receding and the area around it widening asits 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 movingcautiously across the fields, crouching low. The snooper went downtoward them, and then he recognized them. The man and woman whomthe blue-robed villager had tried to shove out of the queue, thatafternoon. Gofredo recognized them, too.
"Your friends, Mark. Harry," he told his subordinate, "go out andpass the word around. Only two, and we think they're friendly. Keepeverybody out of sight; we don't want to scare them away."
The snooper followed closely behind them. The man was no longerwearing his apron; the woman's tunic was even more tattered andsoiled. She was leading him by the hand. Now and then, she wouldstop and turn her head to the rear. The snooper over the moundshowed 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 seemingto be guiding her companion.
"What's happening, Mark?"
It was Lillian; she must have just come out of the soundproofspeech-lab.
"You know them; the pair in the queue, this afternoon. I thinkwe'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 undecidedwhether he was more afraid to turn and run than advance. The woman,holding his hand, led him forward. They were both bruised, and bothhad minor cuts, and neither of them had any of the things that hadbeen 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 gottenthem punished for it."
"I'd have done more to that fellow then Mark did, if I'd been therewhen it happened." The Marine officer turned to Meillard. "Look,this is your show, Paul; how you run it is your job. But in yourplace, I'd take that pair back to the village and have them pointout 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 toestablish Federation law, and Federation law says you mustn't gangup on people and beat and rob them. We don't have to speak Svanteseto make them understand what we'll put up with and what we won't."
"Later, Luis. After we've gotten a treaty with somebody." Meillardbroke off. "Watch this!"
The woman was making sign-talk. She pointed to the village on themound. Then, with her hands, she shaped a bucket like the ones thathad been given to them, and made a snatching gesture away fromherself. She indicated the neckcloths, and the sheath knife and theother things, and snatched them away too. She made beating motions,and touched her bruises and the man's. All the time, she was talkingexcitedly, 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 madevehement gestures of rejection toward the village, then bowed,placing her hands on her brow. The man imitated her obeisance, thenthey both straightened. The woman pointed to herself and to the man,and around the circle of huts and landing craft. She began scuttlingabout, picking up imaginary litter and sweeping with an imaginarybroom. The man started pounding with an imaginary hammer, thenchopping 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 showour attitude by taking them in. You tell them, Luis; these peopleseem 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 thatmeant happiness with them. The man confined his vocal expressions tohis odd _ghroogh-ghroogh_-ing; the woman twittered joyfully. Gofredoput a hand on the woman's shoulder, pointed to the man and from himback to her. "Unh?" he inquired.
The woman put a hand on the man's head, then brought it down towithin a foot of the ground. She picked up the imaginary infantand rocked it in her arms, then set it down and grew it up untilshe had her hand on the top of the man's head again.
"That was good, Mom," Gofredo told her. "Now, you and Sonny comealong; 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 takenaway from them. They gave the man a one-piece suit of Marine combatcoveralls; Lillian gave the woman a lavender bathrobe, and Annacontributed a red scarf. They found them quarters in one end of astore shed, after making sure that there was nothing they could getat that would hurt them or that they could damage. They gave each ofthem a pair of blankets and a pneumatic mattress, which delightedthem, 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 theheadquarters hut. "You said the food on this planet is safefor Terrans."
"So I did, and it is, but the rule's not reversible. Things we eatmight 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 fullof fermenting fruit-mash back of some of those houses; in about ayear, it ought to be fairly good wine. C_{2}H_{5}OH is the same onany 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 hismother 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 acommunity of telepaths, constantly invading the minds of otherswith irrational and disgusting thoughts; no wonder he is rejectedand persecuted. And in a community on this culture level, the motherof an abnormal child is often regarded with superstitiousdetestation--"
"Yes, of course!" Anna de Jong instantly agreed, and began to gointo the villagers' hostility to both mother and son; both of themwere 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. Alittle patch on the screen at seventeen-twenty cycles. The oddthing 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 sheimitated the sound, she ought to imitate the wave pattern. He saidso, 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 brokenby a set of filters into frequency-groups, translated into lightfrom dull red to violet paling into pure white. It photographed thelight-pattern on high-speed film, automatically developed it, andthen made a print-copy and projected the film in slow motion on ascreen. When she pressed a button, a recorded voice said, "_Fwoonk_."An instant later, a pattern of vertical lines in various colors andlengths 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, andpropped it beside the screen. Then she picked up a hand-phone andsaid, "_Fwoonk_," into it. It sounded like the first one, but thepattern that danced onto the
screen was quite different. Where thegreen had been, there was a patch of pale-blue lines. She ran theother three Svants' voices, each saying, presumably, "Me." Some weremainly up in blue, others had a good deal of yellow and orange, butthey all had the little patch of green lines.
"Well, that seems to be the information," he said. "The rest isjust noise."
"Maybe one of them is saying, 'John Doe, _me_, son of Joe Blow,'and another is saying, 'Tough guy, _me_; lick anybody in