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be a guard assigned to protect the barn.
    â€œWhen I first came down,” said Abraham, “they crowded around the floater and stood looking at the stuff and you could see they could hardly keep their hands off it. I tried to talk to them, but they wouldn’t talk too much, except to say that they were poor. Now all they do is just stand off and glare.”
    The barn was a monumental structure when gauged against the tiny houses of the village. It stood up foursquare and solid and entirely without ornament and it was an alien thing—alien of Earth. For, Sheridan realized, it was the same kind of barn that he had seen on the backwoods farms of Earth—the great hip-roof, the huge barn door, the ramp up to the door, and even the louvered cupola that rode astride the ridge-pole.
    The man and the two robots stood in a pool of hostile silence and the lounging natives kept on staring at them and there was something decidedly wrong.
    Sheridan turned slowly and glanced around the square and suddenly he knew what the wrongness was.
    The place was shabby; it approached the downright squalid. The houses were neglected and no longer neat and the streets were littered. And the people were a piece with all the rest of it.
    â€œSir,” said Hezekiah, “they are a sorry lot.”
    And they were all of that.
    There was something in their faces that had a look of haunting and their shoulders stooped and there was fatigue upon them.
    â€œI can’t understand it,” said the puzzled Abraham. “The data says they were a happy-go-lucky bunch, but look at them out there. Could the data have been wrong?”
    â€œNo, Abe. It’s the people who have changed.”
    For there was no chance that the data could be wrong. It had been compiled by a competent team, one of the very best, and headed by a human who had long years of experience on many alien planets. The team had spent two years on Garson IV and had made it very much its business to know this race inside out.
    Something had happened to the people. They had somehow lost their gaiety and pride. They had let the houses go uncared for. They had allowed themselves to become a race of ragamuffins.
    â€œYou guys stay here,” Sheridan said.
    â€œYou can’t do it, sir,” said Hezekiah in alarm.
    â€œWatch yourself,” warned Abraham.
    Sheridan walked toward the barn. The group before it did not stir. He stopped six feet away.
    Close up, they looked more gnomelike than they had appeared in the pictures brought back by the survey team. Little wizened gnomes, they were, but not happy gnomes at all. They were seedy-looking and there was resentment in them and perhaps a dash of hatred. They had a hangdog look and there were some among them who shuffled in discomfiture.
    â€œI see you don’t remember us,” said Sheridan conversationally. “We were away too long, much longer than we had thought to be.”
    He was having, he feared, some trouble with the language. It was, in fact, not the easiest language in the Galaxy to handle. For a fleeting moment, he wished that there were some sort of transmog that could be slipped into the human brain. It would make moments like this so much easier.
    â€œWe remember you,” said one of them in a sullen voice.
    â€œThat’s wonderful,” said Sheridan with forced enthusiasm. “Are you speaker for this village?”
    Speaker because there was no leader, no chief—no government at all beyond a loose, haphazard talking over what daily problems they had, around the local equivalent of the general store, and occasional formless town meetings to decide what to do in their rare crises, but no officials to enforce the decisions.
    â€œI can speak for them,” the native said somewhat evasively. He shuffled slowly forward. “There were others like you who came many years ago.”
    â€œYou were friends to them.”
    â€œWe are friends to all.”
    â€œBut