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 go
wrong would go wrong. Lillian used a word; it was not a ladylike
word at all. The Svants looked at them as though wondering what
could possibly be the matter. Then they went into a huddle, arguing
vehemently. The argument spread, like a ripple in a pool; soon
everybody was twittering vocally or blowing on flutes and Panpipes.
Then the big horn started blaring. Immediately, Gofredo snatched the
hand-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 spoke
again into the phone, then called over his shoulder: "Rienet; three
one-second bursts, in the air!"
A Marine pointed a submachine gun skyward and ripped off a string of
shots, then another, and another. There was silence after the first
burst. Then a frightful howling arose.
"Luis, you imbecile!" Meillard was shouting.
Gofredo jumped onto the top of an airjeep, where they could all
see 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 the
crowd. Gofredo went on talking to them: "Take it easy, now; easy."
He might have been speaking to a frightened dog or a fractious
horse. "Nobody's going to hurt you. This is nothing but the great
noise-magic of the Terrans...."
"Get the presents unloaded," Meillard was saying. "Make a big show
of it. The table first."
The horn, which had started, stopped blowing. As they were getting
off the long table and piling it with trade goods, another lorry
came in, disgorging twenty Marine riflemen. They had their bayonets
fixed; the natives looked apprehensively at the bare steel, but
went on listening to Gofredo. Meillard pulled the (Lord Mayor?
Archbishop? Lord of the Manor?) aside, and began making sign-talk
to him.
When quiet was restored, Howell put a pick and shovel into a
wheelbarrow and pushed them out into the space that had been cleared
in front of the table. He swung the pick for a while, then shoveled
the barrow full of ground. After pushing it around for a while, he
dumped it back in the hole and leveled it off. Two Marines brought
out an eight-inch log and chopped a couple of billets off it with
an 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 what
the data is data about!_]
The knives, jewelry and other small items would be no problem; they
had enough of them to go around. The other stuff would be harder to
distribute, and Paul Meillard and Karl Dorver were arguing about how
to handle it. If they weren't careful, a lot of new bowie knives
would get bloodied.
"Have them form a queue," Anna suggested. "That will give them the
idea of equal sharing, and we'll be able to learn something about
their status levels and social hierarchy and agonistic relations."
* * * * *
The one with the staff took it as a matter of course that he would
go first; his associates began falling in behind him, and the rest
of the villagers behind them. Whether they'd gotten one the day
before or not, everybody was given a knife and a bandanna and one
piece of flashy junk-jewelry, also a stainless steel cup and mess
plate, a bucket, and an empty bottle with a cork. The women didn't
carry sheath knives, so they got Boy Scout knives on lanyards. They
were all lavishly supplied with Extee Three and candy. Any of the
children who looked big enough to be trusted with them got knives
too, and plenty of candy.
Anna and Karl were standing where the queue was forming, watching
how they fell into line; so was Lillian, with an audiovisual camera.
Having seen that the Marine enlisted men were getting the presents
handed out properly, Howell strolled over to them. Just as he came
up, a couple approached hesitantly, a man in a breechclout under a
leather apron, and a woman, much smaller, in a ragged and soiled
tunic. As soon as they fell into line, another Svant, in a blue
robe, 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. The
couple tried to get into line behind the man who had pushed them
aside. Another villager tried to shove them out of his way. Howell
advanced, his right fist closing. Then he remembered that he didn't
know what he'd be punching; he might break the fellow's neck, or
his own knuckles. He grabbed the blue-robed Svant by the wrist with
both hands, kicked a foot out from under him, and jerked, sending
him flying for six feet and then sliding in the dust for another
couple of yards. He pushed the others back, and put the couple
into 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 what
had been done to him. With a snarl of rage, he was on his feet, his
knife in his hand. It was a Terran bowie knife. Without conscious
volition, 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 few
steps, 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 of
his riflemen.
"What happened, Mark? Trouble?"
"All over now." He told Gofredo what had happened. Dorver was still
objecting:
"... Social precedence; the Svant may have been right, according
to local customs."
"Local customs be damned!" Gofredo became angry. "This is a Terran
Federation handout; we make the rules, and one of them is, no
pushing people out of line. Teach the buggers that now and we won't
have 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. Maybe
the one who got thrown on his ear--no, he didn't have any--was not
one 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 use
letting them find out the noise won't hurt them any sooner than
we have to."
Paul Meillard had worked out a way to distribute the picks and
shovels and axes. Considering each house as representing a family
unit, which might or might not be the case, there were picks and
shovels enough to go around, and an ax for every third house. They
took them around in an airjeep and left them at the doors. The
houses, he found, weren't adobe at all. They were built of logs,
plastered with adobe on the outside. That demolished his theory
that the houses were torn down periodically, and left the mound
itself unexplained.
The wheelbarrows and the grindstone and the two crosscut saws
were another matter. Nobody was quite sure that the (nobility?
capitalist-class? politicians? prominent citizens?) wouldn't simply
appropriate them for themselves. Paul Meillard was worried about
that; everybody else was willing to let matters take their course.
Before they were off the ground in their vehicles, a violent dispute
had begun, with a bedlam of jabbering and shrieking. By the time
they were landing at the camp, the big laminated leather horn had
begun to bellow.
* * * * *
One of the huts had been fitted as contact-team headquarters, with
all the view and communication screens installed, and one end
partitioned off and soundproofed for Lillian to study recordings in.
It was cocktail time when they returned; conversationally, it was a
continuation from lunch. Karl Dorver was even more convinced than
ever of his telepathic hypothesis, and he had completely converted
Anna de Jong to it.
"Look at that." He pointed at the snooper screen, which gave a view
of the plaza from directly above. "They're reaching an agreement
already."
So they seemed to be, though upon what was less apparent. The horn
had stopped, and the noise was diminishing. The odd thing was that
peace was being restored, or was restoring itself, as the uproar had
begun--outwardly from the center of the plaza to the periphery of
the crowd. The same thing had happened when Gofredo had ordered the
submachine gun fired, and, now that he recalled, when he had dealt
with the line-crasher.
"Suppose a few of them, in the middle, are agreed," Anna said.
"They are all thinking in unison, combining their telepathic
powers. They dominate those nearest to them, who join and amplify
their telepathic signal, and it spreads out through the whole
group. A mental chain-reaction."
"That would explain the mechanism of community leadership, and I'd
been 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 their
opinions in the minds of all the others. I'll bet the purpose of the
horn is to distract the thoughts of the others, so that they can be
more easily dominated. And the noise of the shots shocked them out
of communication with each other; no wonder they were frightened."
Bennet Fayon was far from convinced. "So far, this telepathy theory
is only an assumption. I find it a lot easier to assume some
fundamental difference between the way they translate sound into
sense-data and the way we do. We _think_ those combs on top of their
heads are their external hearing organs, but we have no idea what's
back 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 a
couple of fresh cadavers. Too bad they aren't warlike. Nothing like
a good bloody battle to advance the science of anatomy, and what we
don'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 come
down from the ship, we'll trade for cattle."
"When they make the second landing in the mountains, I'm going to do
a lot of hunting," Loughran added. "I'll get wild animals for you."
"Well, I'm going to assume that the vocal noises they make are
meaningful speech," Lillian Ransby said. "So far, I've just been
trying to analyze them for phonetic values. Now I'm going to analyze
them for sound-wave patterns. No matter what goes on inside their
private nervous systems, the sounds exist as waves in the public
atmosphere. I'm going to assume that the Lord Mayor and his stooges
were all trying to say the same thing when they were pointing to
themselves, and I'm going to see if all four of those sounds have
any common characteristic."
By the time dinner was over, they were all talking in circles, none
of them hopefully. They all made recordings of the speech about the
slithy toves in the Malemute Saloon; Lillian wanted to find out what
was different about them. Luis Gofredo saw to it that the camp
itself would be visible-lighted, and beyond the lights he set up
more photoelectric robot sentries and put a couple of snoopers to
circling on contragravity, with infra-red lights and receptors. He
also insisted that all his own men and all Dave Questell's Navy
construction engineers keep their weapons ready to hand. The natives
in the village were equally distrustful. They didn't herd the cattle
up from the meadows where they had been pastured, but they lighted
watch-fires along the edge of the mound as soon as it became dark.
* * * * *
It was three hours after nightfall when something on the
indicator-board for the robot sentries went off like a startled
rattlesnake. Everybody, talking idly or concentrating on writing up
the 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 Willi
Schallenmacher, rose and snatched his belt from the back of his
chair, putting it on.
"Take it easy," Gofredo said. "Probably just a cow or a horse--local
equivalent--that's strayed over from the other side."
He sat down in front of one of the snooper screens and twisted knobs
on the remote controls. The monochrome view, transformed from infra
red, rotated as the snooper circled and changed course. The other
screen showed the camp receding and the area around it widening as
its 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 moving
cautiously across the fields, crouching low. The snooper went down
toward them, and then he recognized them. The man and woman whom
the blue-robed villager had tried to shove out of the queue, that
afternoon. Gofredo recognized them, too.
"Your friends, Mark. Harry," he told his subordinate, "go out and
pass the word around. Only two, and we think they're friendly. Keep
everybody out of sight; we don't want to scare them away."
The snooper followed closely behind them. The man was no longer
wearing his apron; the woman's tunic was even more tattered and
soiled. She was leading him by the hand. Now and then, she would
stop and turn her head to the rear. The snooper over the mound
showed 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 seeming
to be guiding her companion.
"What's happening, Mark?"
It was Lillian; she must have just come out of the soundproof
speech-lab.
"You know them; the pair in the queue, this afternoon. I think
we'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 undecided
whether he was more afraid to turn and run than advance. The woman,
holding his hand, led him forward. They were both bruised, and both
had minor cuts, and neither of them had any of the things that had
been 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 gotten
them punished for it."
"I'd have done more to that fellow then Mark did, if I'd been there
when it happened." The Marine officer turned to Meillard. "Look,
this is your show, Paul; how you run it is your job. But in your
place, I'd take that pair back to the village and have them point
out 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 to
establish Federation law, and Federation law says you mustn't gang
up on people and beat and rob them. We don't have to speak Svantese
to make them understand what we'll put up with and what we won't."
"Later, Luis. After we've gotten a treaty with somebody." Meillard
broke off. "Watch this!"
The woman was making sign-talk. She pointed to the village on the
mound. Then, with her hands, she shaped a bucket like the ones that
had been given to them, and made a snatching gesture away from
herself. She indicated the neckcloths, and the sheath knife and the
other things, and snatched them away too. She made beating motions,
and touched her bruises and the man's. All the time, she was talking
excitedly, 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 made
vehement gestures of rejection toward the village, then bowed,
placing her hands on her brow. The man imitated her obeisance, then
they both straightened. The woman pointed to herself and to the man,
and around the circle of huts and landing craft. She began scuttling
about, picking up imaginary litter and sweeping with an imaginary
broom. The man started pounding with an imaginary hammer, then
chopping 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 show
our attitude by taking them in. You tell them, Luis; these people
seem 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 that
meant happiness with them. The man confined his vocal expressions to
his odd _ghroogh-ghroogh_-ing; the woman twittered joyfully. Gofredo
put a hand on the woman's shoulder, pointed to the man and from him
back to her. "Unh?" he inquired.
The woman put a hand on the man's head, then brought it down to
within a foot of the ground. She picked up the imaginary infant
and rocked it in her arms, then set it down and grew it up until
she had her hand on the top of the man's head again.
"That was good, Mom," Gofredo told her. "Now, you and Sonny come
along; 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 taken
away from them. They gave the man a one-piece suit of Marine combat
coveralls; Lillian gave the woman a lavender bathrobe, and Anna
contributed a red scarf. They found them quarters in one end of a
store shed, after making sure that there was nothing they could get
at that would hurt them or that they could damage. They gave each of
them a pair of blankets and a pneumatic mattress, which delighted
them, 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 the
headquarters hut. "You said the food on this planet is safe
for Terrans."
"So I did, and it is, but the rule's not reversible. Things we eat
might kill them," Fayon said. "Meats will be especially dangerous.
And no caffeine, and no alcohol."
"Alcohol won't hurt them," Schallenmacher said. "I saw big jars full
of fermenting fruit-mash back of some of those houses; in about a
year, it ought to be fairly good wine. C_{2}H_{5}OH is the same on
any 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 his
mother 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 a
community of telepaths, constantly invading the minds of others
with irrational and disgusting thoughts; no wonder he is rejected
and persecuted. And in a community on this culture level, the mother
of an abnormal child is often regarded with superstitious
detestation--"
[Illustration]
"Yes, of course!" Anna de Jong instantly agreed, and began to go
into the villagers' hostility to both mother and son; both of them
were 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. A
little patch on the screen at seventeen-twenty cycles. The odd
thing 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 she
imitated the sound, she ought to imitate the wave pattern. He said
so, 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 broken
by a set of filters into frequency-groups, translated into light
from dull red to violet paling into pure white. It photographed the
light-pattern on high-speed film, automatically developed it, and
then made a print-copy and projected the film in slow motion on a
screen. When she pressed a button, a recorded voice said, "_Fwoonk_."
An instant later, a pattern of vertical lines in various colors and
lengths 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, and
propped it beside the screen. Then she picked up a hand-phone and
said, "_Fwoonk_," into it. It sounded like the first one, but the
pattern that danced onto the screen was quite different. Where the
green had been, there was a patch of pale-blue lines. She ran the
other three Svants' voices, each saying, presumably, "Me." Some were
mainly up in blue, others had a good deal of yellow and orange, but
they all had the little patch of green lines.
"Well, that seems to be the information," he said. "The rest is
just 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 these
people could pack into one syllable? He picked up the hand-phone and
said, "Fwoonk," into it. The pattern, a little deeper in color and
with longer lines, was recognizably like hers, and unlike any of
the Svants'.
* * * * *
The others came in, singly and in pairs and threes. They watched
the colors dance on the screen to picture the four Svant words
which might or might not all mean _me_. They tried to duplicate
them. Luis Gofredo and Willi Schallenmacher came closest of anybody.
Bennet Fayon was still insisting that the Svants had a perfectly
comprehensible language--to other Svants. Anna de Jong had started to
veer a little away from the Dorver Hypothesis. There was a difference
between event-level sound, which was a series of waves of alternately
crowded and rarefied molecules of air, and object-level sound, which
was an auditory sensation inside the nervous system, she admitted.
That, Fayon crowed, was what he'd been saying all along; their
auditory 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_ had
become swear words among the joint Space Navy-Colonial Office
contact team.
"Well, if I hear the two sounds alike, why doesn't the analyzer hear
them alike?" Karl Dorver demanded.
"It has better ears than you do, Karl. Look how many different
frequencies there are in that word, all crowding up behind each
other," Lillian said. "But it isn't sensitive or selective enough.
I'm going to see what Ayesha Keithley can do about building me
a better one."
Ayesha was signals and detection officer on the _Hubert Penrose_.
Dave Questell mentioned that she'd had a hard day, and was probably
making 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 when
she gets up. But till we get something that'll sort this mess out
and make sense of it, I'm stopped."
"You're stopped, period, Lillian," Dorver told her. "What these
people gibber at us doesn't even make as much sense as the Shooting
of Dan McJabberwock. The real information is conveyed by telepathy."
* * * * *
Lieutenant j.g. Ayesha Keithley was on the screen the next morning
while 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 girl
in naval uniform in the screen asked.
Lillian shook her head. "Bennet Fayon's hoping for a war, or an
epidemic, or something to break out, so that he can get a few
cadavers to dissect."
"Well, he'll find that they're pretty complex," Ayesha Keithley
said. "I identified stick-and-slip sounds and percussion sounds,
and plucked-string sounds, along with the ordinary hiss-and-buzz
speech-sounds. Making a vocoder to reproduce that speech is going
to be fun. Just what are you using, in the way of equipment?"
Lillian was still talking about that when the two landing craft
from the ship were sighted, coming down. Charley Loughran and Willi
Schallenmacher, who were returning to the _Hubert Penrose_ to join
the other landing party, began assembling their luggage. The others
went outside, Howell among them.
Mom and Sonny were watching the two craft grow larger and closer
above, keeping close to a group of spacemen; Sonny was looking around
excitedly, while Mom clung to his arm, like a hen with an oversized
chick. The reasoning was clear--these people knew all about big things
that came down out of the sky and weren't afraid of them; stick close
to them, and it would be perfectly safe. Sonny saw the contact team
emerging from their hut and grabbed his mother's arm, pointing. They
both beamed happily; that expression didn't look sad, at all, now that
you knew what it meant. Sonny began ghroogh-ghrooghing hideously; Mom
hushed him with a hand over his mouth, and they both made eating
gestures, rubbed their abdomens comfortably, and pointed toward the
mess hut. Bennet Fayon was frightened. He turned and started on the
double 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 came
back, talking to himself.
"Terran carniculture pork," he said, when he returned. "Zarathustra
pool-ball fruit. Potato-flour hotcakes, with Baldur honey and Odin
flameberry jam. And two big cups of coffee apiece. It's a miracle
they aren't dead now. If they're alive for lunch, we won't need to
worry about feeding them anything we eat, but I'm glad somebody else
has the moral responsibility for this."
Lillian Ransby came out of the headquarters hut. "Ayesha's coming
down this afternoon, with a lot of equipment," she said. "We're
not exactly going to count air molecules in the sound waves, but
we'll do everything short of that. We'll need more lab space,
soundproofed."
"Tell Dave Questell what you want," Meillard said. "Do you really
think you can get anything?"
She shrugged. "If there's anything there to get. How long it'll
take is another question."
* * * * *
The two sixty-foot collapsium-armored turtles settled to the ground
and went off contragravity. The ports opened, and things began being
floated off on lifter-skids: framework for the water tower, and
curved titanium sheets for the tank. Anna de Jong said something
about hot showers, and not having to take any more sponge-baths.
Howell was watching the stuff come off the other landing craft. A
dozen pairs of four-foot wagon wheels, with axles. Hoes, in bundles.
Scythe blades. A hand forge, with a crank-driven fan blower, and a
hundred and fifty pound anvil, and sledges and cutters and swages
and tongs.
Everybody was busy, and Mom and Sonny were fidgeting, gesturing
toward the work with their own empty hands. _Hey, boss; whatta
we 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 to
give them technologies. The people on the ship hadn't thought of
that. These wheels, now; machined steel hubs, steel rims, tubular
steel spokes, drop-forged and machined axles. The Svants wouldn't
be able to copy them in a thousand years. Well, in a hundred, if
somebody showed them where and how to mine iron and how to smelt
and work it. And how to build a steam engine.
He went over and pulled a hoe out of one of the bundles. Blades
stamped out with a power press, welded to tubular steel handles.
Well, wood for hoe handles was hard to come by on a spaceship, even
a battle cruiser almost half a mile in diameter; he had to admit
that. And they were about two thousand per cent more efficient than
the bronze scrapers the Svants used. That wasn't the idea, though.
Even supposing that the first wave of colonists came out in a year
and a half, it would be close to twenty years before Terran-operated
factories would be in mass production for the native trade. The idea
was to teach these people to make better things for themselves; give
them a leg up, so that the next generation would be ready for
contragravity and nuclear and electric power.
Mom didn't know what to make of any of it. Sonny did, though; he
was 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 as
an affirmative sign. "Like big wheelbarrow."
One thing puzzled Sonny, though. Wheelbarrow wheels were small--his
hands 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 two
pairs of wheels, and then put a wagon on them, and drew a quadruped
hitched to it, and a Svant with a stick walking beside it. Sonny
looked at the picture--Svants seemed to have pictoral sense, for
which make us thankful!--and then caught his mother's sleeve and
showed it to her. Mom didn't get it. Sonny took the pencil and
drew another animal, with a pole travois. He made gestures. A
travois dragged; it went slow. A wagon had wheels that went
around; it went fast.
So Lillian and Anna thought he was the village half-wit. Village
genius, more likely; the other peasants didn't understand him, and
resented his superiority. They went over for a closer look at the
wheels, and pushed them. Sonny was almost beside himself. Mom was
puzzled, but she thought they were pretty wonderful.
Then they looked at blacksmith tools. Tongs; Sonny had never seen
anything like them. Howell wondered what the Svants used to handle
hot metal; probably big tweezers made by tying two green sticks
together. There was an old Arabian legend that Allah had made the
first tongs and given them to the first smith, because nobody could
make 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 the
pivoted tongs, all embodied the same principle, one his people
had evidently never discovered. A whole new world seemed to open
before him; from then on, he was constantly finding things pierced
and rotating on pivots.
* * * * *
By this time, Mom was fidgeting again. She ought to be doing
something to justify her presence in the camp. He was wondering
what sort of work he could invent for her when Karl Dorver called
to him from the door of the headquarters hut.
"Mark, can you spare Mom for a while?" he asked. "We want her to
look 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 that
it 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 water
in 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 the
Terrans and pointed at him. Sonny noticed that. He unobtrusively
picked up a double-bitted ax and kept it to hand.
He and Mom had lunch with the contact team. As they showed no ill
effects from breakfast, Fayon decided that it was safe to let them
have anything the Terrans ate or drank. They liked wine; they knew
what it was, all right, but this seemed to have a delightfully
different flavor. They each tried a cigarette, choked over the
first few puffs, and decided that they didn't like smoking.
"Mom gave us a lot of information, as far as she could, on the crops
and animals. The big things, the size of rhinoceroses, are draft
animals and nothing else; they're not eaten," Dorver said. "I don't
know whether the meat isn't good, or is taboo, or they are too
valuable to eat. They eat all the other three species, and milk two
of them. I have an idea they grind their grain in big stone mortars
as needed."
That was right; he'd seen things like that.
"Willi, when you're over in the mountains, see if you can find
something we can make millstones out of. We can shape them with
sono-cutters; after they get the idea, they can do it themselves
by 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 say
something, I'd repeat it, and she'd tell us it was wrong and say
the same thing over again. Lillian took recordings; she got the
same 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, after
lunch. 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 the
one 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 and
teach us how to recognize and pronounce them. You're the only
linguist we have."
That seemed to comfort her a little. He hoped it would work out that
way. If they could communicate with these people and did leave a
party here to prepare for the first colonization, he'd stay on, to
teach the natives Terran technologies and study theirs. He'd been
expecting that Lillian would stay, too. She was the linguist; she'd
have to stay. But now, if it turned out that she would be no help but
a liability, she'd go back with the _Hubert Penrose_. Paul wouldn't
keep a linguist who offended the natives' every sensibility with
every word she spoke. He didn't want that to happen. Lillian and he
had 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 for
cattle. Mom didn't want to; she was afraid. They had to do a lot of
play-acting, with half a dozen Marines pretending to guard her with
fixed bayonets from some of Dave Questell's Navy construction men
who had red bandannas on their heads to simulate combs before she
got the idea. Then she was afraid to get into the contragravity
lorry that was to carry the hoes and the wagon wheels. Sonny managed
to reassure her, and insisted on going along, and he insisted on
taking his ax with him. That meant doubling the guard, to make sure
Sonny didn't lose his self-control when he saw his former
persecutors within chopping distance.
It went off much better than either Paul Meillard or Luis Gofredo
expected. After the first shock of being air-borne had worn off,
Mom found that she liked contragravity-riding; Sonny was wildly
delighted with it from the start. The natives showed neither of them
any hostility. Mom's lavender bathrobe and Sonny's green coveralls
and big ax seemed to be symbols of a new and exalted status; even
the 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, including
a 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 animals
at once and get to work on it. Gofredo advised him to put it off
till the next morning. He wanted a large native audience to see
the animal being shot with a rifle.
The water tower was finished, and the big spherical tank hoisted on
top of it and made fast. A pump, and a filter-system were installed.
There was no water for hot showers that evening, though. They would
have to run a pipeline to the river, and that would entail a ditch
that would cut through several cultivated fields, which, in turn,
would provoke an uproar. Paul Meillard didn't want that happening
until he'd concluded the cattle-trade.
Charley Loughran and Willi Schallenmacher had gone up to the ship on
one of the landing craft; they accompanied the landing party that went
down into the mountains. Ayesha Keithley arrived late in the afternoon
on another landing craft, with five or six tons of instruments and
parts and equipment, and a male Navy warrant-officer helper.
They looked around the lab Lillian had been using at one end of
the headquarters hut.
"This won't do," the girl Navy officer said. "We can't get a quarter
of the apparatus we're going to need in here. We'll have to build
something."
Dave Questell was drawn into the discussion. Yes, he could put
up something big enough for everything the girls would need to
install, and soundproof it. Concrete, he decided; they'd have to
wait till he got the water line down and the pump going, though.
There was a crowd of natives in the fields, gaping at the Terran
camp, the next morning, and Gofredo decided to kill the
animal--until they learned the native name, they were calling it
Domesticated Type C. It was herded out where everyone could watch,
and a Marine stepped forward unslung his rifle took a kneeling
position, 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, who
had been consulting by signs over the construction of a wagon, were
standing side by side. The Marine squeezed his trigger. The rifle
banged, and the Domesticated-C bounded into the air, dropped, and
kicked a few times and was still. The natives, however, missed that
part of it; they were howling piteously and rubbing their heads.
All but Sonny. He was just mildly surprised at what had happened
to the Dom.-C.
Sonny, it would appear, was stone deaf.
* * * * *
As anticipated, there was another uproar later in the morning when
the ditching machine started north across the meadow. A mob of
Svants, seeing its relentless progress toward a field of something
like turnips, gathered in front of it, twittering and brandishing
implements of agriculture, many of them Terran-made.
Paul Meillard was ready for this. Two lorries went out; one loaded
with Marines, who jumped off with their rifles ready. By this
time, all the Svants knew what rifles would do beside make a
noise. Meillard, Dorver, Gofredo and a few others got out of the
other vehicle, and unloaded presents. Gofredo did all the talking.
The Svants couldn't understand him, but they liked it. They also
liked the presents, which included a dozen empty half-gallon rum
demijohns, tarpaulins, and a lot of assorted knickknacks. The
pipeline 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 cut
wood; when they got back, they'd burn some charcoal in the pit
that had been dug beside the camp. Until then, he and Sonny were
drawing plans for a wooden wheel with a metal tire when Lillian
came 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 rifle
going off. The only one of this gang that has brains enough to pour
sand out of a boot with directions on the bottom of the heel, and
he'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 saw
a 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 about
sign-talk. She's been doing it all his life." Then she remembered
what she had come out to show him, and held out the clipboard. "You
know how that analyzer of mine works? Well, here's what Ayesha's
going to do. After breaking a sound into frequency bands instead of
being photographed and projected, each band goes to an analyzer of
its own, and is projected on its own screen. There'll be forty of
them, each for a band of a hundred cycles, from zero to four
thousand. That seems to be the Svant vocal range."
The diagram passed from hand to hand during cocktail time, before
dinner. Bennet Fayon had been working all day dissecting the animal
they were all calling a _domsee_, a name which would stick even if
and when they learned the native name. He glanced disinterestedly at
the drawing, then looked again, more closely. Then he set down the
drink he was holding in his other hand and studied it intently.
"You know what you have here?" he asked. "This is a very close analogy
to the hearing organs of that animal I was working on. The comb, as
we've assumed, is the external organ. It's covered with small flaps
and fissures. Back of each fissure is a long, narrow membrane; they're
paired, one on each side of the comb, and from them nerves lead to
clusters of small round membranes. Nerves lead from them to a complex
nerve-cable at the bottom of the comb and into the brain at the base
of the skull. I couldn't understand how the system functioned, but now
I see it. Each of the larger membranes on the outside responds to a
sound-frequency band, and the small ones on the inside break the bands
down 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-enlargements
and 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 grant
that the membranes will respond to sound, but I can't see how
they transmit it."
"But they do hear," Meillard said. "Their musical instruments,
their reactions to our voices, the way they are affected by sounds
like 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 ear
of 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 look
almost like deafness," Ayesha Keithley said. "I wish I could design
a sound-detector one-tenth as good as this must be."
Yes. The way the Lord Mayor said _fwoonk_ and the way Paul Meillard
said it sounded entirely different to them. Of course, _fwoonk_ and
_pwink_ and _tweelt_ and _kroosh_ sounded alike to them, but let's
don't be too picky about things.
* * * * *
There were no hot showers that evening; Dave Questell's gang had
trouble with the pump and needed some new parts made up aboard the
ship. They were still working on it the next morning. He had meant
to start teaching Sonny blacksmithing, but during the evening
Lillian and Anna had decided to try teaching Mom a nonphonetic,
ideographic, alphabet, and in the morning they co-opted Sonny to
help. Deprived of his disciple, he strolled over to watch the work
on the pump. About twenty Svants had come in from the fields and
were also watching, from the meadow.
After a while, the job was finished. The petty officer in charge
of the work pushed in the switch, and the pump started, sucking
dry with a harsh racket. The natives twittered in surprise. Then
the 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 pleasure
and moved closer; within forty or fifty feet, they all squatted on
the ground and sat entranced. Others came in from the fields, drawn
by the sound. They, too, came up and squatted, until there was a
semicircle of them. The tank took a long time to fill; until it did,
they all sat immobile and fascinated. Even after it stopped, many
remained, hoping that it would start again. Paul Meillard began
wondering, a trifle uneasily, if that would happen every time
the pump went on.
"They get a positive pleasure from it. It affects them the same way
Luis' voice does."
"Mean I have a voice like a pump?" Gofredo demanded.
"Well, I'm going to find out," Ayesha Keithley said. "The next time
that starts, I'm going to make a recording, and compare it with your
voice-recording. I'll give five to one there'll be a similarity."
Questell got the foundation for the sonics lab dug, and began
pouring concrete. That took water, and the pump ran continuously
that afternoon. Concrete-mixing took more water the next day, and
by noon the whole village population, down to the smallest child,
was massed at the pumphouse, enthralled. Mom was snared by the sound
like any of the rest; only Sonny was unaffected. Lillian and Ayesha
compared 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 through
the 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 so
that afternoon at cocktail time.
"It's an addiction," he declared. "Once they hear it, they have no
will to resist; they just squat and listen. I don't know what it's
doing to them, but I'm scared of it."
"I know one thing it's doing," Meillard said. "It's keeping them
from their work in the fields. For all we know, it may cause them
to lose a crop they need badly for subsistence."
* * * * *
The native they had come to call the Lord Mayor evidently thought
so, too. He was with the others, the next morning, squatting with
his staff across his knees, as bemused as any of them, but when the
pump stopped he rose and approached a group of Terrans, launching
into what could only be an impassioned tirade. He pointed with his
staff to the pump house, and to the semicircle of still motionless
villagers. He pointed to the fields, and back to the people, and to
the 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 the
staff; he was struggling tormentedly with himself, in vain. His face
relaxed into the heartbroken expression of joy; he turned and
shuffled 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 odd
salaamlike bow toward the Terrans, and then turned on the people,
striking with his staff and shrieking at them. A few got to their
feet and joined him, screaming, pushing, tugging. Others joined.
In a little while, they were all on their feet, straggling away
across 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 colonize
an inhabited planet. We give the natives something new. Then we find
out it's bad for them, and we try to take it away from them. And
then 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 from
the other camp and wanted to talk to Bennet Fayon.
"A funny thing, Bennet. I took a shot at a bird ... no, a flying
mammal ... 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, and
find 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'd
laid my shotgun down and walked away from it--"
"Twelve hundred foot-seconds," Ayesha said. "Bow-wave as well as
muzzle-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 doing
to the nice-noise-place. Ayesha and Lillian consoled her by taking
her into the soundproofed room and playing the recording of the
pump-noise for her. Sonny couldn't care less, one way or another;
he spent the afternoon teaching Mark Howell what the marks on paper
meant. It took a lot of signs and play-acting. He had learned about
thirty 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 and
remember--look how long it took an Old Terran Chinese scribe
to learn his profession--but it was the beginning of a method
of communication.
Questell got the pump house mounded over. Ayesha came out and tried
a 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 demonstrate
angrily. A couple tried to interfere and were knocked down with
rifle butts. The Lord Mayor and his Board of Aldermen came out with
the big horn and harangued them at length, and finally got them
to go back to the fields. As nearly as anybody could tell, he was
friendly to and co-operative with the Terrans. The snooper over
the village reported excitement in the plaza.
Bennet Fayon had taken an airjeep to the other camp immediately
after lunch. He was back by 1500, accompanied by Loughran. They
carried 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 it
was getting. We're still doing a post on this svant-bat; that's what
Charley's calling it, till we get the native name.
"The immediate cause of death was spasmodic contraction of every
muscle in the thing's body; some of them were partly relaxed before
we could get to work on it, but not completely. Every bone that
isn't broken is dislocated; a good many both. There is not the
slightest trace of external injury. Everything was done by its own
muscles." He looked around. "I hope nobody covered Ayesha's bet,
after I left. If they did, she collects. The large outer membranes
in the comb seem to be unaffected, but there is considerable
compression of the small round ones inside, in just one area,
and more on the left side than on the right. Charley says it
was 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 case
of psychosomatic compound fracture."
"Don't be too premature about it, Anna. I think that's more or less
what you have, here."
Everybody looked at him, surprised. His subject was comparative
technology. The bio and psycho-sciences were completely outside
his field.
"A lot of things have been bothering me, ever since the first
contact. I'm beginning to think I'm on the edge of understanding
them, now. Bennet, the higher life-forms here--the people, and that
domsee, and Charley's svant-bat--are structurally identical with us.
I don't mean gross structure, like ears and combs. I mean molecular
and 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 viable
tissue-graft from a Svant to a Terran, or vice versa."
"Ayesha, would the sound waves from that pistol-shot in any
conceivable way have the sort of physical effect we're considering?"
"Absolutely not," she said, and Luis Gofredo said: "I've been shot
at 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 all
contradicted him, many derisively. Signal reactions. Only Paul
Meillard made the semantically appropriate response:
"What do you mean, Mark?"
"They don't _hear_ sound; they _feel_ it. You all saw what they have
inside their combs. Those things don't transmit sound like the ears
of any sound-sensitive life-form we've ever seen. They transform
sound waves into tactile sensations."
Fayon cursed, slowly and luridly. Anna de Jong looked at him
wide-eyed. He finished his cocktail and poured another. In the
snooper screen, what looked like an indignation meeting was making
uproar in the village plaza. Gofredo cut the volume of the speaker
even lower.
"That would explain a lot of things," Meillard said slowly. "How
hard it was for them to realize that we didn't understand when they
talked to us. A punch in the nose feels the same to anybody. They
thought they were giving us bodily feelings. They didn't know we
were 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 it
doesn't sound like _pwink_ or _tweelt_ or _kroosh_. The tactile
sensations, to a Svant, feel no more different than a massage by
four different hands. Analogous to a word pronounced by four
different voices, to us. They'll have a code for expressing meanings
in tactile sensation, just as we have a code for expressing meanings
in audible sound."
"Except that when a Svant tells another, 'I am happy,' or 'I have a
stomach-ache,' he makes the other one feel that way too," Anna said.
"That would carry an awful lot more conviction. I don't imagine
symptom-swapping is popular among Svants. Karl! You were nearly
right, at that. This isn't telepathy, but it's a lot like it."
"So it is," Dorver, who had been mourning his departed telepathy
theory, said brightly. "And look how it explains their society.
Peaceful, everybody in quick agreement--" He looked at the screen
and gulped. The Lord Mayor and his party had formed one clump, and
the opposition was grouped at the other side of the plaza; they were
screaming in unison at each other. "They make their decisions by
endurance; the party that can resist the feelings of the other
longest converts their opponents."
"Pure democracy," Gofredo declared. "Rule by the party that can
make 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 would
really 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 it
in 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 about
a mutual acquaintance, once said, 'When they installed her circuits,
they put in such big feeling circuits that there was no room left
for any thinking circuits.' I think that's a perfect description of
what I estimate Svant mentality to be. Take these bronze knives, and
the musical instruments. Wonderful; the work of individuals trying
to 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 of
Motion, or the Second Law of Thermodynamics, in tickle-pinch-rub
terms? Sonny could grasp an idea like that. Sonny's handicap, if
you call it that, cuts him off from feel-thinking; he can think
logically instead of sensually."
He sipped his cocktail and continued: "I can understand why the
village is mounded up, too. I realized that while I was watching
Dave's gang bury the pump house. I'd been bothered by that, and by
the absence of granaries for all the grain they raise, and by the
number of people for so few and such small houses. I think the
village is mostly underground, and the houses are just entrances,
soundproofed, to shelter them from uncomfortable natural
noises--thunderstorms, for instance."
The horn was braying in the snooper-screen speaker; somebody
wondered what it was for. Gofredo laughed.
"I thought, at first, that it was a war-horn. It isn't. It's a
peace-horn," he said. "Public tranquilizer. The first day, they
brought 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 his
mother can stand being near him."
"Like me," Lillian said. "Now I understand. Just think of the most
revolting thing that could be done to you physically; that's what I
do to them every time I speak. And I always thought I had a nice
voice," she added, pathetically.
"You have, for Terrans," Ayesha said. "For Svants, you'll just
have to change it."
"But how--?"
"Use an analyzer; train it. That was why I took up sonics, in
the 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 myself
an entirely different voice in a couple of months. Just try to
get some pump-sound frequencies into it, like Luis'."
"But why? I'm no use here. I'm a linguist, and these people haven't
any language that I could ever learn, and they couldn't even learn
ours. 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 Terra
Basic vocabulary, and with her help we can train a few more. They
can be our interpreters; we can write what we want them to say to
the others. It'll be clumsy, but it will work, and it's about the
only thing I can think of that will."
"And it will improve in time," Ayesha added. "And we can make
vocoders and visibilizers. Paul, you have authority to requisition
personnel from the ship's company. Draft me; I'll stay here and
work on it."
The rumpus in the village plaza was getting worse. The Lord Mayor
and his adherents were being out-shouted by the opposition.
"Better do something about that in a hurry, Paul, if you don't want
a lot of Svants shot," Gofredo said. "Give that another half hour
and we'll have visitors, with bows and spears."
"Ayesha, you have a recording of the pump," Meillard said. "Load a
record-player onto a jeep and fly over the village and play it for
them. Do it right away. Anna, get Mom in here. We want to get her to
tell that gang that from now on, at noon and for a couple of hours
after sunset, when the work's done, there will be free public
pump-concerts, over the village plaza."
* * * * *
Ayesha and her warrant-officer helper and a Marine lieutenant
went out hastily. Everybody else faced the screen to watch. In
fifteen minutes, an airjeep was coming in on the village. As it
circled 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 out
almost at once. As the jeep circled down to housetop level, the two
contending faction-clumps broke apart; their component individuals
moved into the center of the plaza and squatted, staring up, letting
the 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 with
a 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 him
decide 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 know
what would happen? Nobody would be able to turn it off; they'd
all be hypnotized, or doped, or whatever it is. They'd just sit
in a circle around it till they starved to death, and when the
power-unit gave out, the record-player would be surrounded by
a ring of skeletons. We'll just have to keep on playing it for
them 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 act
nasty. And find out what Lillian has in her voice that the rest of
us don't have, and make a good loud recording of that, and stash it
away 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-country
to talk to the king or whatever. This is better than fire-water ever
was."
"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 to
study technological history, and it seemed to him that that pious
assertion had been made a few times before. Some of the others who
had made it had really meant it, too, but that had made little
difference in the long run.
Fayon and Anna were talking enthusiastically about the work ahead of
them.
"I don't know where your subject ends and mine begins," Anna was
saying. "We'll just have to handle it between us. What are we going
to call it? We certainly can't call it hearing."
"Nonauditory sonic sense is the only thing I can think of," Fayon
said. "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 Domesticated
Type C, and that got cut down to size. _Naudsonce._"
* * * * *