aside.

The tallest of the braves—a lean number the color of an old penny—tossed his bow aside and deliberately stepped squarely in my path. There was an insolent arrogance in every line of his body—a body that topped my six feet a full three inches.

I said, "Hi-yo, Silver," and put my hip into his naked belly and grabbed his arm and threw him over my shoulder. He hit face first two yards away and plowed up a furrow of grass, flopped around a little, then lay still.

Nobody else moved, except me. I started for the spaceship again, not hurrying and not crawling, head still up, spine still stiff, eyes straight ahead. Feet slithered in the grass behind me and the sound made the skin between my shoulder blades twitch like an aching tooth. Every instinct that had anything to do with self-preservation was fighting to make me turn around.

That was when the robots moved. They seemed to come alive at the same instant, metal clanged on metal as they strode stiffly down the ramp to meet me. Violence hung over them as it hangs over a Patton tank.

Every step toward them was like pulling my foot out of quicksand. Only twelve kinds of a cretin would have gone on when faced with anything like this. I went on. I couldn't do anything else. Once you show an Indian a molecule of cowardice, you're twelve lines on the obituary page.

The space between us was down to a narrow ribbon of grass by this time. Four—three more steps and I would have to stop. Nobody could push aside a couple of tons of animated steel. Metal arms were lifting slowly, preparing to close on me. Inside me a silent voice screamed a prayer for Wetzel to pull that trigger and pump a bullet into one of those round, staring, faceted eyes....

The robots seemed to go dead. They hung there motionless, arms lifted, each with a massive foot caught in midstride.

What had stopped them at the last possible second I had no way of telling. All I did know was a sudden release of tension that left me with just enough strength to keep my feet moving.

I went on.

The edge of the ramp was getting uncomfortably close. I was here to see the head man, but I would prefer to see him out in the open. The thought of walking into that black hole left me as cold as a barefoot Eskimo.

The ramp. It was a good six feet wide, made of what seemed to be some form of an aluminum alloy, and was waiting to be walked on. I started up its shallow slope, the rubber soles of my basketball shoes soundless on the smooth surface.

He appeared suddenly, without warning, in the doorway. He was quite tall, slim in the hips, and his naked shoulders seemed almost as wide as the opening. Elaborate beadwork designs had been worked into the buckskin breeches, and his headdress resembled a Sioux warbonnet, its twin rows of red-tipped feathers hanging almost to his moccasins. A hunting knife hung in a snake-skin sheath at his right hip. He was as gauntly handsome as a Blackfoot—and they don't come any better-looking than that.

He stood there, arms folded across his chest, looking as immovable as Pike's Peak. This time I stopped. My back was as stiff as his, my head as erect, my shoulders as square if not as wide. For a long time we stood that way staring straight into each other's eyes, our expressions blank, our tongues locked.

When enough time had passed for me to open the conversation without being accused of impetuousness, I said, "I am Long Rock, of the Potawatomi. I have come in peace, to hold counsel with you."

My words, in the language of the Delaware because of Wetzel's earlier remark, had no immediate effect, which was par for the course with any Indian. Not even his eyelids moved. The silence went on, building into tension. Anyone unfamiliar with the ways of the Indian would have taken another stab at it. I knew better. I had made my pitch; now it was strictly up to him.

Finally his strong lips came unstuck. "I am Lo-as-ro, War Chief of the Kornesh." It was the Delaware tongue, all right, but with inflexions and nuances strange to me. "How is it that your skin is white but you speak in the way of the Orbiwah?"

That last word, I judged, was what the Indian in general was called wherever this specimen had come from. I said, "In my blood is the blood of the Orbiwah. That is why I am here, sent by the Great Chief of all white men."

We squatted down facing each other on the ramp. At once a young brave brought out a long, elaborately carved peace-pipe. Lo-as-ro put the bit to his mouth and puffed smoke toward the four cardinal points of the compass, then passed the pipe to me. The tobacco was far more aromatic than any I had come across before.

With the amenities out of the way, the Chief said, "Why has the White Chief sent you to me?"

"To welcome you to the land of the white man."

"I come not to the land of the white man in peace."

My eyes were as cold as his own. "This we do not understand. The white man has no quarrel with the tribe of Kornesh."

"The white man," Lo-as-ro said sonorously, "has taken from the Orbiwah his land and his home. He has driven the Orbiwah into small areas. He has killed buffalo and the bison and the deer, leaving the Orbiwah to eat the meat of the horse or to starve. The Orbiwah has been made foul with the diseases of the white man."

"All this," I said, "was long, long ago. Perhaps it was not right, but it is the way of life that the strong prevail and the weak perish."

His expression darkened. "You say this—you with the blood of the Orbiwah in your veins?"

"I speak only true words, noble Lo-as-ro. The white men are in number as the leaves of the forest, the Orbiwah few and helpless."

One of his hands made a graceful motion. "I have come to return the land to the Orbiwah, to restore him to the greatness of his fathers. Once more the land shall be alive with game, the rivers filled with fish. Once more shall the Orbiwah hunt with the weapons of his fathers. I have spoken."

"From whence do you come?" I asked.

He pointed dramatically toward the sky. "From a great distance. Up there are many worlds."

"Tell me of your world," I said.

The telling took a long time but not a word of it was dull. According to Lo-as-ro, his world was a planet revolving about one of the stars in the Big Dipper. It was slightly smaller than Earth, with about the same climates and development of life. It was peopled with only one race, the Orbiwah, who lived much as the Indians in America did before the arrival of the white man. Recently spaceships from another planet in the same solar system had landed on the Orbiwah world. These newcomers were friendly, had no thought of conquest, and possessed a science and culture of amazing proportions.

From them the Orbiwah learned of a planet on which were men of their own kind. Lo-as-ro, fired by the thought of establishing contact with people like himself, had borrowed spaceships manned by robots and crossed the void to Earth. For weeks they had hovered in our atmosphere, at first saddened, then angered, by the fate meted out to the Indians.

Since the spaceships were able to move through Time into the past, Lo-as-ro hit on the idea of going back to the days when the Indian was still in control of most of America. With the power at his control he could force the white man from the continent and restore the land to those who owned it.

Arriving near the close of the Eighteenth Century, he found a sizeable encampment of Indians, brought the ship down among them, and summoned the chiefs to a Council of War, where he outlined to them his plan. To his astonishment he found the chiefs suspicious of outside help and confident that they could defeat the white man alone. In vain did Lo-as-ro explain that they were doomed; they could not, or would not, believe that he had visited the future. He offered to take them ahead and let them see for themselves—an offer that was quickly refused.

Whereupon Lo-as-ro decided to