Inside the tent, Shota Rustaveli and Katerina had been listening to everything that was going on. Rustaveli greeted Lopatin with an ironic bow. “Good day, Oleg Borisovich, and welcome to the Gulag.”

“That’s enough from you, you Georgian-“ Lopatin growled before Tolmasov followed him in.

“That’s enough from both of you,” the pilot said sharply. “I cannot command us to like one another, but we will treat each other with respect, all the more so in this tight space. Think of it as spaceship discipline if you must.”

Everyone nodded. Then Katerina said, “Think of it as living in a two-room apartment with four generations of your family.” This time everyone laughed.

“Da,” Tolmasov said. He had lived like that himself. Everyone had lived that way in Smolensk when he was small, in one of the Stalin-Gothic apartment blocks that had gone up like ugly toadstools after the Great Patriotic War. Afterward, he had never thought those memories would be funny. Now he was grateful to Katerina for using them to break the tension of the moment.

“The resemblance will grow even closer when the chemical toilet clogs up,” Rustaveli said. He sounded sardonic as usual, but he looked serious. He was right, too. After a few days-a week, at most-with four people in permanent residence, the tent would be a decidedly unpleasant place to live.

“The heater will need another charge of gas before long, too,” Katerina said. “And the stove. Afterward, we’ll have no way to make tea, or to make our concentrates into hot food. Come to that, we may not even have water.”

Tolmasov grimaced. Maybe the Minervans would let them go out to gather ice and snow, maybe not. If not, the siege would end in a hurry.

“If the natives want our Kalashnikovs so badly, maybe we should give them a good taste,” Lopatin said. Then, before anyone could shout at him, he shook his head. “No, it would not do. Like it or not, we live in the age of media. Regardless of what a few well placed bullets might accomplish here, they would do more damage back on Earth.”

“Imperialism is easier when word of what it takes to build an empire never leaks out,” Rustaveli said. “Georgia has learned that all too well, from underneath.” For a moment, the brooding expression in his dark, hooded eyes, the way the shadows sat on his narrow cheeks, made him seem almost as alien to the three Great Russians in the tent with him as did the Minervans outside.

A real fight might have sprung from his words. Maybe he intended that. Just then, though, a Minervan called, “Sergei Konstantinovich, come out, please. Come alone.” He spoke Russian.

“Fralk,” Tolmasov mouthed silently. Not seeing what other choice he had, he went. “Zdrast’ye, “he said somberly. “What do you aim to do with us?”

“Do with you?” Fralk returned to his own language. He sounded altogether innocent, a good enough reason, Tolmasov thought, to suspect he wasn’t. “Nothing at all. We will merely keep you here and at your skyboat.”

His pause, again, was perfectly-too perfectly-contrived. “The machine that goes back and forth between here and your skyboat may continue to do so… provided it goes by the same route it always uses. Other than that, you humans may not leave the skyboat, either. Males are on the way to enforce Hogram’s command there.”

“Thank you for letting us eat and stay warm, at any rate.”

Tolmasov did his best to stay polite. He was seething inside. Sure enough, the locals had spotted the humans’ weakness. Being on Minerva without exploring was like sharing a bed with a beautiful-and expensive, oh so expensive trollop without making love.

“We have no wish to harm you humans in any way,” Fralk assured him. “As you know, I owe you my life. But Hogram, wanting many other males to be preserved thanks to your rifle, can no longer cooperate with you when you do not cooperate with us.”

“You should write for Pravda,” Tolmasov muttered, which meant nothing to Fralk. But the Minervan was doing a good job of reproducing the more-in-sorrow-than-imagine, it’s-for-your own-good tone the paper often took. The pilot went on. “My domain masters-”

“Are far away,” Fralk interrupted. “Hogram is here, and so are you. You would do well to remember it.”

Tolmasov waved at the spear-carrying males. “Hard to forget.”

“Think of them as being here to protect you, if you like,” Fralk said.

Tolmasov did not know how to say “hypocrite” in the Skarmer tongue, and Fralk did not understand the Russian word. The conversation, accordingly, lagged. Tolmasov went back into the tent. Fralk’s voice pursued him. “Think on what you do, Sergei Konstantinovich.”

“Bah!” The pilot flung himself into the chair in front of the radio. He worked off some of his fury by profanely embellishing the warning he sent to Bryusov and Voroshilov in Tsiolkovsky.

After the sparks stopped shooting from Tolmasov’s mouth, the two men on the ship did not reply for some little while. At last, timidly, Valery Bryusov asked, “Do I understand that you want us to obey the Minervan males when they arrive?”

“Yes, curse it,” the pilot growled. “If they keep letting the rover travel back and forth, I don’t see what else we can do. We cannot fight them unless they attack us first-as Oleg Borisovich has said, public opinion back home would never support it. We will just have to see just who can be more stubborn, us or the Minervans.”

Over the next ten days, Tolmasov developed a rankling hatred for the color orange. He had never been fond of Oleg Lopatin; although the KGB man did his best to be self-effacing- something he could not have found easy-Tolmasov began to despise him in earnest. Shota Rustaveli’s jokes wore very thin, Even Katerina started getting on the pilot’s nerves. And he was grimly certain everyone crowded into the tent with him was sick of him, too.

Then Voroshilov called from Tsiolkovsky. “Moscow wonders why we aren’t sending them data based on new journeys, just analysis of what we’d done a while ago.”

“Screw Moscow, Yuri Ivanovich,” Tolmasov said. No one had said anything to Moscow about their confinement, hoping the standoff would resolve itself before they had to.

“Thank you, no,” the chemist answered. “What, though, do you propose to tell them back home? I cannot see us avoiding the issue any longer.”

Tolmasov sighed. “I fear we will have to tell them the truth.” Voroshilov was a quiet, patient man. When he started chiding- however gently-the pilot knew he could not sit on his hands any longer.

The message that came back to Tsiolkovsky was circumspect but not ambiguous: “Use whatever means necessary to stay on good terms with the natives and continue your scheduled program of exploration.”

“Which of us becomes drillmaster?” Shota Rustaveli asked when Bryusov relayed the word from Earth.

That, Tolmasov thought gloomily, about summed things up.

Fralk watched with five eyes as the human opened a catch and clicked a curved brown box into place on the bottom of the rifle. “This holds bullets,” Oleg said.

“Bullets,” Fralk repeated-so many new words to learn! All of them were necessarily in the human language, too; his own lacked the concepts for easy translation. “Bullets, bullets, bullets.”

“Da. Khorosho-good. The bullets come out of the muzzle when you pull the trigger.”

“Muzzle. Trigger.” Fralk said the words while Oleg, holding the rifle in one manyfingered hand, pointed out the parts with the other.

The human held out the rifle. “Go ahead. Pull the trigger.” “What?” Fralk watched himself turn blue with alarm. “You said, uh, bullets, would come out!” He had seen what bullets had done to the krong. He didn’t know how to make them go where he wanted and didn’t want them to do that to Oleg or him.

“Go ahead. Pull,” Oleg insisted.

Hesitantly, Fralk reached out with a fingerclaw. The trigger was hard as stone but smooth as ice. He pulled. Nothing happened. “No bullets,” he said, relieved.