They watched Aries come in - de Messigny, the Princess and, a little to one side, Grimes and Kravisky.  Grimes had thought it strange that the spaceport control tower should be left unmanned at this juncture, but the two El Doradans, coldly and amusedly, had informed him that the electronic intelligences housed therein were quite capable of handling any normal landing without any human interference, Grimes did not like the way that the Comte slightly stressed the word "normal."

They stood there, the four of them, on the edge of the apron, well clear of the triangle of red lights.  Above them, on gleaming wings, wheeled and hovered a quartet of flying things that looked like birds, that must be four of the watchbirds about which Grimes had already heard, which, in fact, he had already encountered.  (And, he thought glumly, there was still the enquiry into the loss of the re-entry vehicle to face.)

The two El Doradans ignored their mechanical guardians.  The Lieutenant could not, wondering what would happen should he make some inadvertent move that would be construed by the electronic brains as an act of hostility.  He started to edge a little further away from Marlene von Stolzberg and de Messigny, then, with an audible grunt, stood his ground.

They saw the ship before they heard her - at first a glittering speck in the cloudless, morning sky and then, after only a few seconds, a gleaming spindle.  She was well in sight when there drifted down to them he odd, irregular throbbing of an inertial drive unit in operation, no more than an uneasy mutter to begin with but swelling to an ominous, intermittent thunder, the voice of the power that had hurled men out among the stars.

But this was all wrong.  On any civilized world, or on any civilized world other than this, there would have been an honor guard, ranks of soldiers, in ceremonial uniform, drawn to rigid attention.  There would have been antique cannon with black powder charges to fire a salute to the Captain of a major Terran war vessel.  There would have been flags and ceremonial.  But here, here there was only one man - and his uniform, after all, was a mercantile one - and one woman.  A self-styled Princess, perhaps, but even so...  And, thought Grimes, there's also Kravisky and myself, but dressed like beach boys.

Lower dropped the ship, and lower, the noise of her Drive deafening now, every protrusion, every mast, turret and sponson that broke the smooth lines of her hull visible to the naked eye.  From a staff just abaft her sharp stem the ensign of the Survey Service - a golden S on a black field, with the green, blue and gold globe of Earth in the upper canton - was broken out, streamed vertically upwards.  Grimes did not have to turn to see that there was no bunting displayed from the masts of the spaceport administration buildings.  Perhaps, he thought, there were in the Universe aristocrats sufficiently courteous to put out more flags to celebrate the arrival of snotty-nosed ragamuffins from the wrong side of the tracks, but the only aristocratic quality to be found in abundance on El Dorado was arrogance.