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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Naudsonce, by H. Beam Piper
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Naudsonce
+
+Author: H. Beam Piper
+
+Illustrator: Morey
+
+Release Date: August 18, 2006 [EBook #19076]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NAUDSONCE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Greg Weeks, William Woods, and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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, the
+mosslike stuff was soft and yielding, and there was a fragrance
+in the air unlike anything he had ever smelled. He was going to
+like this planet; he knew it. The question was, how would it,
+and its people, like him? He watched the little figures advancing
+across the fields from the mound, with the village out of sight
+on the other end of it and the combat-car circling lazily on
+contragravity above.
+
+Major Luis Gofredo, the Marine officer, spoke without lowering
+his binoculars:
+
+"They have a tubular thing about twelve feet long; six of them
+are carrying it on poles, three to a side, and a couple more are
+walking 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 looked
+pretty primitive. Of course, gunpowder's one of those things a
+primitive people could discover by accident, if the ingredients
+were available."
+
+"We won't take any chances, then."
+
+"You think they're hostile? I was hoping they were coming out to
+parley with us."
+
+That was Paul Meillard. He had a right to be anxious; his whole
+future in the Colonial Office would be made or ruined by what was
+going to happen here.
+
+The joint Space Navy-Colonial Office expedition was looking for
+new planets suitable for colonization; they had been out, now,
+for four years, which was close to maximum for an exploring
+expedition. They had entered eleven systems, and made landings
+on eight planets. Three had been reasonably close to Terra-type.
+There had been Fafnir; conditions there would correspond to Terra
+during the Cretaceous Period, but any Cretaceous dinosaur would
+have been cute and cuddly to the things on Fafnir. Then there had
+been Imhotep; in twenty or thirty thousand years, it would be
+a fine planet, but at present it was undergoing an extensive
+glaciation. 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 just
+gotten as far as clubs and _coup-de-poing_ axes. Contact with
+them had entailed heavy ammunition expenditure, with two men and
+a 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, and
+the rest had been the sort that get colonized by irreconcilable
+minority-groups who want to get away from everybody else. The
+Colonial Office wouldn't even consider any of them.
+
+Then they had found this one, third of a G0-star, eighty million
+miles from primary, less axial inclination than Terra, which would
+mean a more uniform year-round temperature, and about half land
+surface. On the evidence of a couple of sneak landings for
+specimens, the biochemistry was identical with Terra's and the
+organic matter was edible. It was the sort of planet every explorer
+dreams of finding, except for one thing.
+
+It was inhabited by a sapient humanoid race, and some of them were
+civilized enough to put it in Class V, and Colonial Office doctrine
+on Class V planets was rigid. Friendly relations with the natives
+had to be established, and permission to settle had to be guaranteed
+in a treaty of some sort with somebody more or less authorized to
+make one.
+
+If Paul Meillard could accomplish that, he had it made. He would
+stay on with forty or fifty of the ship's company to make
+preparations. In a year a couple of ships would come out from Terra,
+with a thousand colonists, and a battalion or so of Federation
+troops, to protect them from the natives and vice versa. Meillard
+would automatically be appointed governor-general.
+
+But if he failed, he was through. Not out--just through. When he
+got back to Terra, he would be promoted to some home office position
+at slightly higher base pay but without the three hundred per cent
+extraterrestrial bonus, and he would vegetate there till he retired.
+Every time his name came up, somebody would say, "Oh, yes; he
+flubbed the contact on Whatzit."
+
+It wouldn't do the rest of them any good, either. There would
+always 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 seconds
+later, it was repeated, then repeated again.
+
+"Our cannon's a horn," Gofredo said. "I can't see how they're
+blowing it, though."
+
+There was a stir to right and left, among the Marines deployed
+in a crescent line on either side of the contact team; a metallic
+clatter as weapons were checked. A shadow fell in front of them
+as 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 the
+suggestion. "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 walking
+behind it has a hand-bellows." He raised his voice. "Fix bayonets!
+These people don't know anything about rifles, but they know what
+spears are. They have some of their own."
+
+So they had. The six who walked in the lead were unarmed, unless
+the thing one of them carried was a spear. So, it seemed, were the
+horn-bearers. Behind them, however, in an open-order skirmish-line,
+came fifty-odd with weapons. Most of them had spears, the points
+glinting 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 a
+bronze-headed staff. Three of his companions also wore robes; the
+other two were bare-legged in short tunics. The horn-bearers wore
+either robes or tunics; the spearmen and bowmen behind either wore
+tunics or were naked except for breechclouts. All wore sandals. They
+were red-brown in color, completely hairless; they had long necks,
+almost chinless lower jaws, and fleshy, beaklike noses that gave
+them an avian appearance which was heightened by red crests, like
+roosters' 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 between
+one and another of the Terrans must puzzle them. Paul Meillard, as
+close to being a pure Negro as anybody in the Seventh Century of
+the Atomic Era was to being pure anything. Lillian Ransby, almost
+ash-blond. Major Gofredo, barely over the minimum Service height
+requirement; his name was Old Terran Spanish, but his ancestry
+must 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 stock
+of the things they wore and carried. Belts, with pouches, and knives
+with flat bronze blades and riveted handles. Three of the delegation
+had small flutes hung by cords around their necks, and a fourth had
+a reed Pan-pipe. No shields, and no swords; that was good. Swords
+and shields mean organized warfare, possibly a warrior-caste. This
+crowd weren't warriors. The spearmen and bowmen weren't arrayed for
+battle, but for a drive-hunt, with the bows behind the spears to
+stop anything that broke through the line.
+
+"All right; let's go meet them." The querulous, uncertain note was
+gone from Meillard's voice; he knew what to do and how to do it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Gofredo called to the Marines to stand fast. Then they were
+advancing to meet the natives, and when they were twenty feet apart,
+both groups halted. The horn stopped blowing. The one in the yellow
+robe lifted his staff and said something that sounded like,
+"_Tweedle-eedle-oodly-eenk_."
+
+The horn, he saw, was made of strips of leather, wound spirally
+and coated with some kind of varnish. Everything these people had
+was 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 the
+Malemute Saloon, and the kid that handled the music box did gyre
+and gimble in the wabe, and back of the bar in a solo game all
+mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgabe the lady
+that'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 of
+the sort to this crowd. It scared them. The dignitary with the staff
+twittered 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 few
+seconds, and then we'll have Phase Two."
+
+When the gibbering and skreeking began to fall off, she stepped
+forward. Lillian was, herself, a good test of how human aliens were;
+this gang weren't human enough to whistle at her. She touched
+herself 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," to
+Luis 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 self
+and a word for person-addressed."
+
+"Well, look at them," Karl Dorver invited. "Six different opinions
+about what we mean, and now the band's starting an argument of their
+own."
+
+"Phase Two-A," Lillian said firmly, stepping forward. She pointed
+to herself. "Me--Lillian Ransby. Lillian Ransby--me _name_.
+You--_name_?
+
+"_Bwoooo!_" the spokesman screamed in horror, clutching his staff
+as though to shield it from profanation. The others howled like
+a 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, and
+spit in your mother's face,' I suppose."
+
+"Let me try it," Gofredo said.
+
+The little Marine major went through the same routine. At his first
+word, the uproar stopped; before he was through, the natives' faces
+were sagging and crumbling into expressions of utter and
+heartbroken 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're
+farmers; they ought to have a word for water."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They spent almost an hour at it. They poured out two gallons of
+water, pretended to be thirsty, gave each other drinks. The natives
+simply couldn't agree on the word, in their own language, for water.
+That or else they missed the point of the whole act. They tried
+fire, next. The efficiency of a steel hatchet was impressive, and
+so was the sudden flame of a pocket-lighter, but no word for fire
+emerged, either.
+
+"Ah, to Niflheim with it!" Luis Gofredo cried in exasperation.
+"We're getting nowhere at five times light speed. Give them their
+presents 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 anything
+with a carbon-hydrogen metabolism, and so could the trade candy.
+"Nothing else, though, till we have some idea what goes on inside
+them."
+
+Dorver thought the six members of the delegation would be persons
+of special consequence, and should have something extra. That was
+probably so. Dorver was as quick to pick up clues to an alien social
+order as he was, himself, to deduce a culture pattern from a few
+artifacts. He and Lillian went back to the landing craft to collect
+the presents.
+
+Everybody, horn-detail, armed guard and all, got one ten-inch bowie
+knife and sheath, a red bandanna neckcloth, and a piece of flashy
+junk jewelry. The (town council? prominent citizens? or what?) also
+received a colored table-spread apiece; these were draped over their
+shoulders and fastened with two-inch plastic pins advertising the
+candidacy of somebody for President of the Federation Member Republic
+of Venus a couple of elections ago. They all looked woebegone about
+it; that would be their expression of joy. Different type nerves and
+different facial musculature, Fayon thought. As soon as they sampled
+the Extee Three and candy, they looked crushed under all the sorrows
+of the galaxy.
+
+By pantomime and pointing to the sun, Meillard managed to inform
+them that the next day, when the sun was in the same position, the
+Terrans would visit their village, bringing more gifts. The natives
+were quite agreeable, but Meillard was disgruntled that he had to
+use sign-talk. The natives started off toward the village on the
+mound, munching Extee Three and trying out their new knives. This
+time tomorrow, half of them would have bandaged thumbs.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The Marine riflemen and submachine-gunners were coming in, slinging
+their weapons and lighting cigarettes. A couple of Navy technicians
+were getting a snooper--a thing shaped like a short-tailed tadpole,
+six feet long by three at the widest, fitted with visible-light
+and infra-red screen pickups and crammed with detection
+instruments--ready to relieve the combat car over the village.
+The contact team crowded into the Number One landing craft, which
+had been fitted out as a temporary headquarters. Prefab-hut elements
+were already being unloaded from the other craft.
+
+Everybody felt that a drink was in order, even if it was two hours
+short of cocktail time. They carried bottles and glasses and ice to
+the front of the landing craft and sat down in front of the battery
+of 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, were
+Captain Guy Vindinho and two other Navy officers, and a Marine
+captain in shipboard blues. Like Gofredo, Vindinho must have gotten
+into the Service on tiptoe; he had a bald dome and a red beard, and
+he always looked as though he were gloating because nobody knew
+that his name was really Rumplestiltskin. He had been watching
+the 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 away
+happy. I hope."
+
+"You're going to make permanent camp where you are now?" one of
+the 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 battle
+cruiser. One, at ten-power magnification, gave a maplike view of the
+broad valley and the uplands and mountain foothills to the south. It
+was only by tracing the course of the main river and its tributaries
+that they could find the tiny spot of the native village, and they
+couldn't see the landing craft at all. The other, at a hundred
+power, showed the oblong mound, with the village on its flat top,
+little dots around a circular central plaza. They could see the two
+turtle-shaped landing-craft, and the combat car, that had been
+circling 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, from
+two hundred feet above the village. From the sound outlet came an
+incessant gibber of native voices. There were over a hundred houses,
+all small and square, with pyramidal roofs. On the end of the mound
+toward the Terran camp, animals of at least four different species
+were crowded, cattle that had been herded up from the meadows at
+the first alarm. The open circle in the middle of the village was
+crowded, and more natives lined the low palisade along the edge
+of 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 completely
+isolated, forests on both sides, and seventy miles to the nearest
+other village. If we're careful, we can stay here as long as we want
+to and nobody'll find out about us. Then, after we can talk with
+these 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 almost
+three thousand people. That was where the treaty would have to
+be negotiated.
+
+[Illustration: "... But no two of them speak the same language!"]
+
+"You'll want more huts. You'll want a water tank, and a pipeline
+to that stream below you, and a pump," Questell said. "You think
+a month?"
+
+Meillard looked at Lillian Ransby. "What do you think?"
+
+"_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!"
+
+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 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._"
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Naudsonce, by H. Beam Piper
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