Naudsonce

Ransby. "What do you think?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  "Their village is fortified," Meillard mentioned.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  A name for the planet had also arrived.

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

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

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

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

  * * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  * * * * *

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

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

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


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

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

  "They have to have