"No." Chon's voice was strained tight. "It should have been me to kiss you." Chon turned to me. "Luck out there, Johnny." I grabbed his hand and levered it fast, before he could decide I needed kissing. "Sure thing, Lee. Thanks." * * * * * The buildings weren't much to see, but they were a step above primitive huts. They were adobe, or maybe plastic. The aliens understood the stress principles of the dome, Ellik said, because all the buildings had curved roofs. Unbaked pottery was what they looked like to me, and they looked as if they would be brittle as coffee-colored chalk. Actually, their ceramic surfaces were at least as hard as steel. The Azure had welcomed Ellik with an outstretched hand. Mike wasn't one to jump to conclusions, so he just held out his own hand. The native grabbed and let it go after pulling it some. The alien saw me apparently carrying Ellik on a seat cushion with one hand, and he kicked me in the leg. To test my muscles, I guess. I managed to keep from yelling or jumping. The Azure looked impressed and the Indigos did a bad job of hiding a lot of envy and hate. As the Indigos toted their man along on the litter and I guided Ellik's seat cushion along the channel of magnetic feedback, the two riders began talking. Ellik's translator collar broke the language barrier, of course. It was a two-way communicator on a direct hook-up to our cybernetic calculator on the ship. The brain analyzed the phonetic structure of the alien language under various systems of logic or anti-logic and fed the translation into Ellik's ear. Then it went through its memory banks and played back the right sounds to translate Ellik's talk into the alien language. I understand things like that. I'm a pretty good mechanic. I didn't have my translator turned on, but it seemed to me that somehow I could understand what the plug-uglies, the Indigos, were saying. Ellik told me that it was because all their speech was based on the one universal humanoid sound, "mama." Everything good in the way of nouns and verbs (there were no other particles of speech) was some inflection of "m-m" and everything bad was "uh-m-m." Ellik was pretty "uh-m-m." I was _plenty_ "uh-m-m." I threatened their jobs, they thought. They were a real miserable bunch of slobs, those Indigos. We passed through the wide places between the houses--I wouldn't call them streets--and saw a lot of Indigos crouched in doorways, watching us, and Azures being toted around. The clothing they wore was also pretty universal for sentient bipeds--a tunic or sarong, kind of. For the Azures, it was smooth and colorful; and for the Indigos, a loincloth of some rough, dun-colored stuff.