"_Poodly-doodly-oodly-foodle_," she said. "You saw how far we didn't
get this afternoon. All we found out was that none of the standard
procedures 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 or
three hundred miles south of you," Vindinho said. "It's not right
to keep the rest aboard two hundred miles off planet, and you won't
be 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 this
crowd 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 at
their 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 the
hunter. They made boar-spears like that on Terra a thousand years
ago. Maybe they have to fight raiding parties from the hills once
in a while, but not often enough for them to develop special
fighting weapons or techniques."
"Their village is fortified," Meillard mentioned.
"I question that," Gofredo differed. "There won't be more than
a total of five hundred there; call that a fighting strength of
two hundred, to defend a twenty-five-hundred-meter perimeter, with
woodchoppers' axes and bows and spears. If you notice, there's no
wall around the village itself. That palisade is just a fence."
"Why would they mound the village up?" Questell, in the screen
wondered. "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 that
stream, there"--he nodded at the hundred-power screen--"ever gets
more than six inches over the bank."
"I don't know what those houses are built of. This is all alluvial
country; building stone would be almost unobtainable. I don't see
anything like a brick kiln. I don't see any evidence of irrigation,
either, so there must be plenty of rainfall. If they use adobe, or
sun-dried brick, houses would start to crumble in a few years, and
they would be pulled down and the rubble shoved aside to make room
for a new house. The village has been rising on its own ruins,
probably shifting back and forth from one end of that mound to
the 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 draft
animals; when we were coming down, I saw a few of them pulling pole
travoises. I'd say they've been farming for a long time. They have
quite a diversity of crops, and I suspect that they have some idea
of crop-rotation. I'm amazed at their musical instruments; they seem
to have put more skill into making them than anything else. I'm
going to take a jeep, while they're all in the village, and have
a 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 had
been unhitched in the first panic when the landing craft had been
coming down. Some of them had big baskets permanently attached.
There were drag-marks everywhere in the soft ground, but not a
single wheel track. He found one plow, cunningly put together with
wooden pegs and rawhide lashings; the point was stone, and it
would only score a narrow groove, not a proper furrow. It was,
however, fitted with a big bronze ring to which a draft animal
could be hitched. Most of the cultivation seemed to have been done
with spades and hoes. He found a couple of each, bronze, cast flat
in an open-top mold. They hadn't learned to make composite molds.
There was an even wider variety of crops than he had expected: two
cereals, a number of different root-plants, and a lot of different
legumes, and things like tomatoes and pumpkins.
"Bet these people had a pretty good life, here--before the Terrans
came," Charley observed.
"Don't say that in front of Paul," Lillian warned. "He has enough
to worry about now, without starting him on whether we'll do these
people more harm than good."
Two more landing craft had come down from the _Hubert Penrose_;
they found Dave Questell superintending the unloading of more
prefab-huts, and two were already up that had been brought down
with the first landing.
A name for the planet had also arrived.
"Svantovit," Karl Dorver told him. "Principal god of the Baltic
Slavs, about three thousand years ago. Guy Vindinho dug it out
of the 'Encyclopedia of Mythology.' Svantovit was represented as
holding 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 him
to 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. "After
dinner, I am going to start playing back recordings and running off
audiovisuals. I will be so happy to know that I have a name for what
I'm studying. Probably be all I will know."
* * * * *
After dinner, he and Karl and Paul went into a huddle on what sort
of gifts to give the natives, and the advisability of trading with
them, and for what. Nothing too far in advance of their present
culture level. Wheels; they could be made in the fabricating shop
aboard the ship.
"You know, it's odd," Karl Dorver said. "These people here have
never seen a wheel, and, except in documentary or historical-drama
films, neither have a lot of Terrans."
That was true. As a means of transportation, the wheel had been
completely obsolete since the development of contragravity, six
centuries ago. Well, a lot of Terrans in the Year Zero had never
seen a suit of armor, or an harquebus, or even a tinder box or
a spinning wheel.
Wheelbarrows; now there was something they'd find useful. He
screened Max Milzer, in charge of the fabricating and repair shops
on 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, in
the Sixth Century Pre-Atomic. How soon can you get me half a dozen
of them?"
"Well, let's see. Welded sheet metal, and pipe for the frame and
handles. I'll have some of them for you by noon tomorrow. Now, about
hoes; how tall are these people, and how long are their arms, and
how far can they stoop over?"
* * * * *
They were all up late, that night. So were the Svants; there was a
fire burning in the middle of the village, and watch-fires along the
edge of the mound. Luis Gofredo was just as distrustful of them as
they were of the Terrans; he kept the camp lighted, a strong guard
on the alert, and the area of darkness beyond infra red lighted and
covered by photoelectric sentries on the ground and snoopers in the
air. Like Paul Meillard, Luis Gofredo was a worrier and a pessimist.
Everything happened for the worst in this worst of all possible
galaxies, and if anything could conceivably go wrong, it infallibly
would. That was probably why he was still alive and had never had
a 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 of
picks and shovels and axes, and cases of sheath knives and mess gear
and miscellaneous trade goods, including a lot of the empty wine and
whisky 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 had
just gotten up, was discouraged.
"I don't know what we're going to do next," she admitted. "Glenn
Orent and Anna and I were on it all night, and we're nowhere. We
have about a hundred wordlike sounds isolated, and twenty or so are
used repeatedly, and we can't assign a meaning to any of them. And
none of the Svants ever reacted the same way twice to anything we
said to them. There's just no one-to-one relationship anywhere."
"I'm beginning to doubt they have a language," the Navy intelligence
officer said. "Sure, they make a lot of vocal noise. So do chipmunks."
"They have to have a language," Anna de Jong declared. "No sapient
thought is possible without verbalization."
"Well, no society like that is possible without some means of
communication," 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 at
him in surprise. Anna started to say, "Oh, I doubt if--" and then
stopped.
"I know, the race of telepaths is an old gimmick that's been used in
new-planet adventure stories for centuries, but maybe we've finally
found one."
"I don't like it, Karl," Loughran said. "If they're telepaths, why
don't they understand us? And if they're telepaths, why do they talk
at all? And you can't convince me that this boodly-oodly-doodle of
theirs isn't talking."
"Well, our neural structure and theirs won't be nearly alike,"
Fayon said. "I know, this analogy between telepathy and radio
is full of holes, but it's good enough for this. Our wave length
can't be picked up with their sets."
"The deuce it can't," Gofredo contradicted. "I've been bothered
about that from the beginning. These people act as though they got
meaning from us. Not the meaning we intend, but some meaning. When
Paul made the gobbledygook speech, they all reacted in the same
way--frightened, and then defensive. The you-me routine simply
bewildered them, as we'd be at a set of semantically lucid but
self-contradictory statements. When Lillian tried to introduce
herself, 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 Mark
explaining that steel knives were dangerously sharp; they got the
demonstration, but when he tried to tie words onto it, it threw
them completely."
"ALL RIGHT. Pass that," Loughran conceded. "But if they have
telepathy, why do they use spoken words?"
"Oh, I can answer that," Anna said. "Say they communicated by speech
originally, and developed their telepathic faculty slowly and without
realizing it. They'd go on using speech, and since the message would
be received telepathically ahead of the spoken message, nobody would
pay any attention to the words as such. Everybody would have a spoken
language of his own; it would be sort of the instrumental
accompaniment 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, or
in group-danger situations, telepathy would be a race-survival
characteristic. It would be selected for genetically, and the
non-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 emerged
from savagery, or an old, stagnant race. All indications seem to
favor the latter. A young race would not have time to develop
telepathy as Anna suggests. An old race would have gone much farther
than these people have. Progress is a matter of communication and
pooling ideas and discoveries. Make a trend-graph of technological
progress on Terra; every big jump comes after an improvement in
communications. The printing press; railways and steamships; the
telegraph; radio. Then think how telepathy would speed up progress."
* * * * *
The sun was barely past noon meridian before the Svants, who had
ventured down into the fields at sunrise, were returning to the
mound-village. In the snooper-screen, they could be seen coming up
in tunics and breechclouts, entering houses, and emerging in long
robes. There seemed to be no bows or spears in evidence, but the big
horn sounded occasionally. Paul Meillard was pleased. Even if it had
been by sign-talk, which he rated with worm-fishing for trout or
shooting sitting rabbits, he had gotten something across to them.
When they went to the village, at 1500, they had trouble getting
their lorry down. A couple of Marines in a jeep had to go in first
to get the crowd out of the way. Several of the locals, including
the one with the staff, joined with them; this quick co-operation
delighted Meillard. When they had the lorry down and were all out
of it, the dignitary with the staff, his scarlet tablecloth over
his yellow robe, began an oration, apparently with every confidence
that 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 told
Meillard. "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 henchmen
advanced. 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 they
ought to!"