By evening of the second Rocannon was stiff and wind-burned, but had learned to sit easy in the high saddle and to guide with some skill the great flying beast from Hallan stables.  Now the pink air of the long, slow sunset stretched above and beneath him, levels of rose-crystal light.  The windsteeds were flying high to stay as long as they could in sunlight, for like great cats they loved warmth.  Mogen on his black hunter - a stallion, would you call it, Rocannon wondered, or a tom? - was looking down, seeking a camping place, for windsteeds would not fly in darkness.  Two midmen soared behind on smaller white mounts, pink-winged in the after-glow of the great sun Fomalhaut.

"Look there, Starlord"

Rocannon's steed checked and snarled, seeing what Mogien was pointing to: a little black object moving low across the sky ahead of them, dragging behind it through the evening quiet a faint rattling noise.  Rocannon gestured that they land at once.  In the forest glade where they alighted, Mogien asked, "Was that a ship like yours, Starlord?"

"No.  It was a planet-bound ship, a helicopter.  It could only have been brought here on a ship much larger than mine was, a starfrigate or a transport.  They must be coming here in force.  And they must have started out before I did.  What are they doing here anyhow, with bombers and helicopters?...  They could shoot us right out of the sky from a long way off.  We'll have to watch out for them, Lord Mogien."

"The thing was flying up from the Clayfields.  I hope they were not there before us."

Rocannon only nodded, heavy with anger at the sight of that black spot on the sunset, that roach on a clean world.  Whoever these people were that had bombed an unarmed Survey ship at sight, they evidently meant to survey this planet and take it over for colonization or for some military use.  The High-Intelligence Life Forms of the planet, of which there were at least three species, all of low technological achievement, they would ignore or enslave or extirpate, whichever was most convenient.  For to an aggressive people only technology mattered.

And there, Rocannon said to himself as he watched the midmen unsaddle the windsteeds and loose them for their night's hunting, right there perhaps was the League's own weak spot.  Only technology mattered.  The two missions to this world in the last century had started pushing one of the species toward a pre-atomic technology before they had even explored the other continents or contacted all intelligent races.  He had called a halt to that, and had finally managed to bring his own Ethnographic Survey here to learn something about the planet, but he did not fool himself.  Even his work here would finally have served only as an informational basis for encouraging technological advance in the most likely species or culture.  This was how the League of All Worlds prepared to meet its ultimate enemy.  A hundred worlds had been trained and armed, a thousand more were being schooled in the uses of steel and wheel and tractor and reactor.  But Rocannon the hilfer, whose job was learning, not teaching, and who had lived on quite a few backward worlds, doubted the wisdom of staking everything on weapons and the uses of machines.  Dominated by the aggressive, tool-making humanoid species of Centaurus, Earth, and the Cetians, the League had slighted certain skills and powers and potentialities of intelligent life, and judged by too narrow a standard.