NAUDSONCE

 Bishop Berkeley's famous question about the sound of a falling tree may have no standing in Science. But there is a highly interesting question about "sound" that Science needs to consider. .. . 

BY H. BEAM PIPER

ILLUSTRATED BY MOREY

 * * * * *

[Illustration]

The sun warmed Mark Howell's back pleasantly. Underfoot, themosslike stuff was soft and yielding, and there was a fragrancein the air unlike anything he had ever smelled. He was going tolike this planet; he knew it. The question was, how would it, and its people, like him? He watched the little figures advancingacross the fields from the mound, with the village out of sighton the other end of it and the combat-car circling lazily oncontragravity above. 

Major Luis Gofredo, the Marine officer, spoke without loweringhis binoculars:

"They have a tubular thing about twelve feet long; six of themare carrying it on poles, three to a side, and a couple more arewalking behind it. Mark, do you think it could be a cannon?"

So far, he didn't know enough to have an opinion, and said so, adding:

"What I saw of the village in the screen from the car, it lookedpretty primitive. Of course, gunpowder's one of those things aprimitive people could discover by accident, if the ingredientswere available. "

"We won't take any chances, then. "

"You think they're hostile? I was hoping they were coming out toparley with us. "

That was Paul Meillard. He had a right to be anxious; his wholefuture in the Colonial Office would be made or ruined by what wasgoing to happen here. 

The joint Space Navy-Colonial Office expedition was looking fornew planets suitable for colonization; they had been out, now, for four years, which was close to maximum for an exploringexpedition. They had entered eleven systems, and made landingson eight planets. Three had been reasonably close to Terra-type. There had been Fafnir; conditions there would correspond to Terraduring the Cretaceous Period, but any Cretaceous dinosaur wouldhave been cute and cuddly to the things on Fafnir. Then there hadbeen Imhotep; in twenty or thirty thousand years, it would bea fine planet, but at present it was undergoing an extensiveglaciation. And Irminsul, covered with forests of gigantic trees;it would have been fine except for the fauna, which was nasty, especially a race of subsapient near-humanoids who had justgotten as far as clubs and _coup-de-poing_ axes. Contact withthem had entailed heavy ammunition expenditure, with two men anda woman killed and a dozen injured. He'd had a limp, himself, for a while as a result. 

As for the other five, one had been an all-out hell-planet, andthe rest had been the sort that get colonized by irreconcilableminority-groups who want to get away from everybody else. TheColonial Office wouldn't even consider any of them. 

Then they had found this one, third of a G0-star, eighty millionmiles from primary, less axial inclination than Terra, which wouldmean a more uniform year-round temperature, and about half landsurface. On the evidence of a couple of sneak landings forspecimens, the biochemistry was identical with Terra's and theorganic matter was edible. It was the sort of planet every explorerdreams of finding, except for one thing. 

It was inhabited by a sapient humanoid race, and some of them werecivilized enough to put it in Class V, and Colonial Office doctrineon Class V planets was rigid. Friendly relations with the nativeshad to be established, and permission to settle had to be guaranteedin a treaty of some sort with somebody more or less authorized tomake one. 

If Paul Meillard could accomplish that, he had it made. He wouldstay on with forty or fifty of the ship's company to makepreparations. In a year a couple of ships would come out from Terra, with a thousand colonists, and a battalion or so of Federationtroops, to protect them from the natives and vice versa. Meillardwould automatically be appointed governor-general. 

But if he failed, he was through. Not out--just through. When hegot back to Terra, he would be promoted to some home office positionat slightly higher base pay but without the three hundred per centextraterrestrial bonus, and he would vegetate there till he retired. Every time his name came up, somebody would say, "Oh, yes; heflubbed the contact on Whatzit. "

It wouldn't do the rest of them any good, either. There wouldalways be the suspicion that they had contributed to the failure. 

 * * * * *

_Bwaaa-waaa-waaanh!_

The wavering sound hung for an instant in the air. A few secondslater, it was repeated, then repeated again. 

"Our cannon's a horn, " Gofredo said. "I can't see how they'reblowing it, though. "

There was a stir to right and left, among the Marines deployedin a crescent line on either side of the contact team; a metallicclatter as weapons were checked. A shadow fell in front of themas a combat-car moved into position above. 

"What do you suppose it means?" Meillard wondered. 

"Terrans, go home. " He drew a frown from Meillard with thesuggestion. "Maybe it's supposed to intimidate us. "

"They're probably doing it to encourage themselves, " Anna de Jong, the psychologist, said. "I'll bet they're really scared stiff. "

"I see how they're blowing it, " Gofredo said. "The man who's walkingbehind it has a hand-bellows. " He raised his voice. "Fix bayonets!These people don't know anything about rifles, but they know whatspears are. They have some of their own. "

So they had. The six who walked in the lead were unarmed, unlessthe thing one of them carried was a spear. So, it seemed, were thehorn-bearers. Behind them, however, in an open-order skirmish-line, came fifty-odd with weapons. Most of them had spears, the pointsglinting redly. Bronze, with a high copper content. A few had bows. They came slowly; details became more plainly visible. 

The leader wore a long yellow robe; the thing in his hand was abronze-headed staff. Three of his companions also wore robes; theother two were bare-legged in short tunics. The horn-bearers woreeither robes or tunics; the spearmen and bowmen behind either woretunics or were naked except for breechclouts. All wore sandals. Theywere red-brown in color, completely hairless; they had long necks, almost chinless lower jaws, and fleshy, beaklike noses that gavethem an avian appearance which was heightened by red crests, likeroosters' combs, on the tops of their heads. 

"Well, aren't they something to see?" Lillian Ransby, the linguist asked. 

"I wonder how we look to them, " Paul Meillard said. 

That was something to wonder about, too. The differences betweenone and another of the Terrans must puzzle them. Paul Meillard, asclose to being a pure Negro as anybody in the Seventh Century ofthe Atomic Era was to being pure anything. Lillian Ransby, almostash-blond. Major Gofredo, barely over the minimum Service heightrequirement; his name was Old Terran Spanish, but his ancestrymust have been Polynesian, Amerind and Mongolian. Karl Dorver, the sociographer, six feet six, with red hair. Bennet Fayon, the biologist and physiologist, plump, pink-faced and balding. Willi Schallenmacher, with a bushy black beard. .. . 

They didn't have any ears, he noticed, and then he was taking stockof the things they wore and carried. Belts, with pouches, and kniveswith flat bronze blades and riveted handles. Three of the delegationhad small flutes hung by cords around their necks, and a fourth hada reed Pan-pipe. No shields, and no swords; that was good. Swordsand shields mean organized warfare, possibly a warrior-caste. Thiscrowd weren't warriors. The spearmen and bowmen weren't arrayed forbattle, but for a drive-hunt, with the bows behind the spears tostop anything that broke through the line. 

"All right; let's go meet them. " The querulous, uncertain note wasgone from Meillard's voice; he knew what to do and how to do it. 

 * * * * *

Gofredo called to the Marines to stand fast. Then they wereadvancing to meet the natives, and when they were twenty feet apart, both groups halted. The horn stopped blowing. The one in the yellowrobe lifted his staff and said something that sounded like, "_Tweedle-eedle-oodly-eenk_. "

The horn, he saw, was made of strips of leather, wound spirallyand coated with some kind of varnish. Everything these people hadwas carefully and finely made. An old culture, but a static one. Probably tradition-bound as all get-out. 

Meillard was raising his hands; solemnly he addressed the natives:

"'Twas brillig and the slithy toves were whooping it up in theMalemute Saloon, and the kid that handled the music box did gyreand gimble in the wabe, and back of the bar in a solo game allmimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgabe the ladythat's known as Lou. "

That was supposed to show them that we, too, have a spoken language, to prove that their language and ours were mutually incomprehensible, and to demonstrate the need for devising a means of communication. At least that was what the book said. It demonstrated nothing ofthe sort to this crowd. It scared them. The dignitary with the stafftwittered excitedly. One of his companions agreed with him at length. Another started to reach for his knife, then remembered his manners. The bellowsman pumped a few blasts on the horn. 

"What do you think of the language?" he asked Lillian. 

"They all sound that bad, when you first hear them. Give them a fewseconds, and then we'll have Phase Two. "

When the gibbering and skreeking began to fall off, she steppedforward. Lillian was, herself, a good test of how human aliens were;this gang weren't human enough to whistle at her. She touchedherself on the breast. "Me, " she said. 

The natives seemed shocked. She repeated the gesture and the word, then turned and addressed Paul Meillard. "You. "

"Me, " Meillard said, pointing to himself. Then he said, "You, " toLuis Gofredo. It went around the contact team; when it came to him, he returned it to point of origin. 

"I don't think they get it at all, " he added in a whisper. 

"They ought to, " Lillian said. "Every language has a word for selfand a word for person-addressed. "

"Well, look at them, " Karl Dorver invited. "Six different opinionsabout what we mean, and now the band's starting an argument of theirown. "

"Phase Two-A, " Lillian said firmly, stepping forward. She pointedto herself. "Me--Lillian Ransby. Lillian Ransby--me _name_. You--_name_?

"_Bwoooo!_" the spokesman screamed in horror, clutching his staffas though to shield it from profanation. The others howled likea hound-pack at a full moon, except one of the short-tunic boys, who was slapping himself on the head with both hands and yodeling. The horn-crew hastily swung their piece around at the Terrans, pumping frantically. 

"What do you suppose I said?" Lillian asked. 

"Oh, something like, 'Curse your gods, death to your king, andspit in your mother's face, ' I suppose. "

"Let me try it, " Gofredo said. 

The little Marine major went through the same routine. At his firstword, the uproar stopped; before he was through, the natives' faceswere sagging and crumbling into expressions of utter andheartbroken grief. 

"It's not as bad as all that, is it?" he said. "You try it, Mark. "

"Me . .. Mark . .. Howell. .. . " They looked bewildered. 

"Let's try objects, and play-acting, " Lillian suggested. "They'refarmers; they ought to have a word for water. "

 * * * * *

They spent almost an hour at it. They poured out two gallons ofwater, pretended to be thirsty, gave each other drinks. The nativessimply couldn't agree on the word, in their own language, for water. That or else they missed the point of the whole act. They triedfire, next. The efficiency of a steel hatchet was impressive, andso was the sudden flame of a pocket-lighter, but no word for fireemerged, either. 

"Ah, to Nifflheim with it!" Luis Gofredo cried in exasperation. "We're getting nowhere at five times light speed. Give them theirpresents and send them home, Paul. "

"Sheath-knives; they'll have to be shown how sharp they are, "he suggested. "Red bandannas. And costume jewelry. "

"How about something to eat, Bennet?" Meillard asked Fayon. 

"Extee Three, and C-H trade candy, " Fayon said. Field Ration, Extraterrestrial Service, Type Three, could be eaten by anythingwith a carbon-hydrogen metabolism, and so could the trade candy. "Nothing else, though, till we have some idea what goes on insidethem. "

Dorver thought the six members of the delegation would be personsof special consequence, and should have something extra. That wasprobably so. Dorver was as quick to pick up clues to an alien socialorder as he was, himself, to deduce a culture pattern from a fewartifacts. He and Lillian went back to the landing craft to collectthe presents. 

Everybody, horn-detail, armed guard and all, got one ten-inch bowieknife and sheath, a red bandanna neckcloth, and a piece of flashyjunk jewelry. The (town council? prominent citizens? or what?) alsoreceived a colored table-spread apiece; these were draped over theirshoulders and fastened with two-inch plastic pins advertising thecandidacy of somebody for President of the Federation Member Republicof Venus a couple of elections ago. They all looked woebegone aboutit; that would be their expression of joy. Different type nerves anddifferent facial musculature, Fayon thought. As soon as they sampledthe Extee Three and candy, they looked crushed under all the sorrowsof the galaxy. 

By pantomime and pointing to the sun, Meillard managed to informthem that the next day, when the sun was in the same position, theTerrans would visit their village, bringing more gifts. The nativeswere quite agreeable, but Meillard was disgruntled that he had touse sign-talk. The natives started off toward the village on themound, munching Extee Three and trying out their new knives. Thistime tomorrow, half of them would have bandaged thumbs. 

 * * * * *

The Marine riflemen and submachine-gunners were coming in, slingingtheir weapons and lighting cigarettes. A couple of Navy technicianswere getting a snooper--a thing shaped like a short-tailed tadpole, six feet long by three at the widest, fitted with visible-lightand infra-red screen pickups and crammed with detectioninstruments--ready to relieve the combat car over the village. The contact team crowded into the Number One landing craft, whichhad been fitted out as a temporary headquarters. Prefab-hut elementswere already being unloaded from the other craft. 

Everybody felt that a drink was in order, even if it was two hoursshort of cocktail time. They carried bottles and glasses and ice tothe front of the landing craft and sat down in front of the batteryof view and communication screens. The central screen was a two-way, tuned to one in the officers' lounge aboard the _Hubert Penrose_, two hundred miles above. In it, also provided with drinks, wereCaptain Guy Vindinho and two other Navy officers, and a Marinecaptain in shipboard blues. Like Gofredo, Vindinho must have gotteninto the Service on tiptoe; he had a bald dome and a red beard, andhe always looked as though he were gloating because nobody knewthat his name was really Rumplestiltskin. He had been watchingthe contact by screen. He lifted his glass toward Meillard. 

"Over the hump, Paul?"

Meillard raised his drink to Vindinho. "Over the first one. There's a whole string of them ahead. At least, we sent them awayhappy. I hope. "

"You're going to make permanent camp where you are now?" one ofthe other officers asked. Lieutenant-Commander Dave Questell;ground engineering and construction officer. "What do you need?"

There were two viewscreens from pickups aboard the 2500-foot battlecruiser. One, at ten-power magnification, gave a maplike view of thebroad valley and the uplands and mountain foothills to the south. Itwas only by tracing the course of the main river and its tributariesthat they could find the tiny spot of the native village, and theycouldn't see the landing craft at all. The other, at a hundredpower, showed the oblong mound, with the village on its flat top, little dots around a circular central plaza. They could see the twoturtle-shaped landing-craft, and the combat car, that had beencircling over the mound, landing beside them, and, sometimes, a glint of sunlight from the snooper that had taken its place. 

The snooper was also transmitting in, to another screen, fromtwo hundred feet above the village. From the sound outlet came anincessant gibber of native voices. There were over a hundred houses, all small and square, with pyramidal roofs. On the end of the moundtoward the Terran camp, animals of at least four different specieswere crowded, cattle that had been herded up from the meadows atthe first alarm. The open circle in the middle of the village wascrowded, and more natives lined the low palisade along the edgeof the mound. 

"Well, we're going to stay here till we learn the language, "Meillard was saying. "This is the best place for it. It's completelyisolated, forests on both sides, and seventy miles to the nearestother village. If we're careful, we can stay here as long as we wantto and nobody'll find out about us. Then, after we can talk withthese people, we'll go to the big town. "

 * * * * *

The big town was two hundred and fifty miles down the valley, at the forks of the main river, a veritable metropolis of almostthree thousand people. That was where the treaty would have tobe negotiated. 

[Illustration: ". .. But no two of them speak the same language!"]

"You'll want more huts. You'll want a water tank, and a pipelineto that stream below you, and a pump, " Questell said. "You thinka month?"

Meillard looked at Lillian Ransby. "What do you think?"

"_Poodly-doodly-oodly-foodle_, " she said. "You saw how far we didn'tget this afternoon. All we found out was that none of the standardprocedures work at all. " She made a tossing gesture over her shoulder. "There goes the book; we have to do it off the cuff from here. "

"Suppose we make another landing, back in the mountains, say two orthree hundred miles south of you, " Vindinho said. "It's not rightto keep the rest aboard two hundred miles off planet, and you won'tbe wanting liberty parties coming down where you are. "

"The country over there looks uninhabited, " Meillard said. "No villages, anyhow. That wouldn't hurt, at all. "

"Well, it'll suit me, " Charley Loughran, the xeno-naturalist, said. "I want a chance to study the life-forms in a state of nature. "

Vindinho nodded. "Luis, do you anticipate any trouble with thiscrowd here?" he asked. 

"How about it, Mark? What do they look like to you? Warlike?"

"No. " He stated the opinion he had formed. "I had a close look attheir weapons when they came in for their presents. Hunting arms. Most of the spears have cross-guards, usually wooden, lashed on, to prevent a wounded animal from running up the spear-shaft at thehunter. They made boar-spears like that on Terra a thousand yearsago. Maybe they have to fight raiding parties from the hills oncein a while, but not often enough for them to develop specialfighting weapons or techniques. "

"Their village is fortified, " Meillard mentioned. 

"I question that, " Gofredo differed. "There won't be more thana total of five hundred there; call that a fighting strength oftwo hundred, to defend a twenty-five-hundred-meter perimeter, withwoodchoppers' axes and bows and spears. If you notice, there's nowall around the village itself. That palisade is just a fence. "

"Why would they mound the village up?" Questell, in the screenwondered. "You don't think the river gets up that high, do you?Because if it does--"

Schallenmacher shook his head. "There just isn't enough watershed, and there's too much valley. I'll be very much surprised if thatstream, there"--he nodded at the hundred-power screen--"ever getsmore than six inches over the bank. "

"I don't know what those houses are built of. This is all alluvialcountry; building stone would be almost unobtainable. I don't seeanything like a brick kiln. I don't see any evidence of irrigation, either, so there must be plenty of rainfall. If they use adobe, orsun-dried brick, houses would start to crumble in a few years, andthey would be pulled down and the rubble shoved aside to make roomfor a new house. The village has been rising on its own ruins, probably shifting back and forth from one end of that mound tothe other. "

"If that's it, they've been there a long time, " Karl Dorver said. "And how far have they advanced?"

"Early bronze; I'll bet they still use a lot of stone implements. Pre-dynastic Egypt, or very early Tigris-Euphrates, in Terran terms. I can't see any evidence that they have the wheel. They have draftanimals; when we were coming down, I saw a few of them pulling poletravoises. I'd say they've been farming for a long time. They havequite a diversity of crops, and I suspect that they have some ideaof crop-rotation. I'm amazed at their musical instruments; they seemto have put more skill into making them than anything else. I'mgoing to take a jeep, while they're all in the village, and havea look around the fields, now. "

Charley Loughran went along for specimens, and, for the ride, Lillian Ransby. Most of his guesses, he found, had been correct. He found a number of pole travoises, from which the animals hadbeen unhitched in the first panic when the landing craft had beencoming down. Some of them had big baskets permanently attached. There were drag-marks everywhere in the soft ground, but not asingle wheel track. He found one plow, cunningly put together withwooden pegs and rawhide lashings; the point was stone, and itwould only score a narrow groove, not a proper furrow. It was, however, fitted with a big bronze ring to which a draft animalcould be hitched. Most of the cultivation seemed to have been donewith spades and hoes. He found a couple of each, bronze, cast flatin an open-top mold. They hadn't learned to make composite molds. 

There was an even wider variety of crops than he had expected: twocereals, a number of different root-plants, and a lot of differentlegumes, and things like tomatoes and pumpkins. 

"Bet these people had a pretty good life, here--before the Terranscame, " Charley observed. 

"Don't say that in front of Paul, " Lillian warned. "He has enoughto worry about now, without starting him on whether we'll do thesepeople more harm than good. "

Two more landing craft had come down from the _Hubert Penrose_;they found Dave Questell superintending the unloading of moreprefab-huts, and two were already up that had been brought downwith the first landing. 

A name for the planet had also arrived. 

"Svantovit, " Karl Dorver told him. "Principal god of the BalticSlavs, about three thousand years ago. Guy Vindinho dug it outof the 'Encyclopedia of Mythology. ' Svantovit was represented asholding a bow in one hand and a horn in the other. "

"Well, that fits. What will we call the natives; Svantovitians, or Svantovese?"

"Well, Paul wanted to call them Svantovese, but Luis persuaded himto call them Svants. He said everybody'd call them that, anyhow, so we might as well make it official from the start. "

"We can call the language Svantovese, " Lillian decided. "Afterdinner, I am going to start playing back recordings and running offaudiovisuals. I will be so happy to know that I have a name for whatI'm studying. Probably be all I will know. "

 * * * * *

After dinner, he and Karl and Paul went into a huddle on what sortof gifts to give the natives, and the advisability of trading withthem, and for what. Nothing too far in advance of their presentculture level. Wheels; they could be made in the fabricating shopaboard the ship. 

"You know, it's odd, " Karl Dorver said. "These people here havenever seen a wheel, and, except in documentary or historical-dramafilms, neither have a lot of Terrans. "

That was true. As a means of transportation, the wheel had beencompletely obsolete since the development of contragravity, sixcenturies ago. Well, a lot of Terrans in the Year Zero had neverseen a suit of armor, or an harquebus, or even a tinder box ora spinning wheel. 

Wheelbarrows; now there was something they'd find useful. Hescreened Max Milzer, in charge of the fabricating and repair shopson the ship. Max had never even heard of a wheelbarrow. 

"I can make them up, Mark; better send me some drawings, though. Did you just invent it?"

"As far as I know, a man named Leonardo da Vinci invented it, inthe Sixth Century Pre-Atomic. How soon can you get me half a dozenof them?"

"Well, let's see. Welded sheet metal, and pipe for the frame andhandles. I'll have some of them for you by noon tomorrow. Now, abouthoes; how tall are these people, and how long are their arms, andhow far can they stoop over?"

 * * * * *

They were all up late, that night. So were the Svants; there was afire burning in the middle of the village, and watch-fires along theedge of the mound. Luis Gofredo was just as distrustful of them asthey were of the Terrans; he kept the camp lighted, a strong guardon the alert, and the area of darkness beyond infra red lighted andcovered by photoelectric sentries on the ground and snoopers in theair. Like Paul Meillard, Luis Gofredo was a worrier and a pessimist. Everything happened for the worst in this worst of all possiblegalaxies, and if anything could conceivably go wrong, it infalliblywould. That was probably why he was still alive and had never hada command massacred. 

The wheelbarrows, four of them, came down from the ship by midmorning. With them came a grindstone, a couple of crosscut saws, and a lot ofpicks and shovels and axes, and cases of sheath knives and mess gearand miscellaneous trade goods, including a lot of the empty wine andwhisky bottles that had been hoarded for the past four years. 

At lunch, the talk was almost exclusively about the language problem. Lillian Ransby, who had not gotten to sleep before sunrise and hadjust gotten up, was discouraged. 

"I don't know what we're going to do next, " she admitted. "GlennOrent and Anna and I were on it all night, and we're nowhere. Wehave about a hundred wordlike sounds isolated, and twenty or so areused repeatedly, and we can't assign a meaning to any of them. Andnone of the Svants ever reacted the same way twice to anything wesaid to them. There's just no one-to-one relationship anywhere. "

"I'm beginning to doubt they have a language, " the Navy intelligenceofficer said. "Sure, they make a lot of vocal noise. So do chipmunks. "

"They have to have a language, " Anna de Jong declared. "No sapientthought is possible without verbalization. "

"Well, no society like that is possible without some means ofcommunication, " Karl Dorver supported her from the other flank. He seemed to have made that point before. "You know, " he added, "I'm beginning to wonder if it mightn't be telepathy. "

He evidently hadn't suggested that before. The others looked athim in surprise. Anna started to say, "Oh, I doubt if--" and thenstopped. 

"I know, the race of telepaths is an old gimmick that's been used innew-planet adventure stories for centuries, but maybe we've finallyfound one. "

"I don't like it, Karl, " Loughran said. "If they're telepaths, whydon't they understand us? And if they're telepaths, why do they talkat all? And you can't convince me that this boodly-oodly-doodle oftheirs isn't talking. "

"Well, our neural structure and theirs won't be nearly alike, "Fayon said. "I know, this analogy between telepathy and radiois full of holes, but it's good enough for this. Our wave lengthcan't be picked up with their sets. "

"The deuce it can't, " Gofredo contradicted. "I've been botheredabout that from the beginning. These people act as though they gotmeaning from us. Not the meaning we intend, but some meaning. WhenPaul made the gobbledygook speech, they all reacted in the sameway--frightened, and then defensive. The you-me routine simplybewildered them, as we'd be at a set of semantically lucid butself-contradictory statements. When Lillian tried to introduceherself, they were shocked and horrified. .. . "

"It looked to me like actual physical disgust, " Anna interpolated. 

"When I tried it, they acted like a lot of puppies being petted, and when Mark tried it, they were simply baffled. I watched Markexplaining that steel knives were dangerously sharp; they got thedemonstration, but when he tried to tie words onto it, it threwthem completely. "

"ALL RIGHT. Pass that, " Loughran conceded. "But if they havetelepathy, why do they use spoken words?"

"Oh, I can answer that, " Anna said. "Say they communicated by speechoriginally, and developed their telepathic faculty slowly and withoutrealizing it. They'd go on using speech, and since the message wouldbe received telepathically ahead of the spoken message, nobody wouldpay any attention to the words as such. Everybody would have a spokenlanguage of his own; it would be sort of the instrumentalaccompaniment to the song. "

"Some of them don't bother speaking, " Karl nodded. "They just toot. "

"I'll buy that, right away, " Loughran agreed. "In mating, orin group-danger situations, telepathy would be a race-survivalcharacteristic. It would be selected for genetically, and thenon-gifted strains would tend to die out. "

It wouldn't do. It wouldn't do at all. He said so. 

"Look at their technology. We either have a young race, just emergedfrom savagery, or an old, stagnant race. All indications seem tofavor the latter. A young race would not have time to developtelepathy as Anna suggests. An old race would have gone much fartherthan these people have. Progress is a matter of communication andpooling ideas and discoveries. Make a trend-graph of technologicalprogress on Terra; every big jump comes after an improvement incommunications. The printing press; railways and steamships; thetelegraph; radio. Then think how telepathy would speed up progress. "

 * * * * *

The sun was barely past noon meridian before the Svants, who hadventured down into the fields at sunrise, were returning to themound-village. In the snooper-screen, they could be seen coming upin tunics and breechclouts, entering houses, and emerging in longrobes. There seemed to be no bows or spears in evidence, but the bighorn sounded occasionally. Paul Meillard was pleased. Even if it hadbeen by sign-talk, which he rated with worm-fishing for trout orshooting sitting rabbits, he had gotten something across to them. 

When they went to the village, at 1500, they had trouble gettingtheir lorry down. A couple of Marines in a jeep had to go in firstto get the crowd out of the way. Several of the locals, includingthe one with the staff, joined with them; this quick co-operationdelighted Meillard. When they had the lorry down and were all outof it, the dignitary with the staff, his scarlet tablecloth overhis yellow robe, began an oration, apparently with every confidencethat he was being understood. In spite of his objections at lunch, the telepathy theory was beginning to seem more persuasive. 

"Give them the Shooting of Dan McJabberwock again, " he toldMeillard. "This is where we came in yesterday. "

Something Meillard had noticed was exciting him. "Wait a moment. They're going to do something. "

They were indeed. The one with the staff and three of his henchmenadvanced. The staff bearer touched himself on the brow. "_Fwoonk_, "he said. Then he pointed to Meillard. "_Hoonkle_, " he said. 

"They got it!" Lillian was hugging herself joyfully. "I knew theyought to!"

Meillard indicated himself and said, "_Fwoonk_. "

That wasn't right. The village elder immediately corrected him. The word, it seemed, was, "_Fwoonk_. "

His three companions agreed that that was the word for self, but that was as far as the agreement went. They rendered it, respectively, as "_Pwink_, " "_Tweelt_" and "_Kroosh_. "

Gofredo gave a barking laugh. He was right; anything that could gowrong would go wrong. Lillian used a word; it was not a ladylikeword at all. The Svants looked at them as though wondering whatcould possibly be the matter. Then they went into a huddle, arguingvehemently. The argument spread, like a ripple in a pool; sooneverybody was twittering vocally or blowing on flutes and Panpipes. Then the big horn started blaring. Immediately, Gofredo snatched thehand-phone of his belt radio and began speaking urgently into it. 

"What are you doing, Luis?" Meillard asked anxiously. 

"Calling the reserve in. I'm not taking chances on this. " He spokeagain into the phone, then called over his shoulder: "Rienet; threeone-second bursts, in the air!"

A Marine pointed a submachine gun skyward and ripped off a string ofshots, then another, and another. There was silence after the firstburst. Then a frightful howling arose. 

"Luis, you imbecile!" Meillard was shouting. 

Gofredo jumped onto the top of an airjeep, where they could allsee him; drawing his pistol, he fired twice into the air. 

"Be quiet, all of you!" he shouted, as though that would do any good. 

It did. Silence fell, bounced noisily, and then settled over thecrowd. Gofredo went on talking to them: "Take it easy, now; easy. "He might have been speaking to a frightened dog or a fractioushorse. "Nobody's going to hurt you. This is nothing but the greatnoise-magic of the Terrans. .. . "

"Get the presents unloaded, " Meillard was saying. "Make a big showof it. The table first. "

The horn, which had started, stopped blowing. As they were gettingoff the long table and piling it with trade goods, another lorrycame in, disgorging twenty Marine riflemen. They had their bayonetsfixed; the natives looked apprehensively at the bare steel, butwent on listening to Gofredo. Meillard pulled the (Lord Mayor?Archbishop? Lord of the Manor?) aside, and began making sign-talkto him. 

When quiet was restored, Howell put a pick and shovel into awheelbarrow and pushed them out into the space that had been clearedin front of the table. He swung the pick for a while, then shoveledthe barrow full of ground. After pushing it around for a while, hedumped it back in the hole and leveled it off. Two Marines broughtout an eight-inch log and chopped a couple of billets off it withan ax, then cut off another with one of the saws, split them up, and filled the wheelbarrow with the firewood. 

[Illustration: _We can't use the computer till we can tell it whatthe data is data about!_]

The knives, jewelry and other small items would be no problem; theyhad enough of them to go around. The other stuff would be harder todistribute, and Paul Meillard and Karl Dorver were arguing about howto handle it. If they weren't careful, a lot of new bowie kniveswould get bloodied. 

"Have them form a queue, " Anna suggested. "That will give them theidea of equal sharing, and we'll be able to learn something abouttheir status levels and social hierarchy and agonistic relations. "

 * * * * *

The one with the staff took it as a matter of course that he wouldgo first; his associates began falling in behind him, and the restof the villagers behind them. Whether they'd gotten one the daybefore or not, everybody was given a knife and a bandanna and onepiece of flashy junk-jewelry, also a stainless steel cup and messplate, a bucket, and an empty bottle with a cork. The women didn'tcarry sheath knives, so they got Boy Scout knives on lanyards. Theywere all lavishly supplied with Extee Three and candy. Any of thechildren who looked big enough to be trusted with them got knivestoo, and plenty of candy. 

Anna and Karl were standing where the queue was forming, watchinghow they fell into line; so was Lillian, with an audiovisual camera. Having seen that the Marine enlisted men were getting the presentshanded out properly, Howell strolled over to them. Just as he cameup, a couple approached hesitantly, a man in a breechclout under aleather apron, and a woman, much smaller, in a ragged and soiledtunic. As soon as they fell into line, another Svant, in a bluerobe, pushed them aside and took their place. 

"Here, you can't do that!" Lillian cried. "Karl, make him step back. "

Karl was saying something about social status and precedence. Thecouple tried to get into line behind the man who had pushed themaside. Another villager tried to shove them out of his way. Howelladvanced, his right fist closing. Then he remembered that he didn'tknow what he'd be punching; he might break the fellow's neck, orhis own knuckles. He grabbed the blue-robed Svant by the wrist withboth hands, kicked a foot out from under him, and jerked, sendinghim flying for six feet and then sliding in the dust for anothercouple of yards. He pushed the others back, and put the coupleinto place in the line. 

"Mark, you shouldn't have done that, " Dorver was expostulating. "We don't know. .. . "

The Svant sat up, shaking his head groggily. Then he realized whathad been done to him. With a snarl of rage, he was on his feet, hisknife in his hand. It was a Terran bowie knife. Without consciousvolition, Howell's pistol was out and he was thumbing the safety off. 

The Svant stopped short, then dropped the knife, ducked his head, and threw his arms over it to shield his comb. He backed away a fewsteps, then turned and bolted into the nearest house. The others, including the woman in the ragged tunic, were twittering in alarm. Only the man in the leather apron was calm; he was saying, tonelessly, "_Ghrooogh-ghrooogh_. "

Luis Gofredo was coming up on the double, followed by three ofhis riflemen. 

"What happened, Mark? Trouble?"

"All over now. " He told Gofredo what had happened. Dorver was stillobjecting:

". .. Social precedence; the Svant may have been right, accordingto local customs. "

"Local customs be damned!" Gofredo became angry. "This is a TerranFederation handout; we make the rules, and one of them is, nopushing people out of line. Teach the buggers that now and we won'thave to work so hard at it later. " He called back over his shoulder, "Situation under control; get the show going again. "

The natives were all grimacing heartbrokenly with pleasure. Maybethe one who got thrown on his ear--no, he didn't have any--was notone of the more popular characters in the village. 

"You just pulled your gun, and he dropped the knife and ran?"Gofredo asked. "And the others were scared, too?"

"That's right. They all saw you fire yours; the noise scared them. "

Gofredo nodded. "We'll avoid promiscuous shooting, then. No useletting them find out the noise won't hurt them any sooner thanwe have to. "

Paul Meillard had worked out a way to distribute the picks andshovels and axes. Considering each house as representing a familyunit, which might or might not be the case, there were picks andshovels enough to go around, and an ax for every third house. Theytook them around in an airjeep and left them at the doors. Thehouses, he found, weren't adobe at all. They were built of logs, plastered with adobe on the outside. That demolished his theorythat the houses were torn down periodically, and left the mounditself unexplained. 

The wheelbarrows and the grindstone and the two crosscut sawswere another matter. Nobody was quite sure that the (nobility?capitalist-class? politicians? prominent citizens?) wouldn't simplyappropriate them for themselves. Paul Meillard was worried aboutthat; everybody else was willing to let matters take their course. Before they were off the ground in their vehicles, a violent disputehad begun, with a bedlam of jabbering and shrieking. By the timethey were landing at the camp, the big laminated leather horn hadbegun to bellow. 

 * * * * *

One of the huts had been fitted as contact-team headquarters, withall the view and communication screens installed, and one endpartitioned off and soundproofed for Lillian to study recordings in. It was cocktail time when they returned; conversationally, it was acontinuation from lunch. Karl Dorver was even more convinced thanever of his telepathic hypothesis, and he had completely convertedAnna de Jong to it. 

"Look at that. " He pointed at the snooper screen, which gave a viewof the plaza from directly above. "They're reaching an agreementalready. "

So they seemed to be, though upon what was less apparent. The hornhad stopped, and the noise was diminishing. The odd thing was thatpeace was being restored, or was restoring itself, as the uproar hadbegun--outwardly from the center of the plaza to the periphery ofthe crowd. The same thing had happened when Gofredo had ordered thesubmachine gun fired, and, now that he recalled, when he had dealtwith the line-crasher. 

"Suppose a few of them, in the middle, are agreed, " Anna said. "They are all thinking in unison, combining their telepathicpowers. They dominate those nearest to them, who join and amplifytheir telepathic signal, and it spreads out through the wholegroup. A mental chain-reaction. "

"That would explain the mechanism of community leadership, and I'dbeen wondering about that, " Dorver said, becoming more excited. "It's a mental aristocracy; an especially gifted group of telepaths, in agreement and using their powers in concert, implanting theiropinions in the minds of all the others. I'll bet the purpose of thehorn is to distract the thoughts of the others, so that they can bemore easily dominated. And the noise of the shots shocked them outof communication with each other; no wonder they were frightened. "

Bennet Fayon was far from convinced. "So far, this telepathy theoryis only an assumption. I find it a lot easier to assume somefundamental difference between the way they translate sound intosense-data and the way we do. We _think_ those combs on top of theirheads are their external hearing organs, but we have no idea what'sback of them, or what kind of a neural hookup is connected to them. I wish I knew how these people dispose of their dead. I need acouple of fresh cadavers. Too bad they aren't warlike. Nothing likea good bloody battle to advance the science of anatomy, and what wedon't know about Svant anatomy is practically the entire subject. "

"I should imagine the animals hear in the same way, " Meillard said. "When the wagon wheels and the hoes and the blacksmith tools comedown from the ship, we'll trade for cattle. "

"When they make the second landing in the mountains, I'm going to doa lot of hunting, " Loughran added. "I'll get wild animals for you. "

"Well, I'm going to assume that the vocal noises they make aremeaningful speech, " Lillian Ransby said. "So far, I've just beentrying to analyze them for phonetic values. Now I'm going to analyzethem for sound-wave patterns. No matter what goes on inside theirprivate nervous systems, the sounds exist as waves in the publicatmosphere. I'm going to assume that the Lord Mayor and his stoogeswere all trying to say the same thing when they were pointing tothemselves, and I'm going to see if all four of those sounds haveany common characteristic. "

By the time dinner was over, they were all talking in circles, noneof them hopefully. They all made recordings of the speech about theslithy toves in the Malemute Saloon; Lillian wanted to find out whatwas different about them. Luis Gofredo saw to it that the campitself would be visible-lighted, and beyond the lights he set upmore photoelectric robot sentries and put a couple of snoopers tocircling on contragravity, with infra-red lights and receptors. Healso insisted that all his own men and all Dave Questell's Navyconstruction engineers keep their weapons ready to hand. The nativesin the village were equally distrustful. They didn't herd the cattleup from the meadows where they had been pastured, but they lightedwatch-fires along the edge of the mound as soon as it became dark. 

 * * * * *

It was three hours after nightfall when something on theindicator-board for the robot sentries went off like a startledrattlesnake. Everybody, talking idly or concentrating on writing upthe day's observations, stiffened. Luis Gofredo, dozing in a chair, was on his feet instantly and crossing the hut to the instruments. His second-in-command, who had been playing chess with WilliSchallenmacher, rose and snatched his belt from the back of hischair, putting it on. 

"Take it easy, " Gofredo said. "Probably just a cow or a horse--localequivalent--that's strayed over from the other side. "

He sat down in front of one of the snooper screens and twisted knobson the remote controls. The monochrome view, transformed from infrared, rotated as the snooper circled and changed course. The otherscreen showed the camp receding and the area around it widening asits snooper gained altitude. 

"It's not a big party, " Gofredo was saying. "I can't see--Oh, yes I can. Only two of them. "

The humanoid figures, one larger than the other, were movingcautiously across the fields, crouching low. The snooper went downtoward them, and then he recognized them. The man and woman whomthe blue-robed villager had tried to shove out of the queue, thatafternoon. Gofredo recognized them, too. 

"Your friends, Mark. Harry, " he told his subordinate, "go out andpass the word around. Only two, and we think they're friendly. Keepeverybody out of sight; we don't want to scare them away. "

The snooper followed closely behind them. The man was no longerwearing his apron; the woman's tunic was even more tattered andsoiled. She was leading him by the hand. Now and then, she wouldstop and turn her head to the rear. The snooper over the moundshowed nothing but half a dozen fire-watchers dozing by their fires. Then the pair were at the edge of the camp lights. As they advanced, they seemed to realize that they had passed a point-of-no-return. They straightened and came forward steadily, the woman seemingto be guiding her companion. 

"What's happening, Mark?"

It was Lillian; she must have just come out of the soundproofspeech-lab. 

"You know them; the pair in the queue, this afternoon. I thinkwe've annexed a couple of friendly natives. "

They all went outside. The two natives, having come into the camp, had stopped. For a moment, the man in the breechclout seemed undecidedwhether he was more afraid to turn and run than advance. The woman, holding his hand, led him forward. They were both bruised, and bothhad minor cuts, and neither of them had any of the things that hadbeen given to them that afternoon. 

"Rest of the gang beat them up and robbed them, " Gofredo began angrily. 

"See what you did?" Dorver began. "According to their own customs, they had no right to be ahead of those others, and now you've gottenthem punished for it. "

"I'd have done more to that fellow then Mark did, if I'd been therewhen it happened. " The Marine officer turned to Meillard. "Look, this is your show, Paul; how you run it is your job. But in yourplace, I'd take that pair back to the village and have them pointout who beat them up, and teach the whole gang of them a lesson. If you're going to colonize this planet, you're going to have toestablish Federation law, and Federation law says you mustn't gangup on people and beat and rob them. We don't have to speak Svanteseto make them understand what we'll put up with and what we won't. "

"Later, Luis. After we've gotten a treaty with somebody. " Meillardbroke off. "Watch this!"

The woman was making sign-talk. She pointed to the village on themound. Then, with her hands, she shaped a bucket like the ones thathad been given to them, and made a snatching gesture away fromherself. She indicated the neckcloths, and the sheath knife and theother things, and snatched them away too. She made beating motions, and touched her bruises and the man's. All the time, she was talkingexcitedly, in a high, shrill voice. The man made the same_ghroogh-ghroogh_ noises that he had that afternoon. 

"No; we can't take any punitive action. Not now, " Meillard said. "But we'll have to do something for them. "

Vengeance, it seemed, wasn't what they wanted. The woman madevehement gestures of rejection toward the village, then bowed, placing her hands on her brow. The man imitated her obeisance, thenthey both straightened. The woman pointed to herself and to the man, and around the circle of huts and landing craft. She began scuttlingabout, picking up imaginary litter and sweeping with an imaginarybroom. The man started pounding with an imaginary hammer, thenchopping with an imaginary ax. 

Lillian was clapping her hands softly. "Good; got it the first time. 'You let us stay; we work for you. ' How about it, Paul?"

Meillard nodded. "Punitive action's unadvisable, but we will showour attitude by taking them in. You tell them, Luis; these peopleseem to like your voice. "

Gofredo put a hand on each of their shoulders. "You . .. Stay . .. With us. " He pointed around the camp. "You . .. Stay . .. This . .. Place. "

Their faces broke into that funny just-before-tears expression thatmeant happiness with them. The man confined his vocal expressions tohis odd _ghroogh-ghroogh_-ing; the woman twittered joyfully. Gofredoput a hand on the woman's shoulder, pointed to the man and from himback to her. "Unh?" he inquired. 

The woman put a hand on the man's head, then brought it down towithin a foot of the ground. She picked up the imaginary infantand rocked it in her arms, then set it down and grew it up untilshe had her hand on the top of the man's head again. 

"That was good, Mom, " Gofredo told her. "Now, you and Sonny comealong; we'll issue you equipment and find you billets. " He added, "What in blazes are we going to feed them; Extee Three?"

 * * * * *

They gave them replacements for all the things that had been takenaway from them. They gave the man a one-piece suit of Marine combatcoveralls; Lillian gave the woman a lavender bathrobe, and Annacontributed a red scarf. They found them quarters in one end of astore shed, after making sure that there was nothing they could getat that would hurt them or that they could damage. They gave each ofthem a pair of blankets and a pneumatic mattress, which delightedthem, although the cots puzzled them at first. 

"What do you think about feeding them, Bennet?" Meillard asked, when the two Svants had gone to bed and they were back in theheadquarters hut. "You said the food on this planet is safefor Terrans. "

"So I did, and it is, but the rule's not reversible. Things we eatmight kill them, " Fayon said. "Meats will be especially dangerous. And no caffein, and no alcohol. "

"Alcohol won't hurt them, " Schallenmacher said. "I saw big jars fullof fermenting fruit-mash back of some of those houses; in about ayear, it ought to be fairly good wine. C_{2}H_{5}OH is the same onany planet. "

"Well, we'll get native foodstuffs tomorrow, " Meillard said. "We'll have to do that by signs, too, " he regretted. 

"Get Mom to help you; she's pretty sharp, " Lillian advised. "But I think Sonny's the village half-wit. "

Anna de Jong agreed. "Even if we don't understand Svant psychology, that's evident; he's definitely subnormal. The way he clings to hismother for guidance is absolutely pathetic. He's a mature adult, but mentally he's still a little child. "

"That may explain it!" Dorver cried. "A mental defective, in acommunity of telepaths, constantly invading the minds of otherswith irrational and disgusting thoughts; no wonder he is rejectedand persecuted. And in a community on this culture level, the motherof an abnormal child is often regarded with superstitiousdetestation--"

[Illustration]

"Yes, of course!" Anna de Jong instantly agreed, and began to gointo the villagers' hostility to both mother and son; both of themwere now taking the telepathy hypothesis for granted. 

Well, maybe so. He turned to Lillian. 

"What did you find out?"

"Well, there is a common characteristic in all four sounds. Alittle patch on the screen at seventeen-twenty cycles. The oddthing is that when I try to repeat the sound, it isn't there. "

Odd indeed. If a Svant said something, he made sound waves; if sheimitated the sound, she ought to imitate the wave pattern. He saidso, and she agreed. 

"But come back here and look at this, " she invited. 

She had been using a visibilizing analyzer; in it, a sound was brokenby a set of filters into frequency-groups, translated into lightfrom dull red to violet paling into pure white. It photographed thelight-pattern on high-speed film, automatically developed it, andthen made a print-copy and projected the film in slow motion on ascreen. When she pressed a button, a recorded voice said, "_Fwoonk_. "An instant later, a pattern of vertical lines in various colors andlengths was projected on the screen. 

"Those green lines, " she said. "That's it. Now, watch this. "

She pressed another button, got the photoprint out of a slot, andpropped it beside the screen. Then she picked up a hand-phone andsaid, "_Fwoonk_, " into it. It sounded like the first one, but thepattern that danced onto the screen was quite different. Where thegreen had been, there was a patch of pale-blue lines. She ran theother three Svants' voices, each saying, presumably, "Me. " Some weremainly up in blue, others had a good deal of yellow and orange, butthey all had the little patch of green lines. 

"Well, that seems to be the information, " he said. "The rest isjust noise. "

"Maybe one of them is saying, 'John Doe, _me_, son of Joe Blow, 'and another is saying, 'Tough guy, _me_; lick anybody in town. '"

"All in one syllable?" Then he shrugged. How did he know what thesepeople could pack into one syllable? He picked up the hand-phone andsaid, "Fwoonk, " into it. The pattern, a little deeper in color andwith longer lines, was recognizably like hers, and unlike any ofthe Svants'. 

 * * * * *

The others came in, singly and in pairs and threes. They watchedthe colors dance on the screen to picture the four Svant wordswhich might or might not all mean _me_. They tried to duplicatethem. Luis Gofredo and Willi Schallenmacher came closest of anybody. Bennet Fayon was still insisting that the Svants had a perfectlycomprehensible language--to other Svants. Anna de Jong had started toveer a little away from the Dorver Hypothesis. There was a differencebetween event-level sound, which was a series of waves of alternatelycrowded and rarefied molecules of air, and object-level sound, whichwas an auditory sensation inside the nervous system, she admitted. That, Fayon crowed, was what he'd been saying all along; theirauditory system was probably such that _fwoonk_ and _pwink_ and_tweelt_ and _kroosh_ all sounded alike to them. 

By this time, _fwoonk_ and _pwink_ and _tweelt_ and _kroosh_ hadbecome swear words among the joint Space Navy-Colonial Officecontact team. 

"Well, if I hear the two sounds alike, why doesn't the analyzer hearthem alike?" Karl Dorver demanded. 

"It has better ears than you do, Karl. Look how many differentfrequencies there are in that word, all crowding up behind eachother, " Lillian said. "But it isn't sensitive or selective enough. I'm going to see what Ayesha Keithley can do about building mea better one. "

Ayesha was signals and detection officer on the _Hubert Penrose_. Dave Questell mentioned that she'd had a hard day, and was probablymaking sack-time, and she wouldn't welcome being called at 0130. Nobody seemed to have realized that it had gotten that late. 

"Well, I'll call the ship and have a recording made for her for whenshe gets up. But till we get something that'll sort this mess outand make sense of it, I'm stopped. "

"You're stopped, period, Lillian, " Dorver told her. "What thesepeople gibber at us doesn't even make as much sense as the Shootingof Dan McJabberwock. The real information is conveyed by telepathy. "

 * * * * *

Lieutenant j. G. Ayesha Keithley was on the screen the next morningwhile they were eating breakfast. She was a blonde, like Lillian. 

"I got your message; you seem to have problems, don't you?"

"Speaking conservatively, yes. You see what we're up against?"

"You don't know what their vocal organs are like, do you?" the girlin naval uniform in the screen asked. 

Lillian shook her head. "Bennet Fayon's hoping for a war, or anepidemic, or something to break out, so that he can get a fewcadavers to dissect. "

"Well, he'll find that they're pretty complex, " Ayesha Keithleysaid. "I identified stick-and-slip sounds and percussion sounds, and plucked-string sounds, along with the ordinary hiss-and-buzzspeech-sounds. Making a vocoder to reproduce that speech is goingto be fun. Just what are you using, in the way of equipment?"

Lillian was still talking about that when the two landing craftfrom the ship were sighted, coming down. Charley Loughran and WilliSchallenmacher, who were returning to the _Hubert Penrose_ to jointhe other landing party, began assembling their luggage. The otherswent outside, Howell among them. 

Mom and Sonny were watching the two craft grow larger and closerabove, keeping close to a group of spacemen; Sonny was looking aroundexcitedly, while Mom clung to his arm, like a hen with an oversizedchick. The reasoning was clear--these people knew all about big thingsthat came down out of the sky and weren't afraid of them; stick closeto them, and it would be perfectly safe. Sonny saw the contact teamemerging from their hut and grabbed his mother's arm, pointing. Theyboth beamed happily; that expression didn't look sad, at all, now thatyou knew what it meant. Sonny began ghroogh-ghrooghing hideously; Momhushed him with a hand over his mouth, and they both made eatinggestures, rubbed their abdomens comfortably, and pointed toward themess hut. Bennet Fayon was frightened. He turned and started on thedouble toward the cook, who was standing in the doorway of the hut, calling out to him. 

The cook spoke inaudibly. Fayon stopped short. "Unholy Saint Beelzebub, no!" he cried. The cook said something in reply, shrugging. Fayon cameback, talking to himself. 

"Terran carniculture pork, " he said, when he returned. "Zarathustrapool-ball fruit. Potato-flour hotcakes, with Baldur honey and Odinflameberry jam. And two big cups of coffee apiece. It's a miraclethey aren't dead now. If they're alive for lunch, we won't need toworry about feeding them anything we eat, but I'm glad somebody elsehas the moral responsibility for this. "

Lillian Ransby came out of the headquarters hut. "Ayesha's comingdown this afternoon, with a lot of equipment, " she said. "We'renot exactly going to count air molecules in the sound waves, butwe'll do everything short of that. We'll need more lab space, soundproofed. "

"Tell Dave Questell what you want, " Meillard said. "Do you reallythink you can get anything?"

She shrugged. "If there's anything there to get. How long it'lltake is another question. "

 * * * * *

The two sixty-foot collapsium-armored turtles settled to the groundand went off contragravity. The ports opened, and things began beingfloated off on lifter-skids: framework for the water tower, andcurved titanium sheets for the tank. Anna de Jong said somethingabout hot showers, and not having to take any more sponge-baths. Howell was watching the stuff come off the other landing craft. Adozen pairs of four-foot wagon wheels, with axles. Hoes, in bundles. Scythe blades. A hand forge, with a crank-driven fan blower, and ahundred and fifty pound anvil, and sledges and cutters and swagesand tongs. 

Everybody was busy, and Mom and Sonny were fidgeting, gesturingtoward the work with their own empty hands. _Hey, boss; whattawe gonna do?_ He patted them on the shoulders. 

"Take it easy. " He hoped his tone would convey nonurgency. "We'll find something for you to do. "

He wasn't particularly happy about most of what was coming off. Giving these Svants tools was fine, but it was more important togive them technologies. The people on the ship hadn't thought ofthat. These wheels, now; machined steel hubs, steel rims, tubularsteel spokes, drop-forged and machined axles. The Svants wouldn'tbe able to copy them in a thousand years. Well, in a hundred, ifsomebody showed them where and how to mine iron and how to smeltand work it. And how to build a steam engine. 

He went over and pulled a hoe out of one of the bundles. Bladesstamped out with a power press, welded to tubular steel handles. Well, wood for hoe handles was hard to come by on a spaceship, evena battle cruiser almost half a mile in diameter; he had to admitthat. And they were about two thousand per cent more efficient thanthe bronze scrapers the Svants used. That wasn't the idea, though. Even supposing that the first wave of colonists came out in a yearand a half, it would be close to twenty years before Terran-operatedfactories would be in mass production for the native trade. The ideawas to teach these people to make better things for themselves; givethem a leg up, so that the next generation would be ready forcontragravity and nuclear and electric power. 

Mom didn't know what to make of any of it. Sonny did, though; hewas excited, grabbing Howell's arm, pointing, saying, "_Ghroogh_!_Ghroogh_!" He pointed at the wheels, and then made a stooping, lifting and pushing gesture. _Like wheelbarrow?_

"That's right. " He nodded, wondering if Sonny recognized that asan affirmative sign. "Like big wheelbarrow. "

One thing puzzled Sonny, though. Wheelbarrow wheels were small--hishands indicated the size--and single. These were big, and double. 

"Let me show you this, Sonny. "

He squatted, took a pad and pencil from his pocket, and drew twopairs of wheels, and then put a wagon on them, and drew a quadrupedhitched to it, and a Svant with a stick walking beside it. Sonnylooked at the picture--Svants seemed to have pictoral sense, forwhich make us thankful!--and then caught his mother's sleeve andshowed it to her. Mom didn't get it. Sonny took the pencil anddrew another animal, with a pole travois. He made gestures. Atravois dragged; it went slow. A wagon had wheels that wentaround; it went fast. 

So Lillian and Anna thought he was the village half-wit. Villagegenius, more likely; the other peasants didn't understand him, andresented his superiority. They went over for a closer look at thewheels, and pushed them. Sonny was almost beside himself. Mom waspuzzled, but she thought they were pretty wonderful. 

Then they looked at blacksmith tools. Tongs; Sonny had never seenanything like them. Howell wondered what the Svants used to handlehot metal; probably big tweezers made by tying two green stickstogether. There was an old Arabian legend that Allah had made thefirst tongs and given them to the first smith, because nobody couldmake tongs without having a pair already. 

Sonny didn't understand the fan-blower until it was taken apart. Then he made a great discovery. The wheels, and the fan, and thepivoted tongs, all embodied the same principle, one his peoplehad evidently never discovered. A whole new world seemed to openbefore him; from then on, he was constantly finding things piercedand rotating on pivots. 

 * * * * *

By this time, Mom was fidgeting again. She ought to be doingsomething to justify her presence in the camp. He was wonderingwhat sort of work he could invent for her when Karl Dorver calledto him from the door of the headquarters hut. 

"Mark, can you spare Mom for a while?" he asked. "We want her tolook at pictures and show us which of the animals are meat-cattle, and which of the crops are ripe. "

"Think you can get anything out of her?"

"Sign-talk, yes. We may get a few words from her, too. "

At first, Mom was unwilling to leave Sonny. She finally decided thatit would be safe, and trotted over to Dorver, entering the hut. 

Dave Questell's construction crew began at once on the water tank, using a power shovel to dig the foundation. They had to haul waterin a tank from the river a quarter-mile away to mix the concrete. Sonny watched that interestedly. So did a number of the villagers, who gathered safely out of bowshot. They noticed Sonny among theTerrans and pointed at him. Sonny noticed that. He unobtrusivelypicked up a double-bitted ax and kept it to hand. 

He and Mom had lunch with the contact team. As they showed no illeffects from breakfast, Fayon decided that it was safe to let themhave anything the Terrans ate or drank. They liked wine; they knewwhat it was, all right, but this seemed to have a delightfullydifferent flavor. They each tried a cigarette, choked over thefirst few puffs, and decided that they didn't like smoking. 

"Mom gave us a lot of information, as far as she could, on the cropsand animals. The big things, the size of rhinoceroses, are draftanimals and nothing else; they're not eaten, " Dorver said. "I don'tknow whether the meat isn't good, or is taboo, or they are toovaluable to eat. They eat all the other three species, and milk twoof them. I have an idea they grind their grain in big stone mortarsas needed. "

That was right; he'd seen things like that. 

"Willi, when you're over in the mountains, see if you can findsomething we can make millstones out of. We can shape them withsono-cutters; after they get the idea, they can do it themselvesby hand. One of those big animals could be used to turn the mill. Did you get any words from her?"

Paul Meillard shook his head gloomily. "Nothing we can be sure of. It was the same thing as in the village, yesterday. She'd saysomething, I'd repeat it, and she'd tell us it was wrong and saythe same thing over again. Lillian took recordings; she got thesame results as last night. Ask her about it later. "

"She has the same effect on Mom as on the others?"

"Yes. Mom was very polite and tried not to show it, but--"

Lillian took him aside, out of earshot of the two Svants, afterlunch. She was almost distracted. 

"Mark, I don't know what I'm going to do. She's like the others. Every time I open my mouth in front of her, she's simply horrified. It's as though my voice does something loathsome to her. And I'm theone who's supposed to learn to talk to them. "

"Well, those who can do, and those who can't teach, " he told her. "You can study recordings, and tell us what the words are andteach us how to recognize and pronounce them. You're the onlylinguist we have. "

That seemed to comfort her a little. He hoped it would work out thatway. If they could communicate with these people and did leave aparty here to prepare for the first colonization, he'd stay on, toteach the natives Terran technologies and study theirs. He'd beenexpecting that Lillian would stay, too. She was the linguist; she'dhave to stay. But now, if it turned out that she would be no help buta liability, she'd go back with the _Hubert Penrose_. Paul wouldn'tkeep a linguist who offended the natives' every sensibility withevery word she spoke. He didn't want that to happen. Lillian and hehad come to mean a little too much to each other to be parted now. 

 * * * * *

Paul Meillard and Karl Dorver had considerable difficulty with Mom, that afternoon. They wanted her to go with them and help trade forcattle. Mom didn't want to; she was afraid. They had to do a lot ofplay-acting, with half a dozen Marines pretending to guard her withfixed bayonets from some of Dave Questell's Navy construction menwho had red bandannas on their heads to simulate combs before shegot the idea. Then she was afraid to get into the contragravitylorry that was to carry the hoes and the wagon wheels. Sonny managedto reassure her, and insisted on going along, and he insisted ontaking his ax with him. That meant doubling the guard, to make sureSonny didn't lose his self-control when he saw his formerpersecutors within chopping distance. 

It went off much better than either Paul Meillard or Luis Gofredoexpected. After the first shock of being air-borne had worn off, Mom found that she liked contragravity-riding; Sonny was wildlydelighted with it from the start. The natives showed neither of themany hostility. Mom's lavender bathrobe and Sonny's green coverallsand big ax seemed to be symbols of a new and exalted status; eventhe Lord Mayor was extremely polite to them. 

The Lord Mayor and half a dozen others got a contragravity ride, too, to the meadows to pick out cattle. A dozen animals, includinga pair of the two-ton draft beasts, were driven to the Terran camp. A couple of lorry-loads of assorted vegetables were brought in, too. Everybody seemed very happy about the deal, especially Bennet Fayon. He wanted to slaughter one of the sheep-sized meat-and-milk animalsat once and get to work on it. Gofredo advised him to put it offtill the next morning. He wanted a large native audience to seethe animal being shot with a rifle. 

The water tower was finished, and the big spherical tank hoisted ontop of it and made fast. A pump, and a filter-system were installed. There was no water for hot showers that evening, though. They wouldhave to run a pipeline to the river, and that would entail a ditchthat would cut through several cultivated fields, which, in turn, would provoke an uproar. Paul Meillard didn't want that happeninguntil he'd concluded the cattle-trade. 

Charley Loughran and Willi Schallenmacher had gone up to the ship onone of the landing craft; they accompanied the landing party that wentdown into the mountains. Ayesha Keithley arrived late in the afternoonon another landing craft, with five or six tons of instruments andparts and equipment, and a male Navy warrant-officer helper. 

They looked around the lab Lillian had been using at one end ofthe headquarters hut. 

"This won't do, " the girl Navy officer said. "We can't get a quarterof the apparatus we're going to need in here. We'll have to buildsomething. "

Dave Questell was drawn into the discussion. Yes, he could putup something big enough for everything the girls would need toinstall, and soundproof it. Concrete, he decided; they'd have towait till he got the water line down and the pump going, though. 

There was a crowd of natives in the fields, gaping at the Terrancamp, the next morning, and Gofredo decided to kill theanimal--until they learned the native name, they were calling itDomesticated Type C. It was herded out where everyone could watch, and a Marine stepped forward unslung his rifle took a kneelingposition, and aimed at it. It was a hundred and fifty yards away. Mom had come out to see what was going on; Sonny and Howell, whohad been consulting by signs over the construction of a wagon, werestanding side by side. The Marine squeezed his trigger. The riflebanged, and the Domesticated-C bounded into the air, dropped, andkicked a few times and was still. The natives, however, missed thatpart of it; they were howling piteously and rubbing their heads. All but Sonny. He was just mildly surprised at what had happenedto the Dom. -C. 

Sonny, it would appear, was stone deaf. 

 * * * * *

As anticipated, there was another uproar later in the morning whenthe ditching machine started north across the meadow. A mob ofSvants, seeing its relentless progress toward a field of somethinglike turnips, gathered in front of it, twittering and brandishingimplements of agriculture, many of them Terran-made. 

Paul Meillard was ready for this. Two lorries went out; one loadedwith Marines, who jumped off with their rifles ready. By thistime, all the Svants knew what rifles would do beside make anoise. Meillard, Dorver, Gofredo and a few others got out of theother vehicle, and unloaded presents. Gofredo did all the talking. The Svants couldn't understand him, but they liked it. They alsoliked the presents, which included a dozen empty half-gallon rumdemijohns, tarpaulins, and a lot of assorted knickknacks. Thepipeline went through. 

He and Sonny got the forge set up. There was no fuel for it. A party of Marines had gone out to the woods to the east to cutwood; when they got back, they'd burn some charcoal in the pitthat had been dug beside the camp. Until then, he and Sonny weredrawing plans for a wooden wheel with a metal tire when Lilliancame out of the headquarters hut with a clipboard under her arm. She motioned to him. 

"Come on over, " he told her. "You can talk in front of Sonny;he won't mind. He can't hear. "

"Can't hear?" she echoed. "You mean--?"

"That's right. Sonny's stone deaf. He didn't even hear that riflegoing off. The only one of this gang that has brains enough to poursand out of a boot with directions on the bottom of the heel, andhe's a total linguistic loss. "

"So he isn't a half-wit, after all. "

"He's got an IQ close to genius level. Look at this; he never sawa wheel before yesterday; now he's designing one. "

[Illustration: _It's killing us it's so nice. .. . _]

Lillian's eyes widened. "So that's why Mom's so sharp aboutsign-talk. She's been doing it all his life. " Then she rememberedwhat she had come out to show him, and held out the clipboard. "Youknow how that analyzer of mine works? Well, here's what Ayesha'sgoing to do. After breaking a sound into frequency bands instead ofbeing photographed and projected, each band goes to an analyzer ofits own, and is projected on its own screen. There'll be forty ofthem, each for a band of a hundred cycles, from zero to fourthousand. That seems to be the Svant vocal range. "

The diagram passed from hand to hand during cocktail time, beforedinner. Bennet Fayon had been working all day dissecting the animalthey were all calling a _domsee_, a name which would stick even ifand when they learned the native name. He glanced disinterestedly atthe drawing, then looked again, more closely. Then he set down thedrink he was holding in his other hand and studied it intently. 

"You know what you have here?" he asked. "This is a very close analogyto the hearing organs of that animal I was working on. The comb, aswe've assumed, is the external organ. It's covered with small flapsand fissures. Back of each fissure is a long, narrow membrane; they'repaired, one on each side of the comb, and from them nerves lead toclusters of small round membranes. Nerves lead from them to a complexnerve-cable at the bottom of the comb and into the brain at the baseof the skull. I couldn't understand how the system functioned, but nowI see it. Each of the larger membranes on the outside responds to asound-frequency band, and the small ones on the inside break the bandsdown to individual frequencies. "

"How many of the little ones are there?" Ayesha asked. 

"Thousands of them; the inner comb is simply packed with them. Wait;I'll show you. "

He rose and went away, returning with a sheaf of photo-enlargementsand a number of blocks of lucite in which specimens were mounted. Everybody examined them. Anna de Jong, as a practicing psychologist, had an M. D. And to get that she'd had to know a modicum of anatomy;she was puzzled. 

"I can't understand how they hear with those things. I'll grantthat the membranes will respond to sound, but I can't see howthey transmit it. "

"But they do hear, " Meillard said. "Their musical instruments, their reactions to our voices, the way they are affected by soundslike gunfire--"

"They hear, but they don't hear in the same way we do, " Fayon replied. "If you can't be convinced by anything else, look at these things, and compare them with the structure of the human ear, or the earof any member of any other sapient race we're ever contacted. That's what I've been saying from the beginning. "

"They have sound-perception to an extent that makes ours lookalmost like deafness, " Ayesha Keithley said. "I wish I could designa sound-detector one-tenth as good as this must be. "

Yes. The way the Lord Mayor said _fwoonk_ and the way Paul Meillardsaid it sounded entirely different to them. Of course, _fwoonk_ and_pwink_ and _tweelt_ and _kroosh_ sounded alike to them, but let'sdon't be too picky about things. 

 * * * * *

There were no hot showers that evening; Dave Questell's gang hadtrouble with the pump and needed some new parts made up aboard theship. They were still working on it the next morning. He had meantto start teaching Sonny blacksmithing, but during the eveningLillian and Anna had decided to try teaching Mom a nonphonetic, ideographic, alphabet, and in the morning they co-opted Sonny tohelp. Deprived of his disciple, he strolled over to watch the workon the pump. About twenty Svants had come in from the fields andwere also watching, from the meadow. 

After a while, the job was finished. The petty officer in chargeof the work pushed in the switch, and the pump started, suckingdry with a harsh racket. The natives twittered in surprise. Thenthe water came, and the pump settled down to a steady _thugg-thugg, thugg-thugg_. 

The Svants seemed to like the new sound; they grimaced in pleasureand moved closer; within forty or fifty feet, they all squatted onthe ground and sat entranced. Others came in from the fields, drawnby the sound. They, too, came up and squatted, until there was asemicircle of them. The tank took a long time to fill; until it did, they all sat immobile and fascinated. Even after it stopped, manyremained, hoping that it would start again. Paul Meillard beganwondering, a trifle uneasily, if that would happen every timethe pump went on. 

"They get a positive pleasure from it. It affects them the same wayLuis' voice does. "

"Mean I have a voice like a pump?" Gofredo demanded. 

"Well, I'm going to find out, " Ayesha Keithley said. "The next timethat starts, I'm going to make a recording, and compare it with yourvoice-recording. I'll give five to one there'll be a similarity. "

Questell got the foundation for the sonics lab dug, and beganpouring concrete. That took water, and the pump ran continuouslythat afternoon. Concrete-mixing took more water the next day, andby noon the whole village population, down to the smallest child, was massed at the pumphouse, enthralled. Mom was snared by the soundlike any of the rest; only Sonny was unaffected. Lillian and Ayeshacompared recordings of the voices of the team with the pump-sound;in Gofredo's they found an identical frequency-pattern. 

"We'll need the new apparatus to be positive about it, but it's there, all right, " Ayesha said. "That's why Luis' voice pleases them. "

"That tags me; Old Pump-Mouth, " Gofredo said. "It'll get all throughthe Corps, and they'll be calling me that when I'm a four-star general, if I live that long. "

Meillard was really worried, now. So was Bennet Fayon. He said sothat afternoon at cocktail time. 

"It's an addiction, " he declared. "Once they hear it, they have nowill to resist; they just squat and listen. I don't know what it'sdoing to them, but I'm scared of it. "

"I know one thing it's doing, " Meillard said. "It's keeping themfrom their work in the fields. For all we know, it may cause themto lose a crop they need badly for subsistence. "

 * * * * *

The native they had come to call the Lord Mayor evidently thoughtso, too. He was with the others, the next morning, squatting withhis staff across his knees, as bemused as any of them, but when thepump stopped he rose and approached a group of Terrans, launchinginto what could only be an impassioned tirade. He pointed with hisstaff to the pump house, and to the semicircle of still motionlessvillagers. He pointed to the fields, and back to the people, and tothe pump house again, gesturing vehemently with his other hand. 

_You make the noise. My people will not work while they hear it. The fields lie untended. Stop the noise, and let my people work. _

Couldn't possibly be any plainer. 

Then the pump started again. The Lord Mayor's hands tightened on thestaff; he was struggling tormentedly with himself, in vain. His facerelaxed into the heartbroken expression of joy; he turned andshuffled over, dropping onto his haunches with the others. 

"Shut down the pump, Dave!" Meillard called out. "Cut the power off. "

The _thugg-thugg_-ing stopped. The Lord Mayor rose, made an oddsalaamlike bow toward the Terrans, and then turned on the people, striking with his staff and shrieking at them. A few got to theirfeet and joined him, screaming, pushing, tugging. Others joined. In a little while, they were all on their feet, straggling awayacross the fields. 

Dave Questell wanted to know what it meant; Meillard explained. 

"Well, what are we going to do for water?" the Navy engineer asked. 

"Soundproof the pump house. You can do that, can't you?"

"Sure. Mound it over with earth. We'll have that done in a few hours. "

That started Gofredo worrying. "This happens every time we colonizean inhabited planet. We give the natives something new. Then we findout it's bad for them, and we try to take it away from them. Andthen the knives come out, and the shooting starts. "

Luis Gofredo was also a specialist, speaking on his subject. 

 * * * * *

While they were at lunch, Charley Loughran screened in fromthe other camp and wanted to talk to Bennet Fayon. 

"A funny thing, Bennet. I took a shot at a bird . .. No, a flyingmammal . .. And dropped it. It was dead when it hit the ground, but there isn't a mark on it. I want you to do an autopsy, andfind out how I can kill things by missing them. "

"How far away was it?"

"Call it forty feet; no more. "

"What were you using, Charley?" Ayesha Keithley called from the table. 

"Eight-point-five Mars-Consolidated pistol, " Loughran said. "I'dlaid my shotgun down and walked away from it--"

"Twelve hundred foot-seconds, " Ayesha said. "Bow-wave as well asmuzzle-blast. "

"You think the report was what did it?" Fayon asked. 

"You want to bet it didn't?" she countered. 

Nobody did. 

 * * * * *

Mom was sulky. She didn't like what Dave Questell's men were doingto the nice-noise-place. Ayesha and Lillian consoled her by takingher into the soundproofed room and playing the recording of thepump-noise for her. Sonny couldn't care less, one way or another;he spent the afternoon teaching Mark Howell what the marks on papermeant. It took a lot of signs and play-acting. He had learned aboutthirty ideographs; by combining them and drawing little pictures, he could express a number of simple ideas. There was, of course, a limit to how many of those things anybody could learn andremember--look how long it took an Old Terran Chinese scribeto learn his profession--but it was the beginning of a methodof communication. 

Questell got the pump house mounded over. Ayesha came out and trieda sound-meter, and also Mom, on it while the pump was running. Neither reacted. 

A good many Svants were watching the work. They began to demonstrateangrily. A couple tried to interfere and were knocked down withrifle butts. The Lord Mayor and his Board of Aldermen came out withthe big horn and harangued them at length, and finally got themto go back to the fields. As nearly as anybody could tell, he wasfriendly to and co-operative with the Terrans. The snooper overthe village reported excitement in the plaza. 

Bennet Fayon had taken an airjeep to the other camp immediatelyafter lunch. He was back by 1500, accompanied by Loughran. Theycarried a cloth-wrapped package into Fayon's dissecting-room. At cocktail time, Paul Meillard had to go and get them. 

"Sorry, " Fayon said, joining the group. "Didn't notice how late itwas getting. We're still doing a post on this svant-bat; that's whatCharley's calling it, till we get the native name. 

"The immediate cause of death was spasmodic contraction of everymuscle in the thing's body; some of them were partly relaxed beforewe could get to work on it, but not completely. Every bone thatisn't broken is dislocated; a good many both. There is not theslightest trace of external injury. Everything was done by its ownmuscles. " He looked around. "I hope nobody covered Ayesha's bet, after I left. If they did, she collects. The large outer membranesin the comb seem to be unaffected, but there is considerablecompression of the small round ones inside, in just one area, and more on the left side than on the right. Charley says itwas flying across in front of him from left to right. "

"The receptor-area responding to the frequencies of the report, "Ayesha said. 

Anna de Jong made a passing gesture toward Fayon. "The baby's yours, Bennet, " she said. "This isn't psychological. I won't accept a caseof psychosomatic compound fracture. "

"Don't be too premature about it, Anna. I think that's more or lesswhat you have, here. "

Everybody looked at him, surprised. His subject was comparativetechnology. The bio and psycho-sciences were completely outsidehis field. 

"A lot of things have been bothering me, ever since the firstcontact. I'm beginning to think I'm on the edge of understandingthem, now. Bennet, the higher life-forms here--the people, and thatdomsee, and Charley's svant-bat--are structurally identical with us. I don't mean gross structure, like ears and combs. I mean molecularand cellular and tissue structure. Is that right?"

Fayon nodded. "Biology on this planet is exactly Terra type. Yes. With adequate safeguards, I'd even say you could make a viabletissue-graft from a Svant to a Terran, or vice versa. "

"Ayesha, would the sound waves from that pistol-shot in anyconceivable way have the sort of physical effect we're considering?"

"Absolutely not, " she said, and Luis Gofredo said: "I've been shotat and missed with pistols at closer range than that. "

"Then it was the effect on the animal's nervous system. "

Anna shrugged. "It's still Bennet's baby. I'm a psychologist, not a neurologist. "

"What I've been saying, all along, " Fayon reiterated complacently. "Their hearing is different from ours. This proves it. 

"It proves that they don't hear at all. "

He had expected an explosion; he wasn't disappointed. They allcontradicted him, many derisively. Signal reactions. Only PaulMeillard made the semantically appropriate response:

"What do you mean, Mark?"

"They don't _hear_ sound; they _feel_ it. You all saw what they haveinside their combs. Those things don't transmit sound like the earsof any sound-sensitive life-form we've ever seen. They transformsound waves into tactile sensations. "

Fayon cursed, slowly and luridly. Anna de Jong looked at himwide-eyed. He finished his cocktail and poured another. In thesnooper screen, what looked like an indignation meeting was makinguproar in the village plaza. Gofredo cut the volume of the speakereven lower. 

"That would explain a lot of things, " Meillard said slowly. "Howhard it was for them to realize that we didn't understand when theytalked to us. A punch in the nose feels the same to anybody. Theythought they were giving us bodily feelings. They didn't know wewere insensible to them. "

"But they do . .. They do have a language, " Lillian faltered. "They talk. "

"Not the way we understand it. If they want to say, 'Me, ' it's_tickle-pinch-rub_, even if it sounds like _fwoonk_ to us, when itdoesn't sound like _pwink_ or _tweelt_ or _kroosh_. The tactilesensations, to a Svant, feel no more different than a massage byfour different hands. Analogous to a word pronounced by fourdifferent voices, to us. They'll have a code for expressing meaningsin tactile sensation, just as we have a code for expressing meaningsin audible sound. "

"Except that when a Svant tells another, 'I am happy, ' or 'I have astomach-ache, ' he makes the other one feel that way too, " Anna said. "That would carry an awful lot more conviction. I don't imaginesymptom-swapping is popular among Svants. Karl! You were nearlyright, at that. This isn't telepathy, but it's a lot like it. "

"So it is, " Dorver, who had been mourning his departed telepathytheory, said brightly. "And look how it explains their society. Peaceful, everybody in quick agreement--" He looked at the screenand gulped. The Lord Mayor and his party had formed one clump, andthe opposition was grouped at the other side of the plaza; they werescreaming in unison at each other. "They make their decisions byendurance; the party that can resist the feelings of the otherlongest converts their opponents. "

"Pure democracy, " Gofredo declared. "Rule by the party that canmake the most noise. "

"And I'll bet that when they're sick, they go around chanting, 'I am well; I feel just fine!'" Anna said. "Autosuggestion wouldreally work, here. Think of the feedback, too. One Svant has a feeling. He verbalizes it, and the sound of his own voice re-enforces it in him. It is induced in his hearers, and they verbalize it, re-enforcing itin themselves and in him. This could go on and on. "

"Yes. It has. Look at their technology. " He felt more comfortable, now he was on home ground again. "A friend of mine, speaking abouta mutual acquaintance, once said, 'When they installed her circuits, they put in such big feeling circuits that there was no room leftfor any thinking circuits. ' I think that's a perfect description ofwhat I estimate Svant mentality to be. Take these bronze knives, andthe musical instruments. Wonderful; the work of individuals tryingto express feeling in metal or wood. But get an idea like the wheel, or even a pair of tongs? Poo! How would you state the First Law ofMotion, or the Second Law of Thermodynamics, in tickle-pinch-rubterms? Sonny could grasp an idea like that. Sonny's handicap, ifyou call it that, cuts him off from feel-thinking; he can thinklogically instead of sensually. "

He sipped his cocktail and continued: "I can understand why thevillage is mounded up, too. I realized that while I was watchingDave's gang bury the pump house. I'd been bothered by that, and bythe absence of granaries for all the grain they raise, and by thenumber of people for so few and such small houses. I think thevillage is mostly underground, and the houses are just entrances, soundproofed, to shelter them from uncomfortable naturalnoises--thunderstorms, for instance. "

The horn was braying in the snooper-screen speaker; somebodywondered what it was for. Gofredo laughed. 

"I thought, at first, that it was a war-horn. It isn't. It's apeace-horn, " he said. "Public tranquilizer. The first day, theybrought it out and blew it at us to make us peaceable. "

"Now I see why Sonny is rejected and persecuted, " Anna was saying. "He must make all sorts of horrible noises that he can't hear . .. That's not the word; we have none for it . .. And nobody but hismother can stand being near him. "

"Like me, " Lillian said. "Now I understand. Just think of the mostrevolting thing that could be done to you physically; that's what Ido to them every time I speak. And I always thought I had a nicevoice, " she added, pathetically. 

"You have, for Terrans, " Ayesha said. "For Svants, you'll justhave to change it. "

"But how--?"

"Use an analyzer; train it. That was why I took up sonics, inthe first place. I had a voice like a crow with a sore throat, but by practicing with an analyzer, an hour a day, I gave myselfan entirely different voice in a couple of months. Just try toget some pump-sound frequencies into it, like Luis'. "

"But why? I'm no use here. I'm a linguist, and these people haven'tany language that I could ever learn, and they couldn't even learnours. They couldn't learn to make sounds, as sounds. "

"You've been doing very good work with Mom on those ideographs, "Meillard said. "Keep it up till you've taught her the Lingua TerraBasic vocabulary, and with her help we can train a few more. Theycan be our interpreters; we can write what we want them to say tothe others. It'll be clumsy, but it will work, and it's about theonly thing I can think of that will. "

"And it will improve in time, " Ayesha added. "And we can makevocoders and visibilizers. Paul, you have authority to requisitionpersonnel from the ship's company. Draft me; I'll stay here andwork on it. "

The rumpus in the village plaza was getting worse. The Lord Mayorand his adherents were being out-shouted by the opposition. 

"Better do something about that in a hurry, Paul, if you don't wanta lot of Svants shot, " Gofredo said. "Give that another half hourand we'll have visitors, with bows and spears. "

"Ayesha, you have a recording of the pump, " Meillard said. "Load arecord-player onto a jeep and fly over the village and play it forthem. Do it right away. Anna, get Mom in here. We want to get her totell that gang that from now on, at noon and for a couple of hoursafter sunset, when the work's done, there will be free publicpump-concerts, over the village plaza. "

 * * * * *

Ayesha and her warrant-officer helper and a Marine lieutenantwent out hastily. Everybody else faced the screen to watch. Infifteen minutes, an airjeep was coming in on the village. As itcircled low, a new sound, the steady _thugg-thugg, thugg-thugg_of the pump, began. 

The yelling and twittering and the blaring of the peace-horn died outalmost at once. As the jeep circled down to housetop level, the twocontending faction-clumps broke apart; their component individualsmoved into the center of the plaza and squatted, staring up, lettingthe delicious waves of sound caress them. 

"Do we have to send a detail in a jeep to do that twice a day?"Gofredo asked. "We keep a snooper over the village; fit it witha loud-speaker and a timer; it can give them their _thugg-thugg_, on schedule, automatically. "

"We might give the Lord Mayor a recording and a player and let himdecide when the people ought to listen--if that's the word--to it, "Dorver said. "Then it would be something of their own. "

"No!" He spoke so vehemently that the others started. "You knowwhat would happen? Nobody would be able to turn it off; they'dall be hypnotized, or doped, or whatever it is. They'd just sitin a circle around it till they starved to death, and when thepower-unit gave out, the record-player would be surrounded bya ring of skeletons. We'll just have to keep on playing it forthem ourselves. Terrans' Burden. "

"That'll give us a sanction over them, " Gofredo observed. "Extra_thugg-thugg_ if they're very good; shut it off on them if they actnasty. And find out what Lillian has in her voice that the rest ofus don't have, and make a good loud recording of that, and stash itaway along with the rest of the heavy-weapons ammunition. You know, you're not going to have any trouble at all, when we go down-countryto talk to the king or whatever. This is better than fire-water everwas. "

"We must never misuse our advantage, Luis, " Meillard said seriously. "We must use it only for their good. "

He really meant it. Only--You had to know some general history tostudy technological history, and it seemed to him that that piousassertion had been made a few times before. Some of the others whohad made it had really meant it, too, but that had made littledifference in the long run. 

Fayon and Anna were talking enthusiastically about the work ahead ofthem. 

"I don't know where your subject ends and mine begins, " Anna wassaying. "We'll just have to handle it between us. What are we goingto call it? We certainly can't call it hearing. "

"Nonauditory sonic sense is the only thing I can think of, " Fayonsaid. "And that's such a clumsy term. "

"Mark; you thought of it first, " Anna said. "What do you think?"

"Nonauditory sonic sense. It isn't any worse than DomesticatedType C, and that got cut down to size. _Naudsonce. _"

 * * * * *