nticipate any trouble with this
crowd here?" he asked.

"How about it, Mark? What do they look like to you? Warlike?"

"No." He stated the opinion he had formed. "I had a close look at
their weapons when they came in for their presents. Hunting arms.
Most of the spears have cross-guards, usually wooden, lashed on,
to prevent a wounded animal from running up the spear-shaft at the
hunter. They made boar-spears like that on Terra a thousand years
ago. Maybe they have to fight raiding parties from the hills once
in a while, but not often enough for them to develop special
fighting weapons or techniques."

"Their village is fortified," Meillard mentioned.

"I question that," Gofredo differed. "There won't be more than
a total of five hundred there; call that a fighting strength of
two hundred, to defend a twenty-five-hundred-meter perimeter, with
woodchoppers' axes and bows and spears. If you notice, there's no
wall around the village itself. That palisade is just a fence."

"Why would they mound the village up?" Questell, in the screen
wondered. "You don't think the river gets up that high, do you?
Because if it does--"

Schallenmacher shook his head. "There just isn't enough watershed,
and there's too much valley. I'll be very much surprised if that
stream, there"--he nodded at the hundred-power screen--"ever gets
more than six inches over the bank."

"I don't know what those houses are built of. This is all alluvial
country; building stone would be almost unobtainable. I don't see
anything like a brick kiln. I don't see any evidence of irrigation,
either, so there must be plenty of rainfall. If they use adobe, or
sun-dried brick, houses would start to crumble in a few years, and
they would be pulled down and the rubble shoved aside to make room
for a new house. The village has been rising on its own ruins,
probably shifting back and forth from one end of that mound to
the other."

"If that's it, they've been there a long time," Karl Dorver said.
"And how far have they advanced?"

"Early bronze; I'll bet they still use a lot of stone implements.
Pre-dynastic Egypt, or very early Tigris-Euphrates, in Terran terms.
I can't see any evidence that they have the wheel. They have draft
animals; when we were coming down, I saw a few of them pulling pole
travoises. I'd say they've been farming for a long time. They have
quite a diversity of crops, and I suspect that they have some idea
of crop-rotation. I'm amazed at