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“Why, thank you, Mr. Gilbert.” The Army, on Kwannon, was rather more used to obloquy than praise. “How did you spot what was going on so quickly?”

This was the hundredth time, at least, that he had been asked that today.

“Well, Paul Sanders’ labor all comes from neighboring villages. If they’d just wanted to go home and spend the end of the world with their families, they’d have been dribbling away in small batches for the last couple of hundred hours. Instead, they all bugged out in a bunch, they took all the food they could carry and nothing else, and they didn’t make any trouble before they left. Then, Sanders said they’d been building fires out in the fallow ground and moaning and chanting around them for a couple of days, and idling on the job. Saving their strength for the trek. And he said they had a shoonoo among them. He’s probably the lad who started it. Had a dream from the Gone Ones, I suppose.”

“You mean, like this fellow here?” the lieutenant asked. “What are they, Mr. Gilbert; priests?”

He looked quickly at the lieutenant’s collar-badges. Yellow trefoil for Third Fleet-Army Force, Roman IV for Fourth Army, 907 for his regiment, with C under it for cavalry. That outfit had only been on Kwannon for the last two thousand hours, but somebody should have briefed him better than that.

He shook his head. “No, they’re magicians. Everything these Kwanns do involves magic, and the shoonoon are the professionals. When a native runs into something serious, that his own do-it-yourself magic can’t cope with, he goes to the shoonoo. And, of course, the shoonoo works all the magic for the community as a whole–rain-magic, protective magic for the village and the fields, that sort of thing.”

The lieutenant mopped his face on a bedraggled handkerchief. “They’ll have to struggle along somehow for a while; we have orders to round up all the shoonoon and send them in to Bluelake.”

“Yes.” That hadn’t been General Maith’s idea; the governor had insisted on that. “I hope it doesn’t make more trouble than it prevents.”

The lieutenant was still mopping his face and looking across the gathering-place toward Alpha, glaring above the huts.

“How much worse do you think this is going to get?” he asked.

“The heat, or the native troubles?”

“I was thinking about the heat, but both.”

“Well, it’ll get hotter. Not much hotter, but some. We can expect storms, too, within twelve to fifteen hundred hours. Nobody has any idea how bad they’ll be. The last periastron was ninety years ago, and we’ve only been here for sixty-odd; all we have is verbal accounts from memory from the natives, probably garbled and exaggerated. We had pretty bad storms right after transit a year ago; they’ll be much worse this time. Thermal convections; air starts to cool when it gets dark, and then heats up again in double-sun daylight.”

It was beginning, even now; starting to blow a little after Alpha-rise.

“How about the natives?” the lieutenant asked. “If they can get any crazier than they are now–“

“They can, and they probably will. They think this is the end of the world. The Last Hot Time.” He used the native expression, and then translated it into Lingua Terra. “The Sky Fire–that’s Alpha–will burn up the whole world.”

“But this happens every ninety years. Mean they always acted this way at periastron?”

He shook his head. “Race would have exterminated itself long ago if they had. No, this is something special. The coming of the Terrans was a sign. The Terrans came and brought oomphel to the world; this a sign that the Last Hot Time is at hand.”

“What the devil is oomphel?” The lieutenant was mopping the back of his neck with one hand, now, and trying to pull his sticky tunic loose from his body with the other. “I hear that word all the time.”

“Well, most Terrans, including the old Kwannon hands, use it to mean trade-goods. To the natives, it means any product of Terran technology, from paper-clips to spaceships. They think it’s … well, not exactly supernatural; extranatural would be closer to expressing their idea. Terrans are natural; they’re just a different kind of people. But oomphel isn’t; it isn’t subject to any of the laws of nature at all. They’re all positive that we don’t make it. Some of them even think it makes us.”