travis said. “She isn’t interested in facts about specific humanoid people on Kwannon. She has a lot of high-order abstractions she got in a classroom at Adelaide on Terra.”

“No. Her idea of bettering the natives’ condition is to rope in a lot of young Kwanns, put them in Government schools, overload them with information they aren’t prepared to digest, teach them to despise their own people, and then send them out to the villages, where they behave with such insufferable arrogance that the wonder is that so few of them stop an arrow or a charge of buckshot, instead of so many. And when that happens, as it does occasionally, Welfare says they’re murdered at the instigation of the shoonoon.”

“You know, Miss Shaw, this isn’t just the roughneck’s scorn for the egghead,” Travis said. “Miles went to school on Terra, and majored in extraterrestrial sociography, and got a master’s, just like you did. At Montevideo,” he added. “And he spent two more years traveling on a Paula von Schlicten Fellowship.”

Edith Shaw didn’t say anything. She even tried desperately not to look impressed. It occurred to him that he’d never mentioned that fellowship to Travis. Army Intelligence must have a pretty good dossier on him. Before anybody could say anything further, a Terran captain and a native sergeant of the First K.N.I. came in. In the screen, the four sepoys who had been fussing around straightening things picked up auto-carbines and posted themselves two on either side of a door across from the pickup, taking positions that would permit them to fire into whatever came through without hitting each other.

What came through was one hundred and eighty-four shoonoon. Some wore robes of loose gauze strips, and some wore fire-dance cloaks of red and yellow and orange ribbons. Many were almost completely naked, but they were all amulet-ed to the teeth. There must have been a couple of miles of brass and bright-alloy wire among them, and half a ton of bright scrap-metal, and the skulls, bones, claws, teeth, tails and other components of most of the native fauna. They debouched into the big room, stopped, and stood looking around them. A native sergeant and a couple more sepoys followed. They got the shoonoon over to the semicircle of cushions, having to chase a couple of them away from the single seat at front and center, and induced them to sit down.

The native sergeant in the little room said something under his breath; the captain laughed. Edith Shaw gaped for an instant and said, “Muggawsh!” Travis simply remarked that he’d be damned.

“They do look kind of unusual, don’t they?” Miles said. “I wouldn’t doubt that this is the biggest assemblage of shoonoon in history. They aren’t exactly a gregarious lot.”

“Maybe this is the beginning of a new era. First meeting of the Kwannon Thaumaturgical Society.”

A couple more K.N.I. privates came in with serving-tables on contragravity floats and began passing bowls of a frozen native-food delicacy of which all Kwanns had become passionately fond since its introduction by the Terrans. He let them finish, and then, after they had been relieved of the empty bowls, he nodded to the K.N.I. sergeant, who opened a door on the left. They all went through into the room they had been seeing in the screen. There was a stir when the shoonoon saw him, and he heard his name, in its usual native mispronunciation, repeated back and forth.

“You all know me,” he said, after they were seated. “Have I ever been an enemy to you or to the People?”

“No,” one of them said. “He speaks for us to the other Terrans. When we are wronged, he tries to get the wrongs righted. In times of famine he has spoken of our troubles, and gifts of food have come while the Government argued about what to do.”