thechildren who looked big enough to be trusted with them got knivestoo, and plenty of candy.
Anna and Karl were standing where the queue was forming, watchinghow they fell into line; so was Lillian, with an audiovisual camera.Having seen that the Marine enlisted men were getting the presentshanded out properly, Howell strolled over to them. Just as he cameup, a couple approached hesitantly, a man in a breechclout under aleather apron, and a woman, much smaller, in a ragged and soiledtunic. As soon as they fell into line, another Svant, in a bluerobe, pushed them aside and took their place.
"Here, you can't do that!" Lillian cried. "Karl, make him step back."
Karl was saying something about social status and precedence. Thecouple tried to get into line behind the man who had pushed themaside. Another villager tried to shove them out of his way. Howelladvanced, his right fist closing. Then he remembered that he didn'tknow what he'd be punching; he might break the fellow's neck, orhis own knuckles. He grabbed the blue-robed Svant by the wrist withboth hands, kicked a foot out from under him, and jerked, sendinghim flying for six feet and then sliding in the dust for anothercouple of yards. He pushed the others back, and put the coupleinto place in the line.
"Mark, you shouldn't have done that," Dorver was expostulating."We don't know...."
The Svant sat up, shaking his head groggily. Then he realized whathad been done to him. With a snarl of rage, he was on his feet, hisknife in his hand. It was a Terran bowie knife. Without consciousvolition, Howell's pistol was out and he was thumbing the safety off.
The Svant stopped short, then dropped the knife, ducked his head,and threw his arms over it to shield his comb. He backed away a fewsteps, then turned and bolted into the nearest house. The others,including the woman in the ragged tunic, were twittering in alarm.Only the man in the leather apron was calm; he was saying,tonelessly, "_Ghrooogh-ghrooogh_."
Luis Gofredo was coming up on the double, followed by three ofhis riflemen.
"What happened, Mark? Trouble?"
"All over now." He told Gofredo what had happened. Dorver was stillobjecting:
"... Social precedence; the Svant may have been right, accordingto local customs."
"Local customs be damned!" Gofredo became angry. "This is a TerranFederation handout; we make the rules, and one of them is, nopushing people out of line. Teach the buggers that now and we won'thave to work so hard at it later." He called back over his shoulder,"Situation under control; get the show going again."
The natives were all grimacing heartbrokenly with pleasure. Maybethe one who got thrown on his ear--no, he didn't have any--was notone of the more popular characters in the village.
"You just pulled your gun, and he dropped the knife and ran?"Gofredo asked. "And the others were scared, too?"
"That's right. They all saw you fire yours; the noise scared them."
Gofredo nodded. "We'll avoid promiscuous shooting, then. No useletting them find out the noise won't hurt them any sooner thanwe have to."
Paul Meillard had worked out a way to distribute the picks andshovels and axes. Considering each house as representing a familyunit, which might or might not be the case, there were picks andshovels enough to go around, and an ax for every third house. Theytook them around in an airjeep and left them at the doors. Thehouses, he found, weren't adobe at all. They were built of logs,plastered with adobe on the outside. That demolished his theorythat the houses were torn down periodically, and left the mounditself unexplained.
The wheelbarrows and the grindstone and the two crosscut sawswere another matter. Nobody was quite sure that the (nobility?capitalist-class? politicians? prominent citizens?) wouldn't simplyappropriate them for themselves. Paul Meillard was worried aboutthat; everybody else was willing to let matters take their course.Before they were off the ground in their vehicles, a violent disputehad begun, with a bedlam of jabbering and shrieking. By the timethey were landing at the camp, the big laminated leather horn hadbegun to bellow.
* * * * *
One of the huts had been fitted as contact-team headquarters, withall the view and communication screens installed, and one endpartitioned off and soundproofed for Lillian to study recordings in.It was cocktail time when they returned; conversationally, it was acontinuation from lunch. Karl Dorver was even more convinced thanever of his telepathic hypothesis, and he had completely convertedAnna de Jong to it.
"Look at that." He pointed at the snooper screen, which gave a viewof the plaza from directly above. "They're reaching an agreementalready."
So they seemed to be, though upon what was less apparent. The hornhad stopped, and the noise was diminishing. The odd thing was thatpeace was being restored, or was restoring itself, as the uproar hadbegun--outwardly from the center of the plaza to the periphery ofthe crowd. The same thing had happened when Gofredo had ordered thesubmachine gun fired, and, now that he recalled, when he had dealtwith the line-crasher.
"Suppose a few of them, in the middle, are agreed," Anna said."They are all thinking in unison, combining their telepathicpowers. They dominate those nearest to them, who join and amplifytheir telepathic signal, and it spreads out through the wholegroup. A mental chain-reaction."
"That would explain the mechanism of community leadership, and I'dbeen wondering about that," Dorver said, becoming more excited."It's a mental aristocracy; an especially gifted group of telepaths,in agreement and using their powers in concert, implanting theiropinions in the minds of all the others. I'll bet the purpose of thehorn is to distract the thoughts of the others, so that they can bemore easily dominated. And the noise of the shots shocked them outof communication with each other; no wonder they were frightened."
Bennet Fayon was far from convinced. "So far, this telepathy theoryis only an assumption. I find it a lot easier to assume somefundamental difference between the way they translate sound intosense-data and the way we do. We _think_ those combs on top of theirheads are their external hearing organs, but we have no idea what'sback of them, or what kind of a neural hookup is connected to them.I wish I knew how these people dispose of their dead. I need acouple of fresh cadavers. Too bad they aren't warlike. Nothing likea good bloody battle to advance the science of anatomy, and what wedon't know about Svant anatomy is practically the entire subject."
"I should imagine the animals hear in the same way," Meillard said."When the wagon wheels and the hoes and the blacksmith tools comedown from the ship, we'll trade for cattle."
"When they make the second landing in the mountains, I'm going to doa lot of hunting," Loughran added. "I'll get wild animals for you."
"Well, I'm going to assume that the vocal noises they make aremeaningful speech," Lillian Ransby said. "So far, I've just beentrying to analyze them for phonetic values. Now I'm going to analyzethem for sound-wave patterns. No matter what goes on inside theirprivate nervous systems, the sounds exist as waves in the publicatmosphere. I'm going to assume that the Lord Mayor and his stoogeswere all trying to say the same thing when they were pointing tothemselves, and I'm going to see if all four of those sounds haveany common characteristic."
By the time dinner was over, they were all talking in circles, noneof them hopefully. They all made recordings of the speech about theslithy toves in the Malemute Saloon; Lillian wanted to find out whatwas different about them. Luis Gofredo saw to it that the campitself would be visible-lighted, and beyond the lights he set upmore photoelectric robot sentries and put a couple of snoopers tocircling on contragravity, with infra-red lights and receptors. Healso insisted that all his own men and all Dave Questell's Navyconstruction engineers keep their weapons ready to hand. The nativesin the village were equally distrustful. They didn't herd the cattleup from the meadows where they had been pastured, but they lightedwatch-fires along the edge of the mound as soon as it became dark.
* * * * *
It was three hours after nightfall when something on theindicator-board for the robot sentries went off like a startledrattles
nake. Everybody, talking idly or concentrating on writing upthe day's observations, stiffened. Luis Gofredo, dozing in a chair,was on his feet instantly and crossing the hut to the instruments.His second-in-command, who had been playing chess with WilliSchallenmacher, rose and snatched his belt from the back of hischair, putting it on.
"Take it easy," Gofredo said. "Probably just a cow or a horse--localequivalent--that's strayed over from the other side."
He sat down in front of one of the snooper screens and twisted knobson the remote controls. The monochrome view, transformed from infrared, rotated as the snooper circled and changed course. The otherscreen showed the camp