and four of mine will stay with you. We will exchange—and you can see our ways while we see yours. That would help us understand each other."

It sounded reasonable. An exchange of hostages—or call it a cultural exchange, if you'd prefer. I told him that I'd think it over and to come back tomorrow. He nodded, turned, and together with his retinue disappeared into the jungle.

We hashed K'wan's proposal over at a board meeting that night and decided that we'd take it. The exact status of Lyranian culture worried us. It is a cardinal rule never to underestimate an alien culture or to judge it by surface appearances. So we organized a team that would form our part of the "cultural exchange."

I would go, of course. If K'wan could visit us, I could hardly stay back. Alex was selected partly because he was an engineer, mostly because he'd been over the ground before. Ed Barger, our ecologist, and Patrick Allardyce, our biologist, made up the remainder of the party. I'd have liked to take the padre and Doc, but Doc was more valuable at base, and if I could have only four men, I wanted fighting men.

"Now," I said, "we'll take along a tight-beam communicator. Coupled to our menticoms, it should be able to reach the ship and put what we see and what happens on permanent record." Then I turned to Dan Warren. "If anything goes wrong, don't try to rescue us. Finish your observations and get out. You understand? And get those exchange natives into Interrogation. Condition them to the eyeballs with cooperation dogma. We may need some friends here when the second echelon makes a landfall."

Warren nodded. I didn't have to elaborate.

The native village was about what I expected from our reconnaissance flights. It was beautifully camouflaged. You couldn't tell it from the rest of the forest except that the trees were larger and were hollow—apparently hewn out with patient care to make a comfortable living space inside. Lyranians lived in one place, if what I could see of their dwellings was any criterion. I wanted to look inside, but K'wan hustled us down the irregular "street" that wound through the grove of giant trees until we finally came to the granddaddy of them all, a trunk nearly forty feet in diameter.

K'wan gestured at the tree. "Your house while you are here. We made it for you Earthmen." His voice came over my menticom and was duly recorded on the ship, since we were in constant contact, giving our impressions of the place. So 

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