Oomphel in the Sky | Page 3

left. Then, Sanders said they'd been
building fires out in the fallow ground and moaning and chanting
around them for a couple of days, and idling on the job. Saving their
strength for the trek. And he said they had a shoonoo among them. He's
probably the lad who started it. Had a dream from the Gone Ones, I
suppose."
"You mean, like this fellow here?" the lieutenant asked. "What are they,
Mr. Gilbert; priests?"
He looked quickly at the lieutenant's collar-badges. Yellow trefoil for
Third Fleet-Army Force, Roman IV for Fourth Army, 907 for his
regiment, with C under it for cavalry. That outfit had only been on
Kwannon for the last two thousand hours, but somebody should have
briefed him better than that.
He shook his head. "No, they're magicians. Everything these Kwanns
do involves magic, and the shoonoon are the professionals. When a
native runs into something serious, that his own do-it-yourself magic
can't cope with, he goes to the shoonoo. And, of course, the shoonoo
works all the magic for the community as a whole--rain-magic,
protective magic for the village and the fields, that sort of thing."
The lieutenant mopped his face on a bedraggled handkerchief. "They'll

have to struggle along somehow for a while; we have orders to round
up all the shoonoon and send them in to Bluelake."
"Yes." That hadn't been General Maith's idea; the governor had insisted
on that. "I hope it doesn't make more trouble than it prevents."
The lieutenant was still mopping his face and looking across the
gathering-place toward Alpha, glaring above the huts.
"How much worse do you think this is going to get?" he asked.
"The heat, or the native troubles?"
"I was thinking about the heat, but both."
"Well, it'll get hotter. Not much hotter, but some. We can expect storms,
too, within twelve to fifteen hundred hours. Nobody has any idea how
bad they'll be. The last periastron was ninety years ago, and we've only
been here for sixty-odd; all we have is verbal accounts from memory
from the natives, probably garbled and exaggerated. We had pretty bad
storms right after transit a year ago; they'll be much worse this time.
Thermal convections; air starts to cool when it gets dark, and then heats
up again in double-sun daylight."
It was beginning, even now; starting to blow a little after Alpha-rise.
"How about the natives?" the lieutenant asked. "If they can get any
crazier than they are now--"
"They can, and they probably will. They think this is the end of the
world. The Last Hot Time." He used the native expression, and then
translated it into Lingua Terra. "The Sky Fire--that's Alpha--will burn
up the whole world."
"But this happens every ninety years. Mean they always acted this way
at periastron?"
He shook his head. "Race would have exterminated itself long ago if
they had. No, this is something special. The coming of the Terrans was

a sign. The Terrans came and brought oomphel to the world; this a sign
that the Last Hot Time is at hand."
"What the devil is oomphel?" The lieutenant was mopping the back of
his neck with one hand, now, and trying to pull his sticky tunic loose
from his body with the other. "I hear that word all the time."
"Well, most Terrans, including the old Kwannon hands, use it to mean
trade-goods. To the natives, it means any product of Terran technology,
from paper-clips to spaceships. They think it's ... well, not exactly
supernatural; extranatural would be closer to expressing their idea.
Terrans are natural; they're just a different kind of people. But oomphel
isn't; it isn't subject to any of the laws of nature at all. They're all
positive that we don't make it. Some of them even think it makes us."
When he got back in the car, the native pilot, Heshto, was lolling in his
seat and staring at the crowd of natives along the side of the
gathering-place with undisguised disdain. Heshto had been educated at
one of the Native Welfare Commission schools, and post-graded with
Kwannon Planetwide News. He could speak, read and write Lingua
Terra. He was a mathematician as far as long division and decimal
fractions. He knew that Kwannon was the second planet of the Gettler
Beta system, 23,000 miles in circumference, rotating on its axis once in
22.8 Galactic Standard hours and making an orbital circuit around
Gettler Beta once in 372.06 axial days, and that Alpha was an M-class
pulsating variable with an average period of four hundred days, and
that Beta orbited around it in a long elipse every ninety years. He didn't
believe there was going to be a Last Hot Time. He was an intellectual,
he was.
He started the contragravity-field generator as soon as