Stuart frowned at the screen. "They seem to understand I'm about to visit them, but they're not convinced they can trust visitors. No reason why they should be, I suppose." He disconnected the pickup unit from the cephaloid circuit. Gordon cocked his head to one side reflectively. "Well, I don't think the situation is too bad. You've seen how cautious they are ... they must have been very badly scared when their cities were destroyed. Perfectly natural. It's also evident they're not fundamentally warlike; their behavior shows an absence of military background. Even a couple of traders noticed that, by the way, over on the other side of the planet last year." The linguist shook his head reprovingly. "Let's avoid semantic confusions when we can, Gordon. Their behavior does not fit in with _your_ notion of military background. We have no right to say what it connotes _in their culture_." The captain acknowledged the reasonableness of this statement with a smile and left him to the solitude he needed. He began the task of receiving the material the cephaids had assimilated, feeding in associations of "probable general context" with the natives' comments regarding each picture. He laughed to himself as he realized that a certain amount of projection of his own notions was inevitable. Such was the tremendous power of the cephaloids, and the delicate, almost intuitive skill of his handling, that the major part of the analysis was complete in little more than an hour. He switched the controls to "Translate, Univ. Sp. to Other." Indicator needles shifted and steadied as the surface potentials readjusted in the semi-living colloids. Then, before proceeding further, he asked the captain to join him again. When Gordon was seated, the expert smiled wryly at him. "This is usually considered very poor procedure, but there's only one word I can be fairly sure of as a check on this thing. It seems reasonable that, when the middle native exclaimed 'Aru!', he meant 'Good'!! That was when we destroyed the attacking ship, if you remember ... a little fiction which I shall have to explain to them later." Into the microphone he said, in Universal Speech, "Good. That is good." "Aru. Aru naa lo," replied the loudspeaker. Stuart, though he relaxed a little then, lost no time. It took him only a few minutes to memorize several phrases which the jelly-and-silver translator gave him. By the time Brettner had the little scout ship warmed up for him, Stuart was prepared to tell the natives, "Peace! I come in peace. Your people and my people have the same enemy. Therefore let us be friends and work together. We shall give you large and strong weapons."