noon
He heard nothing but that was what bothered him ; an ominous quiet when there should have been a multitude of sounds from the nearby village for the viewscreen 's audio-pickups to transmit . And it was more than six hours past the time when the native , Throon , should have come to sit with him outside the ship as they resumed the laborious attempt to learn each other 's language . -LSB- Illustration : Was the cat native to the planet , or to his imagination ? -RSB- The viewscreen was black in the light of the control room , even though it was high noon outside . The dull red sun was always invisible through the world 's thick atmosphere and to human eyes full day was no more than a red-tinged darkness . He switched on the ship 's outside floodlights and the viewscreen came to bright white life , showing the empty glades reaching away between groves of purple alien trees . He noticed , absently , that the trees seemed to have changed a little in color since his arrival .