andy area some
thirty feet wide. On either side of it, the houses were scattered at
random, as if each Martian had simply hunted for a comfortable place to
sit and then built a house around it.

"Look," whispered Randolph.

One Martian had stepped from a group situated on the far side of the
street from us. He started to cross the street, his round brown eyes on
us, his small bare feet plodding sand, and we saw that in addition to a
loincloth he wore jewelry--a hammered metal ring, a bracelet on one
skinny ankle. The Sun caught a copperish gleam on his bald narrow head,
and we saw a band of metal there, just above where his eyebrows should
have been.

"The super-chief," Allenby murmured. "Oh, _shaman_ me!"

As the bejeweled Martian approached the center of the street, he glanced
briefly at the ground at his feet. Then he raised his head, stepped with
dignity across the exact center of the street and came on toward us,
passing the dusty-looking buildings of his realm and the dusty-looking
groups of his subjects.

He reached the slope of the dune we lay on, paused--and raised small
hands over his head, palms toward us.

"I think," Allenby said, "that an anthropologist would give odds on that
gesture meaning peace."

He stood up, holstered his gun--without buttoning the flap--and raised
his own hands over his head. We all did.

* * * * *

The Martian language consisted of squeaks.

We made friendly noises, the chief squeaked and pretty soon we were the
center of a group of wide-eyed Martians, none of whom made a sound.
Evidently no one dared peep while the chief spoke--very likely the most
articulate Martians simply squeaked themselves into the job. Allenby,
of course, said they just _squeaked by_.

He was going through the business of drawing concentric circles in the
sand, pointing at the third orbit away from the Sun and thumping his
chest. The crowd around us kept growing as more Martians emerged from
the dome buildings to see what was going on. Down the winding ramps of
the buildings on our side of the wide, sandy street they came--and from
the buildings on the other side of the street, plodding through the
sand, blinking brown eyes at us, not making a sound.

Allenby pointed at the third orbit and thumped his chest. The chief
squeaked and thumped his own chest and pointed at the copperish band
around his head. Then he pointed at Allenby.

"I seem to have conveyed to him