Naudsonce

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 cutwood; when they got back, they'd burn some charcoal in the pitthat had been dug beside the camp. Until then, he and Sonny weredrawing plans for a wooden wheel with a metal tire when Lilliancame 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 riflegoing off. The only one of this gang that has brains enough to poursand out of a boot with directions on the bottom of the heel, andhe'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 sawa wheel before yesterday; now he's designing one."

  _It's killing us it's so nice...._]

  Lillian's eyes widened. "So that's why Mom's so sharp aboutsign-talk. She's been doing it all his life." Then she rememberedwhat she had come out to show him, and held out the clipboard. "Youknow how that analyzer of mine works? Well, here's what Ayesha'sgoing to do. After breaking a sound into frequency bands instead ofbeing photographed and projected, each band goes to an analyzer ofits own, and is projected on its own screen. There'll be forty ofthem, each for a band of a hundred cycles, from zero to fourthousand. That seems to be the Svant vocal range."

  The diagram passed from hand to hand during cocktail time, beforedinner. Bennet Fayon had been working all day dissecting the animalthey were all calling a _domsee_, a name which would stick even ifand when they learned the native name. He glanced disinterestedly atthe drawing, then looked again, more closely. Then he set down thedrink he was holding in his other hand and studied it intently.

  "You know what you have here?" he asked. "This is a very close analogyto the hearing organs of that animal I was working on. The comb, aswe've assumed, is the external organ. It's covered with small flapsand fissures. Back of each fissure is a long, narrow membrane; they'repaired, one on each side of the comb, and from them nerves lead toclusters of small round membranes. Nerves lead from them to a complexnerve-cable at the bottom of the comb and into the brain at the baseof the skull. I couldn't understand how the system functioned, but nowI see it. Each of the larger membranes on the outside responds to asound-frequency band, and the small ones on the inside break the bandsdown 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-enlargementsand 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 grantthat the membranes will respond to sound, but I can't see howthey transmit it."

  "But they do hear," Meillard said. "Their musical instruments,their reactions to our voices, the way they are affected by soundslike 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 earof 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 lookalmost like deafness," Ayesha Keithley said. "I wish I could designa sound-detector one-tenth as good as this must be."

  Yes. The way the Lord Mayor said _fwoonk_ and the way Paul Meillardsaid it sounded entirely different to them. Of course, _fwoonk_ and_pwink_ and _tweelt_ and _kroosh_ sounded alike to them, but let'sdon't be too picky about things.

  * * * * *

  There were no hot showers that evening; Dave Questell's gang hadtrouble with the pump and needed some new parts made up aboard theship. They were still working on it the next morning. He had meantto start teaching Sonny blacksmithing, but during the eveningLillian and Anna had decided to try teaching Mom a nonphonetic,ideographic, alphabet, and in the morning they co-opted Sonny tohelp. Deprived of his disciple, he strolled over to watch the workon the pump. About twenty Svants had come in from the fields andwere also watching, from the meadow.

  After a while, the job was finished. The petty officer in chargeof the work pushed in the switch, and the pump started, suckingdry with a harsh racket. The natives twittered in surprise. Thenthe 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 pleasureand moved closer; within forty or fifty feet, they all squatted onthe ground and sat entranced. Others came in from the fields, drawnby the sound. They, too, came up and squatted, until there was asemicircle of them. The tank took a long time to fill; until it did,they all sat immobile and fascinated. Even after it stopped, manyremained, hoping that it would start again. Paul Meillard beganwondering, a trifle uneasily, if that would happen every timethe pump went on.

  "They get a positive pleasure from it. It affects them the same wayLuis' voice does."

  "Mean I have a voice like a pump?" Gofredo demanded.

  "Well, I'm going to find out," Ayesha Keithley said. "The next timethat starts, I'm going to make a recording, and compare it with yourvoice-recording. I'll give five to one there'll be a similarity."

  Questell got the foundation for the sonics lab dug, and beganpouring concrete. That took water, and the pump ran continuouslythat afternoon. Concrete-mixing took more water the next day, andby noon the whole village population, down to the smallest child,was massed at the pumphouse, enthralled. Mom was snared by the soundlike any of the rest; only Sonny was unaffected. Lillian and Ayeshacompared 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 throughthe 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 sothat afternoon at cocktail time.

  "It's an addiction," he declared. "Once they hear it, they have nowill to resist; they just squat and listen. I don't know what it'sdoing to them, but I'm scared of it."

  "I know one thing it's doing," Meillard said. "It's keeping themfrom their work in the fields. For all we know, it may cause themto lose a crop they need badly for subsistence."

  * * * * *

  The native they had come to call the Lord Mayor evidently thoughtso, too. He was with the others, the next morning, squatting withhis staff across his knees, as bemused as any of them, but when thepump stopped he rose and approached a group of Terrans, launchinginto what could only be an impassioned tirade. He pointed with hisstaff to the pump house, and to the semicircle of still motionlessvillagers. He pointed to the fields, and back to the people, and tothe 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 thestaff; he was struggling tormentedly with himself, in vain. His facerelaxed into the heartbroken expression of joy; he turned andshuffled 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 oddsalaamlike bow toward the Terrans, and then turned on the people,striking with his staff an
d shrieking at them. A few got to theirfeet and joined him, screaming, pushing, tugging. Others joined.In a little while, they were all on their feet, straggling awayacross 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