Naudsonce

town.'"

  "All in one syllable?" Then he shrugged. How did he know what thesepeople could pack into one syllable? He picked up the hand-phone andsaid, "Fwoonk," into it. The pattern, a little deeper in color andwith longer lines, was recognizably like hers, and unlike any ofthe Svants'.

  * * * * *

  The others came in, singly and in pairs and threes. They watchedthe colors dance on the screen to picture the four Svant wordswhich might or might not all mean _me_. They tried to duplicatethem. Luis Gofredo and Willi Schallenmacher came closest of anybody.Bennet Fayon was still insisting that the Svants had a perfectlycomprehensible language--to other Svants. Anna de Jong had started toveer a little away from the Dorver Hypothesis. There was a differencebetween event-level sound, which was a series of waves of alternatelycrowded and rarefied molecules of air, and object-level sound, whichwas an auditory sensation inside the nervous system, she admitted.That, Fayon crowed, was what he'd been saying all along; theirauditory 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_ hadbecome swear words among the joint Space Navy-Colonial Officecontact team.

  "Well, if I hear the two sounds alike, why doesn't the analyzer hearthem alike?" Karl Dorver demanded.

  "It has better ears than you do, Karl. Look how many differentfrequencies there are in that word, all crowding up behind eachother," Lillian said. "But it isn't sensitive or selective enough.I'm going to see what Ayesha Keithley can do about building mea better one."

  Ayesha was signals and detection officer on the _Hubert Penrose_.Dave Questell mentioned that she'd had a hard day, and was probablymaking 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 whenshe gets up. But till we get something that'll sort this mess outand make sense of it, I'm stopped."

  "You're stopped, period, Lillian," Dorver told her. "What thesepeople gibber at us doesn't even make as much sense as the Shootingof Dan McJabberwock. The real information is conveyed by telepathy."

  * * * * *

  Lieutenant j.g. Ayesha Keithley was on the screen the next morningwhile 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 girlin naval uniform in the screen asked.

  Lillian shook her head. "Bennet Fayon's hoping for a war, or anepidemic, or something to break out, so that he can get a fewcadavers to dissect."

  "Well, he'll find that they're pretty complex," Ayesha Keithleysaid. "I identified stick-and-slip sounds and percussion sounds,and plucked-string sounds, along with the ordinary hiss-and-buzzspeech-sounds. Making a vocoder to reproduce that speech is goingto be fun. Just what are you using, in the way of equipment?"

  Lillian was still talking about that when the two landing craftfrom the ship were sighted, coming down. Charley Loughran and WilliSchallenmacher, who were returning to the _Hubert Penrose_ to jointhe other landing party, began assembling their luggage. The otherswent outside, Howell among them.

  Mom and Sonny were watching the two craft grow larger and closerabove, keeping close to a group of spacemen; Sonny was looking aroundexcitedly, while Mom clung to his arm, like a hen with an oversizedchick. The reasoning was clear--these people knew all about big thingsthat came down out of the sky and weren't afraid of them; stick closeto them, and it would be perfectly safe. Sonny saw the contact teamemerging from their hut and grabbed his mother's arm, pointing. Theyboth beamed happily; that expression didn't look sad, at all, now thatyou knew what it meant. Sonny began ghroogh-ghrooghing hideously; Momhushed him with a hand over his mouth, and they both made eatinggestures, rubbed their abdomens comfortably, and pointed toward themess hut. Bennet Fayon was frightened. He turned and started on thedouble 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 cameback, talking to himself.

  "Terran carniculture pork," he said, when he returned. "Zarathustrapool-ball fruit. Potato-flour hotcakes, with Baldur honey and Odinflameberry jam. And two big cups of coffee apiece. It's a miraclethey aren't dead now. If they're alive for lunch, we won't need toworry about feeding them anything we eat, but I'm glad somebody elsehas the moral responsibility for this."

  Lillian Ransby came out of the headquarters hut. "Ayesha's comingdown this afternoon, with a lot of equipment," she said. "We'renot exactly going to count air molecules in the sound waves, butwe'll do everything short of that. We'll need more lab space,soundproofed."

  "Tell Dave Questell what you want," Meillard said. "Do you reallythink you can get anything?"

  She shrugged. "If there's anything there to get. How long it'lltake is another question."

  * * * * *

  The two sixty-foot collapsium-armored turtles settled to the groundand went off contragravity. The ports opened, and things began beingfloated off on lifter-skids: framework for the water tower, andcurved titanium sheets for the tank. Anna de Jong said somethingabout hot showers, and not having to take any more sponge-baths.Howell was watching the stuff come off the other landing craft. Adozen pairs of four-foot wagon wheels, with axles. Hoes, in bundles.Scythe blades. A hand forge, with a crank-driven fan blower, and ahundred and fifty pound anvil, and sledges and cutters and swagesand tongs.

  Everybody was busy, and Mom and Sonny were fidgeting, gesturingtoward the work with their own empty hands. _Hey, boss; whattawe 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 togive them technologies. The people on the ship hadn't thought ofthat. These wheels, now; machined steel hubs, steel rims, tubularsteel spokes, drop-forged and machined axles. The Svants wouldn'tbe able to copy them in a thousand years. Well, in a hundred, ifsomebody showed them where and how to mine iron and how to smeltand work it. And how to build a steam engine.

  He went over and pulled a hoe out of one of the bundles. Bladesstamped out with a power press, welded to tubular steel handles.Well, wood for hoe handles was hard to come by on a spaceship, evena battle cruiser almost half a mile in diameter; he had to admitthat. And they were about two thousand per cent more efficient thanthe bronze scrapers the Svants used. That wasn't the idea, though.Even supposing that the first wave of colonists came out in a yearand a half, it would be close to twenty years before Terran-operatedfactories would be in mass production for the native trade. The ideawas to teach these people to make better things for themselves; givethem a leg up, so that the next generation would be ready forcontragravity and nuclear and electric power.

  Mom didn't know what to make of any of it. Sonny did, though; hewas 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 asan affirmative sign. "Like big wheelbarrow."

  One thing puzzled Sonny, though. Wheelbarrow wheels were small--hishands 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 twopairs of wheels, and then put a wagon on them, and drew a quadrupedhitched to it, and a Svant with a stick walking beside it. Sonnylooked at the picture--Svants seemed to have pictoral sense, forwhich make us thankful!--and then caught his mother's sleeve
andshowed it to her. Mom didn't get it. Sonny took the pencil anddrew another animal, with a pole travois. He made gestures. Atravois dragged; it went slow. A wagon had wheels that wentaround; it went fast.

  So Lillian and Anna thought he was the village half-wit. Villagegenius, more likely; the other peasants didn't understand him, andresented his superiority. They went over for a closer look at thewheels, and pushed them. Sonny was almost beside himself. Mom waspuzzled, but she thought they were pretty wonderful.

  Then they looked at blacksmith tools. Tongs; Sonny had never seenanything like them. Howell wondered what the Svants used to handlehot metal; probably