The Continent Makers and Other Tales of the Viagens by L. Sprague de Camp

fireworks. Henceforth this day shall be known as Liberation Day, for this day the walls of ignorance in which the tyrannical Terrans have long sought to imprison us are overthrown, blasted, finished!”

A.D. 2117
    The Galton Whistle

    Adrian Frome regained consciousness to the sound of harsh Dzlieri consonants. When he tried to move, he found he was tied to a tree by creepers, and that the Vishnuvan centaurs were cavorting around him, fingering weapons and gloating.
    “I think,” said one, “that if we skinned him carefully and rolled him in salt . . .”
    Another said: “Let us rather open his belly and draw forth his guts little by little. Flaying is too uncertain; Earthmen often die before one is half-done.”
    Frome saw that his fellow surveyors had indeed gone, leaving nothing but two dead zebras (out of the six they had started out with) and some smashed apparatus. His head ached abominably. Quinlan must have conked him from behind while Hayataka was unconscious, and then packed up and shoved off, taking his wounded chief but leaving Frome.
    The Dzlieri yelled at one another until one said: “A pox on your fancy slow deaths! Let us stand off and shoot him, thus ridding ourselves of him and bettering our aim at once. Archers first. What say you?”
    The last proposal carried. They spread out as far as the dense vegetation allowed.
    The Dzlieri were not literally centaurs in the sense of looking like handsome Greek statues. If you imagine the front half of a gorilla mounted on the body of a tapir you will have a rough idea of their looks. They had large mobile ears, a caricature of a human face covered with red fur, four-fingered hands, and a tufted tail. Still, the fact that they were equipped with two arms and four legs apiece made people who found the native name hard call them centaurs, though the sight of them would have scared Pheidias or Praxiteles out of his wits.
    “Ready?” said the archery enthusiast. “Aim low, for his head will make a fine addition to our collection if you spoil it not.”
    “Wait,” said another. “I have a better thought. One of their missionaries told me a Terran legend of a man compelled by his chief to shoot a fruit from the head of his son. Let us therefore . . .”
    “No! For then you will surely spoil his head!” And the whole mob was yelling again.
    Lord, thought Frome, how they talk! He tested his bonds, finding that someone had done a good job of tying him up. Although badly frightened, he pulled himself together and put on a firm front: “I say, what are you chaps up to?”
    They paid him no heed until the William Tell party carried the day and one of them, with a trader’s stolen rifle slung over his shoulder, approached with a fruit the size of a small pumpkin.
    Frome asked: “Does that gun of yours shoot?”
    “Yes,” said the Dzlieri. “I have bullets that fit, too!”
    Frome doubted this, but said: “Why not make a real sporting event of it? Each of us put a fruit on our heads and the other try to shoot it off?”
    The Dzlieri gave the gargling sound that passed for laughter. “So you can shoot us, eh? How stupid think you we are?”
    Frome, thinking it more tactful not to say, persisted with the earnestness of desperation: “Really, you know, it’ll only make trouble if you kill me, whereas if you let me go . . .”
    “Trouble we fear not,” roared the fruit-bearer, balancing the fruit on Frome’s head. “Think you we should let go such a fine head? Never have we seen an Earthman with yellow hair on head and face.”
    Frome cursed the coloration that he had always been rather proud of hitherto, and tried to compose more arguments. It was hard to think in the midst of this deafening racket.
    The pseudo-pumpkin fell off with a thump. The Dzlieri howled, and he who had placed it came back and belted Frome with a full-armed slap across the face. “That will teach you to move your head!” Then he tied it fast with a creeper that went over the fruit