Classic Audiobook Collection - Naudsonce by H. Beam Piper ~ Full Audiobook [scifi]

Episode Date: January 19, 2023

Naudsonce by H. Beam Piper audiobook. Genre: scifi Naudsonce? What does THAT mean? Well, to find out you will need to listen to this story where Piper's unique mind explores what we mean by 'communication' and how it happens. The joint Space Navy-Colonial Office expedition was looking for new planets suitable for colonization; they had been out, now, for four years, which was close to maximum for an exploring expedition. They had entered eleven systems, and made landings on eight planets. Three had been reasonably close to Terra-type but were all disqualified by terrible animals or warlike inhabitants. Now, finally here was an ideal world; their last chance before returning in disgrace. Now the only thing was to get an agreement from the local king or whatever to the colonization. Easy, right? Well first, you've got to talk to them ...... and there the trouble starts. For ad-free listening try our premium subscription Chapters (Approximate) (00:00:00) Chapter 1 (00:21:54) Chapter 2 (00:48:40) Chapter 3 (01:11:49) Chapter 4 (01:31:57) Chapter 5 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

nodsons by h beam piper bishop berkeley's famous question about the sound of a falling tree may have no standing in science but there is a highly interesting question about sound that science needs to consider Nodzance Part 1 The Sun warmed Mark Howells back pleasantly. Underfoot the moss-like stuff was soft and yielding, and there was a fragrance in the air unlike anything he had ever smelled. He was going to like this planet. He knew it. The question was, how would it and its people like him? He watched the little figures advancing across the fields from the mound, with the village out of sight on the other end of it, and the combat car circling lazily on contra-gravity above. Major Louis Gaffredo, the Marine officer, spoke without lowering his binoculars.

They have a tubular thing about twelve feet long. Six of them are carrying it on poles, three to a side, and a couple more are walking behind it. Mark, do you think it could be a cannon? So far, he didn't know enough to have an opinion, and said so, adding, What I saw the village in the screen from the car, it looked pretty primitive. Of course, gunpowder is one of those things they primitive people could discover by accident if the ingredients were available.

We won't take any chances, then. You think they're hostile? I was hoping they were coming out to parley with us. That was Paul Mallard. He had a right to be anxious. his whole future in the colonial office would be made or ruined by what was going to happen here the Joint Space Navy Colonial Office expedition was looking for new planets suitable for colonization they had been out now for four years which was close to maximum for an exploring expedition they had entered eleven systems and made landings on eight planets three had been reasonable close to Terra-type. There had been Fafnir. Conditions there would correspond to Terra during the

Cretaceous period, but any Cretaceous dinosaur would have been cute and cuddly to the things on Fafnir. Then there had been M. Huptep. In twenty or thirty thousand years it would be a fine planet, but at present it was undergoing an extensive glaciation. And Ermin's soul, covered with forests of gigantic trees. It would have been fine except for the fauna, which was nasty, especially a race of subsapient near-humanoids, who had just gotten as far as clubs and coop-deploying axes. Contact with them had entailed heavy ammunition expenditure, with two men and a woman killed, and a dozen injured.

He'd had a limp himself for a while as a result. As for the other five, one had been an all-out-hell planet, and the rest had been the sort that get colonized by irreconcilable minority groups who want to get away from everybody else. The colonial office wouldn't even consider any of them. Then they had found this one, third of a geostar, 80 million miles from primary, less axial inclination than Terra, which would mean a much. more uniform year-round temperature, and about half-land surface. On the evidence of a couple of sneak landings for specimens, the biochemistry was identical with terrors and the organic matter was edible. It was the sort of planet every explorer dreams of finding except for one thing. It was inhabited by a sapient humanoid race, and some of them were civilized enough to put it in

Class 5, and Colonial Office Doctrine in Class 5 planets was rigid. Friendly relations with the natives had to be established, and permission to settle had to be guaranteed in a treaty of some sort with somebody more or less authorized to make one. If Paul Millard could accomplish that, he had it made. He could stay on with 40 or 50 of the ship's company to make preparations. In a year a couple of ships would come out from Terra with a thousand colonists and a battalion or so of Federation troops to protect them from the natives, and vice versa. Mallard would automatically be appointed Governor General.

But if he failed, he was through, not out, just through. When he got back to Terra, he would be promoted to some home office position at slightly higher base pay, but without the third. three hundred percent extraterrestrial bonus and he would vegetate there till he retired every time his name came up somebody would say oh yes he flubbed the contact on what's it it wouldn't do the rest of them any good either there would always be the suspicion that they had contributed to the failure the wavering sound hung for an instant in the air a few seconds later it was repeated then repeated again are cannons a horn guffredo said i can't see how they're blowing it though there was a stir to right and left among the marines deployed in a crescent line on either side of the contact team a metallic clatter as weapons were checked a shadow fell in front of them as a combat-car moved in the combat-car moved in the front of them as a combat-car moved in a into position above.

What do you suppose it means, Ballard wondered? Terrans go home. He drew a frown from Millard with the suggestion. Maybe it's supposed to intimidate us. They're probably doing it to encourage themselves. Anna de Jong, the psychologist said. I'll bet they're really scared stiff. I see how they're blowing it, Gafredo said.

The man who's walking behind it has a hand-belled. fellows. He raised his voice, Fix bayonets. These people don't know anything about rifles, but they know what spears are. They have some of their own. So they had. The six who walked in the lead were unarmed, unless the thing one of them carried was a spear. So it seemed were the hornbearers. Behind them, however, in an open-order skirmish line came fifty-odd with weapons. Most of them had spears. the points glinting redly. Bronze with a high copper content. A few had bows. They came slowly, details became more plainly visible. The leader wore a long yellow robe. The thing in his hand was a bronze-headed staff.

Three of his companions also wore robes. The other two were bare-legged in short tunics. The horn-bearers wore either robes or tunics. The spearmen and bow-men. men behind either wore tunics or were naked except for breech-clouts. All wore sandals. They were red, brown, in color, completely hairless. They had long necks, almost chinless lower jaws, and fleshy beak-like noses that gave them an avian appearance which was heightened by the red crests like rooster's combs on the tops of their heads.

"'Well, aren't they something to see?' Lillian Ransby, the linguist, asked. I wonder how we looked to them, Paul Mallard said. That was something to wonder about to. The differences between one and another of the Terrans must puzzle them. Paul Mallard, as close to being a pure negro as anybody in the seventh century of the atomic era was to be pure anything, Lillian Ransby, almost ash-blond, Major Gaffredo, barely over the minimum

serve with height requirement. His name was Old Terran Spanish, but his ancestry must have been Polynesian, Amarid, and Mongolian. Carl Darver, the sociographer, six feet six with red hair. Bennett Fayon, the biologist and physiologist, plump, pink-faced and balding. Willie Schallenmacher with a bushy black beard. They didn't have any ears, he noticed. And then he was taking stock of the things they wore and carried, belts with pouches, and knives with flat bronze blades and riveted handles. Three of the delegation had small flutes hung by cords around their necks, and a fourth had a reed panpipe.

No shields and no swords. That was good. Swords and shields met organized warfare, possibly a warrior cast. This crowd weren't warriors. The spearmen and bowmen weren't arrayed for battle but for a drive-hunt, with the bows behind the spears to stop anything that broke through the line. All right, let's go meet them. The querulous, uncertain note was gone from Millard's voice. He knew what to do, and how to do it.

Gofredo called the Marines to stand fast. Then they were advancing to meet the natives, and when they were twenty feet apart, both. groups halted. The horn stopped blowing. The one in the yellow robe lifted his staff and said something that sounded like, Tweedle-le-l-le-leek. The horn he saw was made of strips of leather, wound spirally and coated with some kind of varnish. Everything these people had was carefully and finely made. An old culture, but a static one, probably tradition-bound as all get out. Mallard was raising his hands. Solomely he addressed the natives.

Twas Brillick and the slithy Toves were whooping it up in the Malamute Saloon, and the kid that handled the music-box did Giron Gimble in the wab, and back of the bar in a solo game All Misty were the Boroughes, and the Moem Raths outgave the lady that's known as Lou. That was supposed to show them that we, too, have a spoken language, to prove that their language in ours were mutually incomprehensible, and to demonstrate the need for devising a means of communication. At least that was what the book said.

It demonstrated nothing of the sort to this crowd. It scared them. The Dignitary with the staff twittered excitedly. one of his companions agreed with him at length. Another started to reach for his knife, then remembered his manners. The bellows man pumped a few blasts on the horn. What do you think of the language? he asked Lillian. They all sound that bad when you first hear them.

Give them a few seconds, then we'll have phase two. When the gibbering and screeking came to fall off, she stepped forward. Lillian was herself. a good test of how human aliens were. This gang weren't human enough to whistle at her. She touched herself on the breast. Me, she said. The natives seemed shocked.

She repeated the gesture in the word, then turned and addressed Paul Mallard, You. Me, Mallard said, pointing to himself. Then he said, you to Louis Gafredo. It went around the contact team. When it came to him, he returned it to the point of origin. I don't think they get it at all, he added in a whisper.

They ought to, Lillian said. Every language has a word for self and a word for person addressed. Well, look at them, Carl Dorover invited. Six different opinions about what we mean, and now the band's starting an argument of their own. Phase 2A, Lillian said firmly, stepping forward. She pointed to herself, Me, Lillian Ransby, Lillian Ransby, me, name. You name?

Woo, the spokesman screamed in horror, clutching his staff as though to shield it from profanation. The other is howled like a hound-packet of full moon, except one of the short tunic boys who was slapping himself on the head with both hands and yodeling. The horn crew hastily swung their piece around at the Terrans, pumping frantically. "'What do you suppose I said?' Lillian asked. "'Oh, something like curse your gods, death to your king, and spit in your mother's face,

I suppose.' "'Let me try it,' Grophredo said. The little Marine Major went through the same. same routine. At his first word, the uproar stopped. Before he was through, the natives' faces were sagging and crumpling into expressions of utter and heartbroken grief. "'It's not as bad as all that, is it?' he said. You try it, Mark.' "'Me, Mark, howl!' They looked bewildered. "'Let's try objects and play acting,' Lillian suggested.

They're farmers. They ought to have a word for water. They spent almost an hour at it. They poured out two gallons of water, pretended to be thirsty, gave each other drinks. The natives simply couldn't agree on the word, in their own language, for water. That or else they missed the point of the whole act. They tried fire next. The efficiency of a steel hatchet was impressive, and so was the sudden flame of a pocket

lighter, but no word for fire emerged either. "'Ah, to Niffleheim with it,' Louis Gaffredo cried an exasperation. "'We're getting nowhere at five times late speed. Give them their presence and send them home, Paul.' Sheath knives. They'll have to be shown how sharp they are, he suggested. Red bandanas and costume jewelry. "'How about something to eat, Bennett?'

Millard asked Féon. XT3 and C.H. Trade candy, Fayon said. Fielrations, Extraterrestrial Service Type 3, could be eaten by anything with a carbon-hydrogen metabolism, and so could the trade candy. Nothing else, though, till we have some idea what goes on inside them. Darver thought the six members of the delegation would be persons of special consequence, and should have something extra. That was probably so.

So, Darver was as quick to pick up clues to an alien social order as he was himself to deduce a culture pattern from a few artifacts. He and Lillian went back to the landing craft to collect the presents. Everybody, horn detail, armed guard and all, got one ten-inch bowie knife and sheath, a red bandana neckcloth, and a piece of flashy junk jewelry. The town council, prominent citizens or what, also received a colored table spread apiece. These were draped over their shoulders and fastened with two-inch plastic pins, advertising the candidacy of somebody for president of the Federation Member Republic of Venus a couple of

elections ago. They all looked woebegone about it. That would be their expression of joy. type nerves and different facial musculature, Phion thought. As soon as they sampled the XT-3 and candy, they looked crushed under all the sorrows of the galaxy. By pantomime and pointing to the sun, Millard managed to inform them that the next day, when the sun was in the same position, the Terrans would visit their village bringing more gifts. The natives were quite agreeable, but Millard was disgruntled that he had to use sign-talk. The natives started

off toward the village on the mound, munching X-T-3 and trying out their new knives. This time tomorrow, half of them would have bandaged thumbs. The Marine riflemen and submachine gunners were coming in, slinging their weapons and lighting cigarettes. A couple of Navy technicians were getting a snooper, a thing shaped like a short-tailed tadpole, six feet long by three at the widest, fitted with visible light and infrared screen pickups, and crammed with detection instruments, ready to relieve the combat car over the village. The contact team crowded into the No. 1 landing craft, which had been fitted out as a temporary headquarters. Pre-fab-hunt elements were already being unloaded from the other craft.

Everybody felt that a drink was in order, even if it was two hours short of cocktail time. They carried bottles and glasses and ice to the front of the landing craft, and sat down in front of the battery of view and communication screens. The central screen was a two-way, tuned to one in the officer's lounge aboard the Hubert Penrose, two hundred miles above it. In it, also provided with drinks, were Captain Give and Vindinjo and two other naval officers and a Marine captain in shipboard blues. Like Gauphredo, Vendinjo must have gotten into the surface on tiptoe.

He had a bald dome and a red beard, and he always looked as though he were gloating because nobody knew that his name was really Rumpel Stilskine. He had been watching the contact by screen. He lifted his glass toward Mollard. Over the humppole. Malarred raised his drink to Vindinjo. Over the first one, there's a whole string of them ahead. At least we sent them away happy.

I hope. You're going to make permanent camp where you are now? One of the other officers asked. Lieutenant Commander Dave Questle, ground engineering and construction officer. What do you need? There were two view screens from pickups aboard the 2,500-foot battlecruiser. one at ten-power magnification gave a map-like view of the broad valley in the uplands and mountain-foot hills to the south. It was only by tracing the course of the main river and its tributaries that they could find the tiny spot of the native village,

and they couldn't see the landing craft at all. The other, at a hundred-power, showed the oblong mound, with the village on its flat-top little dots around a circular central plaza. They could see the two turtle-shaped landing craft, and the combat-car that had been circling over the mound, landing beside them, and sometimes a glint of sunlight from the snooper that had taken its place. The snooper was also transmitting in to the other screen from two hundred feet above the village. From the sound outlet came an incessant gibber of native voices.

There were over a hundred houses, all small and small. square with pyramid roofs. On the end of the mound toward the Taron camp, animals of at least four different species were crowded, cattle that had been herded up from the meadows at the first alarm. The open circle in the middle of the village was crowded, and more natives lined the low palisade along the edge of the mound. Well, we're going to stay here till we learn the language, Mallard was saying, this is the best place for it. It's going to completely isolated, forests on both sides, and 70 miles to the nearest other village. If we're careful, we can stay here as long as we want to and nobody will find out about us.

Then, after we can talk with these people, we'll go to the big town. End of Part 1. Part 2 of Naudsons by H. Beam Piper. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Part 2. The big town was 250 miles down the valley, at the Farks of the Main River, a veritable metropolis of almost 3,000 people. That was where the treaty would have to be negotiated. But no two of them speak the same language. You'll want more huts, you'll want a water tank, and a pipeline to that stream below you, and a pump, Questle said. You think a month?

Mallard looked at Lily and Ransby. What do you think? Poodle, doodily, ouddle, she said. You saw how far we didn't get this afternoon. All we found out was that none of the standard procedures work at all. She made a tossing gesture over her shoulder. There goes the book. We'll have to do it off the cuff from here.

Suppose we make another landing back in the mountain, say two or three hundred miles south, of you," Vindinjo said. It's not right to keep the rest aboard 200 miles off planet, and you won't be wanting Liberty Parties coming down where you are. The country over there looks uninhabited, Millard said. No villages, anyhow. That wouldn't hurt at all. Well, it'll suit me.

Charlie Logren, the Xenonaturalist, said. I want a chance to study the life forms in a state of nature. Vindinjo nodded. Lewis, do you anticipate any trouble with this crowd? out here?" he asked. How about it, Mark? What did they look like to you? Warlike?

No, he stated the opinion he had formed. I had a close look at their weapons when they came in for their presence. Hunting arms. Most of the spears have cross-guards, usually wouldn't, lashed on, to prevent a wounded animal from running up the spear shaft at the hunter. They made boar spears like that on Terra a thousand years ago. Maybe they have to fight raiding parties from the hills once. in a while, but not often enough for them to develop special fighting weapons or techniques.

Their village is fortified, Millard mentioned. I question that, Gouffredo differed. There won't be more than a total of five hundred there, call that a fighting strength of two hundred, to defend a twenty-five hundred meter perimeter with woodchopper's axes and bows and spears. If you notice, there's no wall around the village itself. That palisade is just a fence. Why would they mound the village up?

Questil, in the screen, wondered. You don't think the river gets that high, do you? Because if it does. Shalindmacher shook his head. There just isn't enough watershed, and there's too much valley. I'd be very much surprised if that stream there, he nodded at the hundred-power screen, ever gets more than six inches over the bank.

I don't know what those high. houses are built of. This is an alluvial country. Building stone would be almost unobtainable. I don't see anything like a brick kiln. I don't see any evidence of irrigation either, so there must be plenty of rainfall. If they use a doby or a sun-dried brick, houses would start to crumble in a few years, and they would be pulled down and the rubble shoved aside to make room for a new house. The village has been rising on its own ruins, probably should shifting back and forth from one end of that mound to the other. If that's it, they've been there a long time, Carl Dorber said, and how far have they advanced?

Early bronze. I'll bet they still use a lot of stone implements. Pre-dynastic Egypt are very early Tigris Euphrates in Terran terms. I can't see any evidence that they have the wheel. They have draft animals. When we were coming down, I saw a few of them pulling pole, voices. I'd say they've been farming for a long time. They have quite a diversity of crops, and I suspect that they have some idea of crop rotation. I'm amazed at their musical instruments. They seem to have put more skilled into making them than anything else. I'm going to take a Jeep while they're all in the village and have a look around the fields now.

Charlie Longren 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 travoices, from which the animals had been unhitched in the first panic when the landy craft had been coming down. Some of them had big baskets permanently attached. There were drag marks everywhere in the soft ground, but not a single wheel track. He found one plow, cunningly put. put together with wooden pegs and rawhide lashings. The point was stone, and it would only

score a narrow groove, not a proper furrow. It was, however, fitted with a big bronze ring to which a draft animal could be hitched. Most of the cultivation seemed to have been done with spades and hose. He found a couple of each bronze, cast flat in an open-top mold. They hadn't learned to make composite molds. There was an even one. wider variety of crops than he had expected. Two cereals, a number of different root plants, and a lot of different legumes, and things like tomatoes and pumpkins. "'Bet these people had a pretty good life here, before the Terrans came,' Charlie observed. "'Don't say that in front of Paul,' Lillian warned. He has enough to worry about now,

without starting him on whether we'll do these people more harm than good.' Two more landing craft had come down from the Hubert Penrose. They found Dave Questle superintending the unloading of more prefab huts, and two were already up that had been brought down with the first landing. A name for the planet had also arrived. Svondavit, Carl Dorver told him, Principal God of the Baltic Slavs, about three thousand years ago. Guy Vindinjo dug it out of the encyclical.

Spanthobit was represented as holding a bow in one hand and a horn in the other. Well, that fits. What will we call the natives? Svantevittians or Svanteviz? Well, Paul wanted to call them Svantavis, but Lewis persuaded him to call them Svants. He said everybody he called them that anyhow, so we might as well make it official from the start. We can call the language Sontovies," Lillian decided. After dinner I am going to start playing back recordings and running off audio-visuals.

I will be so happy to know that I have a name for what I'm studying. Probably all I will know." After dinner he and Carl and Paul went into a huddle on what sort of gifts to give the natives, and the advisability of trading with them, and for what. too far in advance of their present culture level. Wheels, they could be made in the fabricating shop aboard the ship. You know, it's odd, Carl Dorover said. These people here have never seen a wheel, and except in documentary or historical drama films, neither have a lot of terrans. That was true. As a means of transportation, the wheel had been completely obsolete since the development

of contra-gravity six centuries ago. Well, a lot of Terrans in the year zero had never seen a pseudorhormer, or in Harkabus, or even a tender-box or a spinning-wheel. Wheelbarrows. Now there was something they'd find useful. He screened Max Millser, in charge of the fabricating and repair shops on 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 in the sixth-century pre-atomic. How soon can you get me a half-dozen of them? Well, let's see. Well, did sheep metal and a pipe for the frame and handles. I'll have some of them for you by noon tomorrow. Now, about hose.

How tall are these people, and how long are their arms, and how far can they stoop over? They were all up late that night. So were the swans. There was a fire burning in the middle of the village and watch fires along the edge of the mound. Louis Cofredo was just as distrustful of them as they were of the Terrans. He kept the camp lighted, a strong guard on the alert, and the area of darkness beyond infrared lighted and covered by photoelectric sentries on the ground and snoopers in the air. Like Paul Millard, Lewis Gaffredo was a warrior and a pessimist.

Everything happened for the worst in this worst of all possible galaxies, and if anything could conceivably go wrong, it infallibly would. That was probably why he was still alive and had never had a command massacred. The wheelbarrows, four of them, came down from the ship by mid-morning. With them came a grindstone. a couple of cross-cut saws and a lot of picks and shovels and axes, and cases of sheath-knives and mess-gear and miscellaneous trade goods, including a lot of the empty wine and whiskey 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 had just gotten up, was discouraged. I don't know what we're going to do next, she admitted. Glenn Orrent and Anna and I were on it all night and we're nowhere. We have about a hundred word-like sounds isolated, and twenty or so are used repeatedly, and we can't assign a meaning to any of them, and none of the Svans ever reacted the same way twice to anything we said to them.

There's just no one-to-one. relationship anywhere. I'm beginning to doubt they have a language, the Navy intelligence officer said. Sure, they make a lot of vocal noise, so do chipmunks. They have to have a language, Anna De Jong declared. No sapient thought is possible without verbalization. Well, no society like that is possible without some means of communication. Carl Dauver supported her from the other flank.

He seemed to have made that point before. You know, he added, I'm beginning to wonder if it mightn't be telepathy. He evidently hadn't suggested that before. The others looked at him in surprise. Anna started to say, oh, I doubt if, and then stopped. I know the race of telepaths is an old gimmick that's been used in new planet adventure stories for centuries, but maybe we finally found one. I don't like it, Carl.

Logrin said. If they're telepaths, why don't they understand us? And if they're telepaths, why do they talk at all? And you can't convince me that this bool-o-o-o-doodle of theirs isn't talking. Well, our neural structure and theirs won't be nearly alike, Fayon said. I know this analogy between telepathy and radio is full of holes, but it's good enough for this. Our wavelength can't be picked up with their sets. The deuce it can't, Gafredo contradicted.

I've been bothered about that from the beginning. These people act as though they got meaning from us. Not the meaning we intend, but some meaning. When Paul made the Gabbledyg speech, they all reacted in the same way, frightened, and then defensive. The you-me-routine simply bewildered. them, as we'd be at a set of semantically lucid but self-contradictory statements. When Lillian tried to introduce herself, they were shocked and horrified.

It looked to me like actual physical disgust, Anna interpolated. When I tried it, they acted like a lot of puppies being petted. And when Mark tried it, they were simply baffled. I watched Mark explaining that steel knives were dangerously sharp. They got the demonstration. But when he tried to tie words onto it, it threw them completely. All right, past that, Lugrin conceded. But if they have telepathy, why do they use spoken words?

Oh, I can answer that, Anna said. Say they communicated by speech originally and developed their telepathic faculty slowly and without realizing it. They go on using speech? And since the message would be received telepathically ahead of the spoken message, message. Nobody would pay any attention to the words as such. Everybody would have a spoken language of his own. It would be a sort of instrumental accompaniment to the song. Some of them don't bother speaking, Carl nodded. They just toot. I'll buy that right

away, Logrin agreed. In mating or in group dangerous situations, telepathy would be a race-survival characteristic. It would be selected for genetically, and the non-gifted strains would tend to die out. It wouldn't do. It wouldn't do at all. He said so. Look at their technology. We either have a young race, just emerged from savagery or an old stagnant race.

All indications seem to favor the latter. A young race would not have time to develop telepathy, as Anna suggests. An old race would have gone much farther than these people have. Progress is a matter of communication and pooling ideas and discoveries. Make a trend graph of technological progress on Terra. Every big jump comes after an improvement in communications. The printing press, railways, and steamships, the telegraph, radio. Then think how telepathy would speed up the progress.

The sun was barely past noon Meridian before the savants, who had ventured to down. into the fields at sunrise, were returning to the mound village. In the snooper screen they could be seen coming up in tunics and breech-clouts, entering houses, and emerging in long robes. There seemed to be no bows or spears in evidence, but the big horn sounded occasionally. Paul Mallard was pleased. Even if it had been by sign-talk which he raided with worm-fishing for trout or shooting-sitting-rubits, he had gotten sick. something across to them. When they went to the village at 1500, they had trouble getting their lorry down.

A couple of Marines in a jeep had to go in first to get the crowd out of the way. Several of the locals, including the one with the staff, joined with them. This quick cooperation delighted Mallard. When they had the lorry down and were all out of it, the dignitary with the staff, His scarlet tablecloth over his yellow robe began an oration, apparently with every confidence that he was being understood. In spite of his objections at lunch, the telepathy theory was beginning to seem more persuasive. Give them the shooting of Dan McJabberwocky again, he told Millard.

This is where we came in yesterday. Something Mallard had noticed was exciting him. Wait a moment. They're going to do something. They were indeed. The one with the staff and three of his henchmen advanced. The staff-bearer touched himself on the brow. Fonk!

He said. Then he pointed to Mallard. Horky. He said. They got it. Lillian was hugging herself joyfully. I knew they ought to. Millard indicated himself and said,

Fwong. That wasn't right. The village elder immediately corrected him. The word it seemed was Fwonk. His three companions agreed that that was the word for self, but that was as far as the agreement went. They rendered it respectively as point, twi-lt, and kloosh. Gofredo gave a barking laugh.

He was right. Anything that could go wrong would go wrong. Lillian used a word. It was not a ladylike word at all. The savants looked at them as though wondering what could possibly be the matter. Then they went into a huddle, arguing vehemently. The arguments spread like a ripple in a pool. Soon everybody was twittering vocally and blowing on flutes and panpipes.

Then the big horn started blaring. Immediately, Gaffredo snatched the handphone of his belt radio and began speaking urgently into it. "'What are you doing, Lewis?' Mallard asked anxiously. "'Calling the reserve in. I'm not taking chances on this.' He spoke again into the phone, then called over his shoulder. Renet, three one-second bursts in the air. A Marine pointed a submachine gun skyward and ripped off a string of shots. then another and another.

There was silence after the first burst. Then a frightful howling arose. Lewis, you imbecile, the Lord was shouting. Gofredo jumped onto the top of an air-cheap where they could all see him, drawing his pistol. He fired it twice into the air. Be quiet all of you, he shouted as though that would do any good. It did.

Silence. fell, bounced noisily, and then settled over the crowd. Gafredo went on talking to them, Take it easy now, easy. He might have been speaking to a frightened dog or a fractious horse. Nobody's going to hurt you. This is nothing but the great noise magic of the Terrans. Get the presents unloaded, Malord was saying. Make a big show of it. The table first. The horn, which had started, stopped blowing. As they were getting off the long table and piling it with trade goods, another lorry came in, discouraging twenty marine riflemen.

They had their bayonets fixed. The natives looked apprehensively at the bare steel, but went on listening to Gofredo. Allard pulled the Lord Mayor, Archbishop, Lord of the Manor, aside, and began making sign talk to him. When quiet was restored, Howell put a pick and shovel. into a wheelbarrow and pushed them out into the space that had been cleared in front of the table. He swung the pick for a while, then shoveled the barrel full of ground. After pushing it around for a while he dumped it back in the hole and leveled it off.

Two marines brought out an eight-inch log and chopped a couple of billets off it with an axe. Then cut off another one with the saws, split them, and filled the wheelbarrow with the firewood. We can't use the computer till we can tell it what the data is data about." The knives, jewelry, and other small items would be no problem. They had enough of them to go around. The other stuff would be harder to distribute, and Paul Mallard and Carl Dorver were arguing about how to handle it. If they weren't careful, a lot of new bowie knives would get bloodied.

Have them farm a cue, Anna suggested. that will give them the idea of equal sharing and will be able to learn something about their status levels and social hierarchy and agonistic relations. The one with the staff took it as a matter of course that he would go first. His associates began falling in behind him and the rest of the villagers behind them. Whether they'd gotten one the day before or not, everybody was given a knife and a bandana and one piece of flashy junk jewelry, also a stainless steel cup and mess plate, a bucket, and an empty bottle with a cork.

The women didn't carry sheath knives, so they got Boy Scout knives on lanyards. They were all lavishly supplied with XT3 and candy. Any of the children who looked big enough to be trusted with them got knives too, and plenty of candy. Anna and Carl were standing where the queue was forming, watching how they fell into line, so was Lillian with an audio-visual camera. Having seen that the Marine enlisted men were getting the presents handed out properly, Cowles strolled over to them, just as he came up, a couple approached hesitantly,

a man in a breech-clout under a leather apron, and a woman much smaller in a ragged and soiled tunic. As soon as they fell into line, another svant and a blue robe pushed them aside and took their place. Here you can't do that, Lillian cried. Carl, make him step back. Carl was saying something about social status and precedence. The couple tried to get into line behind the man who had pushed them aside. Another villager tried to shove them out of his way.

Howell advanced, his right fist closing, then he remembered that he was. didn't know what he'd be punching. He might break the fellow's neck or his own knuckles. He grabbed the blue-robed Svant by the wrist with both hands, kicked a foot out from under him, and jerked sending him flying for six feet, and then sliding in the dust for another couple of yards. He pushed the others back and put the couple into place in their line. "'Mark, you shouldn't have done that!' Dorfer was expostulating. We don't know. The Svant sat up, shaking his head grogily. Then he realized what had been done to him.

With a snarl of rage he was on his feet, his knife in his hand. It was a Terran Bowie knife. Without conscious volition, 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 few steps, then turned and bolted into the nearest house. The others, including the woman in the ragged tunic, were twittering an alarm. Only the man in the leather apron was calm.

He was saying, tonelessly, "'Groog, grog!' Louis Gaffredo was coming up on the double, followed by three of his riflemen. What happened, Mark? Trouble? All over now. He told Gafredo what had had happened. happened. Darver was still objecting. Social precedence. The savant may have been right, according to local customs. Local customs be damned. Capredo became angry. This is a Terran

Federation handout. We make the rules. And one of them is no pushing people out of line. Teach the buggers that now and we won't have 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 heart-brokenly with pleasure. Maybe the one who got thrown on his ear—no, he didn't have any—was not one of the more popular characters in the village. You just pulled your gun, and he dropped the knife and ran, Gafredo asked. And the others were scared, too? That's right. They all saw you far or yours. The noise scared them. Gafredo nodded.

We'll avoid promiscuous shooting, then. No use letting them find out the noise won't hurt them any sooner than we have to. Paul Mallard had worked out a way to distribute the picks and shovels and axes, considering each house as representing a family unit, which might or might not be the case. There were picks and shovels enough to go around and an axe for every third house. They took them around in an air-jeep and left them at the doors. The houses he found weren't Adobe at all. They were built of logs, plastered with Adobe on the outside.

That demolished his theory that the houses were torn down periodically and left the mound itself unexplained. The wheelbarrows and the grindstone and the two cross-cut saws were another matter. Nobody was quite sure that the—nobility, capitalist class, politicians, prominent citizens, wouldn't simply appropriate them for themselves. Paul Mallard was worried about that. Everybody else was willing to let matters take their course. Before they were off the ground in their vehicles, a violent dispute had begun, with a bedlam

of jabbering and shrieking. By the time they were landing at the camp, the big laminated leather horn had begun to bellow. of part two part three of nodsons by h beam piper this laborvox recording is in the public domain part three one of the huts had been fitted as contact team headquarters with all the view and communication screens installed and one end partitioned off and sound-proofed for lillian to study recordings in it was cocktail time when they returned. Conversationally, it was a continuation from lunch. Carl D'Orver was even more convinced than ever of his telepathic hypothesis, and he had completely converted Anna de Jong to it.

"'Look at that,' he pointed at the snooper screen, which gave a view of the plaza from directly above. They're reaching an agreement already. So they seem to be, though upon what was less apparent. The horn had stopped and the noise was diminishing. The odd thing was that peace was being restored or was restoring itself, as the uproar had begun, outwardly from the center of the plaza to the periphery of the crowd. The same thing had happened when Gauphredo had ordered the submachine gun fired, and now that he recalled when he had dealt with the line-crasher.

Suppose a few of them in the middle of the middle of the same. middle, or greed," Anna said. They are all thinking in unison combining their telepathic powers. They dominate those nearest to them, who join and amplify their telepathic signal, and it spreads out through the whole group. A mental chain reaction." That would explain the mechanism of community leadership. And I'd been wondering about that, Dorfer said, becoming more excited.

It's a mental aristocracy. an especially gifted group of telepaths in agreement in using their powers in concert, implanting their opinions in the minds of all the others. I'll bet the purpose of the horn is to distract the thoughts of the others so that they can be more easily dominated, and the noise of the shots shocked them out of communication with each other. No wonder they were frightened. Bennett-Fa-on was far from convinced. So far this telepathy theory is only an assumption.

I find it a lot easier to assume some fundamental difference between the way they translate sound into sense data and the way we do. We think those combs on top of their heads are their external hearing organs, but we have no idea what's back of them, or what kind of neural hookup is connected. to them. I wish I knew how these people disposed of their dead. I need a couple of fresh cadavers. Too bad they aren't warlike. Nothing like a good bloody battle to advance the science of anatomy, and what we don't know about Svant Anatomy is practically the entire subject.

I should imagine the animals here in the same way, Millard said. When the wagon wheels and the hose and the blacksmith tools come down from the ship, we'll trade for kids. cattle. When they make the second landing in the mountains, I'm going to do a lot of hunting, Logren added. I'll get wild animals for you. Well, I'm going to assume that the vocal noises they make are meaningful speech, Lillian Ransby said. So far I've just been trying to analyze them for phonetic values. Now I'm going to analyze them for sound wave patterns. No matter what goes on inside their private nervous systems, the sounds exist as waves in the public atmosphere. I'm going to assume that the Lord Mayor and his stooges were all trying to say the same thing

when they were pointing to themselves, and I'm going to see if all four of those sounds have any common characteristic. By the time dinner was over, they were all talking in circles, none of them, hopefully. They all made recordings of the speech about the slithy to-es. in the Malamute saloon, Lillian wanted to find out what was different about them. Louis Gafredo saw to it that the camp itself would be visible-lighted, and beyond the lights he set up more photoelectric robot sentries and put a couple of snoopers to circling on contra-gravity with infrared lights and receptors. He also insisted that all his own men and all Dave Custle's

Navy construction engineers keep their weapons ready to hand. The natives in the village were equally distrustful. They didn't herd the cattle up from the meadows where they had been pastured, but they lighted watchfires along the edge of the mound as soon as it became dark. It was three hours after nightfall when something on the indicator board for the robot sentries went off like a startled rattlesnake. Everybody, talking idly or concentrating on writing up the day's observations, stiffened. Lewis Gafredo, dozing in his chair, was on his feet instantly and crossing the hut to the

instruments. His second-in-command, who had been playing chess with Willie Schallenmacher, rose and snatched his belt from the back of his chair, putting it on. "'Take it easy,' Gafredo said. "'Probably just a cow or a horse, local equivalent. That's straight over from the other side. He sat down in front of one of the snooper screens and twisted knobs on the remote controls. The monochrome view transformed from infrared, rotated as the snooper circled and changed course.

The other screen showed the camp receding and the area around it widening as its snooper gained altitude. It's not a big party, Gaffredo was saying. I can't see—oh, yes, I can. Only two of them. The humanoid figures, one larger than the other, were moving cautiously across the fields, crouching low. The snooper went down toward them, and then he recognized them. The man and woman whom the blue-robed villager had tried to shove out of the queue that afternoon.

Gafredo recognized them, too. Your friends, Mark. Harry, he told his subordinate, go out. and pass the word around, only two when we think they're friendly. Keep everybody out of sight. We don't want to scare them away. The snooper followed closely behind them. The man was no longer wearing his apron. The woman's tunic was even more tattered and soiled. She was leading him by the hand, now and then she would stop and turn her head to the rear. The snooper over the mound showed 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 seeming to be guiding her companion. What's happening, Mark? It was Lillian. She must have just come out of the soundproof speech lab. You know them, the pair in the queue this afternoon. i think we'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 breech-clout seemed undecided whether he was more afraid to turn and run than advance

the woman holding his hand led him forward they were both bruised and both had minor cuts and neither of them had any of the things that had been given to them that afternoon the rest of the gang beat them up and robbed them gufredo began angrily see what you did darver began according to their own customs they had no right to be ahead of those others and now you've gotten them punished for it i'd have done more to that fellow than mark did if i'd have been there when it happened the marine officer turned to milard look this is your show paul how you run it is your job but in your place i'd take that pair back to the village and have them point out who beat them up and teach the whole gang of them a lesson if we're going to colonize this planet you're going to have to establish federation law and federation law says you mustn't gang up on people and beat and rob them. We don't have to speak spottees to make them understand what we'll put up with and what we won't. Later, Lewis, after we've gotten a treaty with somebody, Malar broke off, watch this. The woman was making sign talk. She pointed to the village on the mound. Then with her hands she shaped a bucket like the ones that had been given to them,

and she made a snatching gesture away from herself. She indicated the neck-clothed. cloths and the sheath-knife and the other things, and snatched them away, too. She made beating motions and touched her bruises and the man's. All the time she was talking excitedly in a high, shrill voice. The man made the same gr-gr-gr-noises that he had that afternoon. No, we can't take any punitive action, not now, Millard said. But we'll have to do something for them. Vengeance, it seemed, wasn't what they wanted.

The woman made vehement gestures of rejection toward the village, then bowed, placing her hands on her brow. The man imitated her obscenance, then they both straightened. The woman pointed to herself and to the man, and around the circle of huts and landing craft. She began scuttling around, picking up imaginary litter and sweeping with an imaginary broom. The man started pounding. with an imaginary hammer, then chopping with an imaginary axe. Lillian was clapping her hands softly.

Good, got it the first time. You let us stay. We work for you. How about it, Paul? Malard nodded. Punitive actions, unadvisable, but we will show our attitude by taking them in. You tell them, Lewis. These people seem to like your voice.

Gofredo put a hand on each of their shoulders. shoulders, you stay with us. He pointed around the camp, you stay this place. Their faces broke into that funny just before tears' expression that meant happiness with them. The man confined his vocal expressions to his odd groth-groh-hing. The woman twittered joyfully. Gofredo put a hand on the woman's shoulder, pointed to the man, and from him back to her. "'Huh?' he inquired. The woman put a hand on the man's head, then brought it down to within a foot of the ground. She picked up the imaginary infant and rocked it in her arms, then set it down and grew it up

until she had her hand on the top of the man's head again. "'That was good, Mom,' Gafredo told her. "'Now you and Sonny come along, we'll issue you equipment and find you billets.' He added, "'What in blazes I'll be going to feed them?' them. XT.3? They gave them replacements for all the things that had been taken away from them. They gave the man a one-piece suit of marine combat cover-alls.

Lillian gave the woman a lavender bath robe, and Anna contributed a red scarf. They found them quarters at one end of a store-shed, after making sure that there was nothing they could get at that would hurt them or that they could damage. They gave each of them a pair of blankets and a pneumatic mattress, which delighted them, although the cots puzzled them at first. What do you think about feeding them, Minnet?" Millard asked, when the two swants had gone to bed, and they were back in the headquarters hut.

You said the food on this planet is safe for Terrans. So I did, and it is, but the rules not reversible. Things we eat might kill them, Thayon said. Meats will be especially dangerous and no. No caffeine and no alcohol. Alcohol won't hurt them, Shelling Mocker said. I saw big jars full of fermenting fruit mash back of some of those houses. In about a year it ought to be fairly good wine.

C2H508 is the same on any planet. Well, we'll get native foodstuffs tomorrow, Mallard 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 Sunnis's the village half-wit. Anna De Jong agreed.

Even if we don't understand Svant's psychology, that's evident. He's definitely subnormal. The way he clings to his mother for guidance is absolutely pathetic. He's a mature adult, but mentally he's still a little child. That may explain it, D'arver cried. A mental defective in a community of telepaths. constantly invading the minds of others with irrational and disgusting thoughts. No wonder he is rejected and persecuted.

And in a community on this culture level, the mother of an abnormal child is often regarded with superstitious detestation. Yes, of course, Anna De Jong instantly agreed, and began to go into the villagers' hostility to both mother and son. Both of them were 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.

A little patch on the screen at 1720 cycles. The odd thing is that when I try to repeat the sound, it isn't there. Odd indeed. If a swat said something, he made sound waves. If she imitated the sound, she ought to imitate the sound. wave pattern. He said so, and she agreed. But come back here and look at this, she invited. She had been using a visibleizing analyzer. In it a sound was broken by a set of filters into frequency groups, translated into light from dull red to violet paling into pure white.

It photographed the light pattern on high-speed film, automatically developed it, and then made a print copy and projected the film in slow motion. on a screen. When she pressed a button, a recorded voice said, Fwong. An instant later, a pattern of vertical lines in various colors and lengths was projected on the screen. Those green lines, she said, that's it. Now, watch this. She pressed another button, got the photo print out of a slot, and propped it beside the screen. Then she picked up a handphone and said,

fwank into it. It sounded like the first one, but the pattern that danced onto the screen was quite different. Where the green had been there was a patch of pale blue lines. She ran the other three Svant's voices, each saying presumably me. Some of them were mainly up in the blue, others had a good deal of yellow and orange, but they all had the little patch of green lines. Well, that seems to be the information, he said. The rest is just noise. Maybe one of them is saying John Doe, me, son of John Blow, and another is saying, tough guy, me, lick anybody in town.

All in one syllable. Then he shrugged. How did he know what these people could pack into one syllable? He picked up the handphone and said, Fonk into it. The pattern, a little deeper in color and with longer lines, was recognizably like hers and unlike any of the savants. The others came in singly and in pairs and threes.

They watched the colors dance on the screen to picture the four savant words which might or might not all mean me. They tried to duplicate them. Louis Cofredo and Willie Schullinmacher came closest of anybody. bennett phaon was still insisting that the savants had a perfectly comprehensible language to other savants anna de jong had started to veer a little away from the dorver hypothesis there was a difference between the event-level sound which was a series of waves of alternately crowded and rarefied molecules of air and object-level sound which was an auditory sensation inside the nervous system she admitted That, Phion Crode, was what he'd been saying all along. Their auditory system was probably such that Fwank and Poinck and Tweet and Kroosh all sounded alike to them.

By this time Fwank and Poinck and Tweet and Kroosh had all become swear words among the joint Space Navy Colonial Office contact team. Well, if I hear the two sounds alike, why doesn't the analyzer hear them alike? Carl Darver demanded. It has better ears than you do, Carl. Look at how many different frequencies there are in that word all crowded up behind each other, Lillian said. But it isn't sensitive or selective enough. I'm going to see what Alicia Keithley can do about building me a better one.

Ayesha with signals. and detection officer of the Hubert Penrose. Dave Quistell mentioned that she'd had a hard day, and was probably making sack time, and she wouldn't welcome being called at 0.130. Nobody seemed to have realized that it had gotten that late. Well, I'll call the ship and have a recording mate for her when she gets up, but till we get something that'll sort this mess out and make sense of it, I'm stopped. You're stopped, period, Lillian, Darver told her.

What these people jibber at us doesn't even make as much sense as the shooting of Dan McJabberwocky. The real information is conveyed by telepathy. Lieutenant J.G. Ayesha Keithley was on the screen the next morning while 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. Yes. You see what we're up against?" You don't know what their vocal organs are like, do you?" The girl in navy uniform in the screen asked. Lillian shook her head. Bennett-Feyon's hoping for a war, or an epidemic, or something to break out, so that he can get a few cadavers to dissect.

Well, he'll find that they're pretty complex, Ayesha Keithley said. I identified stick and slip sounds and percussion sounds, and plucked stringers. sounds along with the ordinary hiss and buzz speech sounds. Making a vocoder to reproduce that speech is going to be fun. Just what are you using in the way of equipment? Lillian was still talking about that when the two landing craft from the ship were sighted coming down. Charles Logren and Willie Shullin-Macher, who were returning to the Hubert Pinrose to join the other landing party, began assembling their luggage. The others went outside, howled. among them. Mom and Sunny were watching the two craft grow larger and closer above, keeping close

to a group of spacemen. Sunny was looking around excitedly, while Mom clung to his arm like a hen with an oversized chick. The reasoning was clear. These people knew all about big things that came down out of the sky and weren't afraid of them. Stick close to them, and it would be perfectly safe. Sonny saw the contact team emerging from their hut and grabbed his mother's arm pointing. They both beamed happily. That expression didn't look sad at all, now that you knew what it meant. Sonny began grung!

Grug! Hideously. Mom hushed him with a hand over his mouth, and they both made eating gestures, rubbed their abdomens comfortably and pointed toward the mess hut. In it, Phion was frightened. He turned and started on the double toward the cook, who was standing in the doorway of the hut, calling out to him. The cook spoke inaudibly.

Feon stopped short. Unholy St. Bios above! No! He cried. The cook said something in reply, shrugging. Fayon came back talking to himself. Turen-corniculture pork, he said, when he returned. Thustra-Pool ball fruit, potato-flower hotcakes, and Baldur Honey, and Odin Flameberry Jam,

and two big cups of coffee apiece. It's a miracle they aren't dead now. If they're alive for lunch, we won't need to worry about feeding them anything we eat, but I'm glad somebody else has the moral responsibility for this. Lily and Ransby came out of the headquarters hut. Ayesha's coming down this afternoon, with a lot of equipment, she said. We're not exactly going to count air molecules in the sound waves, but we'll do everything short of that. We'll need more lab space, soundproofed. Tell Dave Questle what you want, Millard said. Do you really think you can get anything? She shrugged. If there's anything there to get, how long it'll take is another question. End of part three.

of Nautsance by H. Beam Piper. This Librevox recording is in the public domain. Part 4 The two 60-foot collapsium-armored turtles settled to the ground and went off contra-gravity. The ports opened and things began being floated off on lifter skids, framework for the water tower, and curved titanium sheets for the tank. Anna De Jong said something about hot showers, and not having to take any more sponge baths.

Howell was watching the stuff come off the other landing craft. A dozen pairs of four-foot wagon wheels with axles, hose and bundles, scythe blades, a hand-forge with a crank-driven fan blower, and a hundred and fifty-pound anvil, and sledges and cutters and swags and tongs. Everybody was busy, and Mom and Sonny were fidgeting, gesturing toward the work with their own empty hands. Hey, boss, what are we going to do?

He patted them on the shoulders. Take it easy. He hoped his tone would convey none urgency. We'll find something for you to do. He wasn't particularly happy about most of what was coming off. Giving these savants tools was fine, but it was more important to give them technologies. The people on the ship hadn't thought of that.

These wheels now, machined steel hubs, steel rims, tubular steel spokes, drop forged and machined axles, the savants wouldn't be able to copy them in a thousand years. Well, in a hundred if somebody showed them where and how to mine iron, and how to smelt and work it, and how to build a steam engine. He went over and pulled a hoe out of one of the bundles. Blades stamped out with power-press, welded to tubular steel. steel handles. Well, wood for hoe handles was hard to come by on a spaceship. Even a battle cruiser almost half a mile in diameter, he had to admit that. And they were about

2,000 percent more efficient than the bronze scrapers the Svants used. That wasn't the idea, though. Even supposing that the first wave of colonists came out in a year and a half, it would be close to twenty years before terran operated factories would be in mass production for the native trade. The idea was to teach these people to make better things for themselves, give them a leg up, so that the next generation would be ready for contragravity and nuclear and electric power. Mom didn't know what to make of any of it. Sonny did, though. He was excited, grabbing Howell's arm, pointing, saying, goh, goh!

He pointed at the wheels, and then made a stooping, lifting, and pushing gesture, like a wheelbarrow? That's right! He nodded, wondering if Sonny recognized that, as an affirmative sign, like big wheelbarrow. One thing puzzled Sonny, though, wheelbarrow wheels were small. His hands 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 two pairs of wheels,

then put a wagon on them, and drew a quadruped hitched to it, and a Svant with a stick walking beside it. Sonny looked at the picture. Svants seemed to have pictorial sense, for which makes us thankful, and then caught his mother's sleeve and showed it to her. Mom didn't get it. Sonny took the pencil and drew another animal with a pole travoice. He made gestures.

A travoice dragged. It went slow. A wagon had wheels that went around. It went fast. So Lillian and Anna thought he was the village half-wit. Village is genius, more likely. The other peasants didn't understand him and resented his superiority. They went over for a closer look at the wheels and pushed them.

Sonny was almost beside himself. Mom was puzzled, but she thought they were pretty wonderful. Then they looked at blacksmith tools. Tongs. Sunny had never seen anything like them. Howell wondered what the savants used to handle hot metal, probably big tweezers made by tying two green sticks together. There was an old Arabian legend that Allah had made the first tongs

and given them to the first smith, because nobody could make tongs without having a pair already. Sonny didn't understand the fan blower until it was taken apart. Then he made a great discovery. The wheels and the fan and the pivoted tongs all embodied the same principle. One his people had evidently never discovered. A whole new world seemed to open before him. From then on, he was constantly finding things pierced and rotating on pivots. By this time, Mom was fidgeting again. She ought to be doing something to justify her presence in the camp. He was wondering what sort of work he could invent for her

when Carl Darver called to him from the door of the headquarters hut. Mark, can you spare mom for a while? he asked. We want her to look at pictures and show us which of the animals are meat cattle and which of the crops are ripe. Think you can get, Anything out of her?" Sign talk, yes. We may get a few words from her, too."

At first Mom was unwilling to leave Sonny. She finally decided that it would be safe and trotted over to Darver, entering the hut. Dave Questle's construction crew began at once on the water tank, using a power shovel to dig the foundation. They had to haul water in a tank from the river a quarter mile away to mix the concrete. watched that, interestingly. So did a number of the villages who gathered safely out of Beauchot. They noticed Sonny among the Terrans and pointed at him. Sunny noticed that. He unobstruively picked up a double-bitted axe and kept it at hand. He and Mom had lunch with

the contact team. As they showed no ill effects from breakfast, Feion decided that it was safe to let them have anything the Terrans ate or drank. They liked wine. They knew it was all right, but this seemed to have a delightfully different flavor. They each tried a cigarette, choked over the first few puffs, and decided that they didn't like smoking. Mom gave us a lot of information, as far as she could, on the crops and animals. The big things, the size of rhinoceruses, are draft animals and nothing else. They're not eaten, D'Urvers said, I don't know whether the meat isn't good or is taboo, or they are too valuable to eat.

They eat all the other three species and milk two of them. I have an idea they grind their grain in big stone martyrs as needed. That was right. He'd seen things like that. Willie, when you're over in the mountains, see if you can find something we can make millstones out of. We can shape them with sono cutters. After they get the idea, they can do it themselves by hand. One of those big animals could be used to turn the mill. Did you get any words from her?

Paul Mallard shook his head gloomily. Nothing we can be sure of. It was the same thing as in the village yesterday. She'd say something, I'd repeat it. And she'd tell us it was wrong and say the same thing over again. Lillian took recordings. She got the same results as last night. Ask her about it later.

She has the same effect on Mom as on the others? Yes, Mom was very polite and tried not to show it, but... Lillian took him aside, out of earshot of the two. savants after lunch. She was almost distracted. Mark, I don't know what I'm going to do. She's like the others. Every time I open my mouth in front of her, she's simply horrified. It's as though my voice does something loathsome to her, and I'm the one who's supposed to learn to talk to them. Well, those who can do and those who can't teach, he told her. You can study recordings and tell us what the words are and teach us how to recognize and pronounce them.

You're the only linguist we have. That seemed to comfort her a little. He hoped it would work out that way. If they could communicate with these people and did leave a party here to prepare for the first colonization, he'd stay on to teach the natives' terran technologies and to study theirs. He'd been expecting that Lillian would stay, too. She was the linguist.

She'd have to stay. But now, if it turned out that she was, would be of no help without liability. She'd go back with the Hubert Pinrose. Paul wouldn't keep a linguist who offended the natives every sensibility with every word she spoke. He didn't want that to happen. Lillian and he had come to mean a little too much to each other to be parted now. Paul Mallard and Carl Dorover had considerable difficulty with Mom that afternoon. They wanted her to go with them and help trade for cattle. Mom didn't want to. She was afraid. They had to do a lot of play-acting with a half-dozen

Marines pretending to guard her with fixed bayonets from some of Dave Questles Navy construction men who had red band-attas on their heads to simulate combs before she got the idea. Then she was afraid to get into the contra-gravity lorry that was to carry the boxes and the wagon wheels. Sunny managed to reassure her and insisted on going along, and he insisted on taking his axe with him. That meant doubling the guard to make sure Sonny didn't lose his self-control when he saw his former persecutors within chopping distance. It went off much better than either Paul Millard or Louis Cofredo expected.

After the first shock of being airborne had worn off, Mom found that she liked contragravity riding. Sonny was wildly delighted with it from the start. The natives showed neither of them any hostility. Mom's lavender bathrobe and Sunny's green cover-alls and big acts seemed to be symbols of a new and exalted status. Even the Lord Mayor was extremely polite to them. The Lord Mayor and half a dozen others got a contra-gravity ride, too,

to the meadows to pick out cattle. A dozen animals, including a pair of the two-ton draft beasts, were driven to the Taron Kassan. camp. A couple of lorry loads of assorted vegetables were brought in, too. Everybody seemed very happy about the deal, especially Bennett Fayonne. He wanted to slaughter one of the sheep-sized meat and milk animals at once and get to work on it. Gouffredo advised him to put it off till the next morning. He wanted a large native audience to see the animal being shot with a rifle. The water tower was finished, and the big spherical tank hoisted on top of it and made fast.

A pump and a filter system were installed. There was no water for hot showers that evening, though. They would have to run a pipeline to the river, and that would entail a ditch that would cut through several cultivated fields, which in turn would provoke an uproar. Paul Mallard didn't want that happening until he'd concluded the cattle trade. Charlie Logren and Willie Schellenmacher had gone up to the ship on one of the landing craft. They accompanied the landing party that went down into the mountains. Ayesha Keithley arrived late in the afternoon on another landing craft,

with five or six tons of instruments and parts and equipment, and a male Navy warrant officer helper. They looked around the lab Lillian had been using at one end of the headquarters hut. This won't do, the girl Navy officer said. said, "'We can't get a quarter of the apparatus we're going to need in here. We'll have to build something.' Dave Kustle was drawn into the discussion. Yes, he could put up something big enough for everything the girls would need to install and sound-proof it. Concrete, he decided. They'd have to wait till he got the waterline down and the pump going, though. There was a crowd

of natives in the fields gaping at the Taron camp the next morning, and Gofredo decided to to kill the animal. Until they learned the native name, they were calling it domesticated type C. It was herded out where everyone could watch, and a Marine stepped forward, unslung his rifle, took a kneeling position, and aimed at it. It was a hundred and fifty yards away. Mom had come out to see what was going on. Sunny and Howell, who had been consulting by signs over the construction of a wagon, were standing side by side. The Marine squeezed his trigger. The rifle banged, and the domesticated sea bounded into the air, dropped and kicked a few times, and was still.

The natives, however, missed that part of it. They were howling piteously and rubbing their heads. All but sunny. He was just mildly surprised at what had happened to the Dham Sea. Sunny, it would appear, was stone deaf. As anticipated, there was another uproar later in the morning when the ditching machine started north across the meadow. A mob of Svance, seeing its relentless progress toward a field of something like turnips, gathered

in front of it twittering and brandishing implements of agriculture, many of them Terran made. Paul Mollard was ready for this. Two lorries went out, one loaded with Marines, who jumped off with the men. their rifles ready. By this time, all the savants knew what rifles would do besides make a noise. Mallard, Darver, Gauphredo, and a few others got out of the other vehicle in unloaded presents. Gofredo did the talking. The savants couldn't understand him, but they liked it. They also liked the presents, which included a dozen empty half-gallon rum divy-jons,

tarpaulians, and a lot of assorted knick-knacks. The pipeline went through. He and Sunny got the forge set up. There was no fuel for it. A party of Marines had gone out to the east to cut wood. When they got back, they burnt some charcoal in the pit that had been dug beside the camp. Until then, he and Sunny were drawing plans for a wooden wheel with a metal tire when Lillian came 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 rifle going off. The only one of this gang that has brains enough to pour sand out of a boot with

directions on the bottom of the heel. And he'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 saw a wheel before yesterday. Now he's designing one." Lillian's eyes widened.

So that's why Mom's so sharp about sign talk. She's been doing it all his life. Then she remembered what she had come out to show him and held out the clipboard. You know how that analyzer of mine works. Well, here's what Ayesha's going to do. After breaking a sound into frequency bands, instead of being photographed and projected, each band goes to an analyzer of its own and is projected on its own screen. There will be forty of them, each for a band of a hundred cycles, from zero to four thousand.

That seems to be the smart vocal range. The diagram passed from hand to hand during cocktail time before dinner. bennett fayol had been working all day bisecting the animal they were all calling a dom sea a name which would stick even if and when they learned the native name he glanced disinterestedly at the drawing then looked again more closely then he sat down the drink he was holding in his other hand and studied it intently you know what you have here he asked this is a very close analogy to the hearing of the hearing of it yet you know what you have here he asked this is a very close analogy to the hearing organs of that animal I was working on. The comb, as we've assumed, is the external organ. It's covered with small flaps and fissures. Back of each fissure is a long, narrow membrane. They're paired, one on each side of the comb, and from them, nerves lead to clusters of small round membranes. Nerves lead from them to a complex nerve cable at the bottom of the

comb and into the brain at the base of the skull. I couldn't understand how the system functioned, but now I see it. Each of the larger membranes on the outside responds to a sound frequency band, and the small ones on the inside break the bands down 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 enlargements, and a number of blocks of lucite, in which specimens were mounted. Everybody examined them. Anna De Jong, as a practicing psychologist, had an MD, 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 grant that the membranes will respond to sound. but i can't see how they transmit it but they do hear mallard said their musical instruments their reactions to our voices the way they are affected by sounds like 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 ear of any member of any other sapient race we've ever contacted That's what I've been saying from the beginning. They have sound perception to an extent that makes ours look almost like deafness, Ayesha Keithley said. I wish I could design a sound detector one-tenth as good as this must be. Yes, the way the Lord Mayor said Fwunk, and the way Paul Millard said it sounded entirely different to them.

Of course, Fonk and Pwink and Tweet and Kusch sound like to them, but let's don't be too picky about things. End of Part 4. Part 5 of Nodzance by H. Beam Piper. This Libre V recording is in the public domain. Part 5. There were no hot showers that evening. Dave Questell's gang had trouble with the pump

and needed some new parts made up aboard the ship. They were still working on it the next morning. He had meant to start teaching sunny blacksmiths. but during the evening Lillian and Anna had decided to try teaching Mom a non-phonetic, ideographic alphabet, and in the morning they co-opted Sonny to help. Deprived of his disciple, he strolled over to watch the work on the pump. About twenty Svans had come in from the fields and were also watching from the meadow. After a while the job was finished. The petty officer in charge of the work pushed in the swick.

and the pump started sucking dry with a harsh racket. The natives twittered in surprise. Then the water came, and the pump settled down to a steady fug-fug-fug-fug. The Svance seemed to like the new sound. They grimaced in pleasure and moved closer. Within forty or fifty feet, they all squatted on the ground and sat entranced. Others came in from the fields drawn by the size. sound, they too came up and squatted, until there was a semicircle of them.

The tank took a long time to fill, until it did. They all sat immobile and fascinated. Even after it stopped, many remained, hoping that it would start again. Paul Mallard began wondering a trifle uneasily if that would happen every time the pump went on. They get a positive pleasure from it. It affects them the same way Lewis's voice does." "'Mean I have a voice like a pump?' Gafredo demanded.

"'Well, I'm going to find out,' Ayesha Keatley said. The next time that starts, I'm going to make a recording and compare it with your voice recording. I'll give five to one. There'll be a similarity.' Questrel got the foundation of the sonic slab dug and began pouring concrete, that took water, and the pump ran continuously that afternoon. Concrete mixing took more water the next day,

and by noon the whole village population, down to the smallest child, was massed at the pumphouse, enthralled. Mom was snared by the sound like any of the rest. Only Sunny was unaffected. Lillian and Ayesha compared recordings of the voices of the team with the pump sound. in graffredo'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 louis's voice pleases them that tags me old pup mouth graffredo said it'll get all through the core and they'll be calling me that when i'm a four-star general if i live that long malard was really worried now so was benit fayon He said so that afternoon at cocktail time.

"'It's an addiction,' he declared. "'Once they hear it, they have no will to resist. They just squat and listen. I don't know what it's doing to them, but I'm scared of it.' "'I know one thing it's doing,' Mallard said. "'It's keeping them from their work in the fields. For all we know it may cause them to lose the crop they need badly for subsistence.' The native they had come to call the Lord Mayor,

evidently thought so, too. He was with the others the next morning, squatting with his staff across his knees, as bemused as any of them. But when the pump stopped he rose and approached a group of terrans, launching into what could only be an impassioned tirade. He pointed with his staff to the pump-house, and to the semicircle of still motionless villagers. He pointed to the fields and back to the people,

and to the 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 his staff. He was struggling tormentedly with himself, in vain. His face relaxed into the heartbroken expression of joy. He turned and shuffled over, dropping onto his haunches with the others. Shut down the pump, Dave, the Lord called out. Cut the power off.

The thug-thugging stopped. The Lord Mayor Rose, made an odd salaam-like bow toward the terrans, and then turned on the people, striking with his staff and shrieking at them. If you got to their feet and joined him, screamed. screaming, pushing, tugging. Others joined. In a little while they were all on their feet straggling away across the fields. Dave Questle wanted to know what it meant. Malard explained. Well, what'll 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 Gafredo worrying. This happened. It happens every time we colonize an inhabited planet. We give the natives something new. They find out it's bad for them, and we try to take it away from them. And then the knives come out and the shooting starts. Louis Gaffredo was a specialist speaking on his subject. While there were lunch, Charlie Logren screened in from the other camp and wanted to talk to Bennett Fayon.

A funny thing, Bennett. I took a shot at a bird. No. Mammal and dropped it. It was dead when it hit the ground, but there isn't a mark on it. I want you to do an autopsy and find out how I can kill things by missing them. How far away was it? Call it forty feet, no more.

What were you using, Charlie? Ayesha Keithly called from the table. 8.5 Mars Consolidated Pistol, Logran said. I laid my shotgun down and walked away from it. Twelve hundred foot seconds, Ayesha said. bow wave as well as muzzle blast. You think the report was what did it? Thaeon asked.

You ought to bet it didn't, she countered. Nobody did. Mom was sulky. She didn't like what Dave Crestle's men were doing to the nice noise place. Ayesha and Lillian consult her by talking her into the soundproofed room and playing the recording of the pump noise for her. Sonny couldn't care less, one way or another. he spent the afternoon teaching Mark Howell what the marks on paper meant.

It took a lot of signs and play-acting. He had learned about thirty idiographs. By combining them and drawing little pictures, he could express a number of simple ideas. There was, of course, a limit to how many of those things anybody could learn and remember. Look how long it took an old Terran Chinese scribe to learn his profession. But it was the beginning of a method of communication. Questle got the pump-house mounted over. Ayesha came out and tried a sound-meter and also mom on it while the pump was running.

Neither reacted. A good many Svance were watching the work. They began to demonstrate angrily. A couple tried to interfere and were knocked down with rifle butts. The Lord Mayor and his board of aldermen came out with the big horn and harangued them at length and finally got them to go back to the fields. As nearly as anybody could tell, he was friendly, too, and cooperative with the Terrans. The snooper over the village reported excitement in the plaza.

Bennett Feion had taken an air-jeep to the other camp immediately after lunch. He was back by 1500, accompanied by Logren. They carried a cloth-wrapped package into Feon's dissecting room, At cocktail time, Paul Mallard had to go and get them. Sorry, Vion said joining the group, didn't notice how late it was getting. We're still doing a post on this spot bat. That's what Charlie's calling it, till we get the native name. The immediate cause of death was spasmodic contraction of every muscle in the thing's body.

Some of them were partly relaxed before we could get to work on it, but not completely. every bone that isn't broken is dislocated. A good many both. There is not the slightest trace of external injury. Everything was done by its own muscles. He looked around. I hope nobody covered a yeashe's bet after I left. If they did, she collects.

The large outer membranes in the comb seemed to be unaffected, but there is considerable compression of the small, small round ones inside, in just one area, and more on the left side, and on the right. Charlie says it was flying across in front of him from left to right. The receptor area responding to the frequencies of the report, Ayesha said. Anna De Jong made a passing gesture toward Fayonne. The baby's yours, Bennett, she said. This isn't psychological.

I won't accept a case of psychosomatic compound fracture. Don't be too premature about it, Anna. I think that's more or less what you have here. Everybody looked at him, surprised. His subject was comparative technology. The bio and psychosciences were completely outside his field. A lot of things have been bothering me ever since the first contact. I'm beginning to think I'm on the edge of understanding them now.

Bennett. The higher life forms here—the people and that dumb sort of. and Charlie's savant bet are structurally identical with us. I don't mean gross structure like ears and combs. I mean molecular and cellular and tissue structure. Is that right?" Féon nodded. Biology on this planet is exactly terotype.

Yes. With adequate safeguards, I'd even say you could make a viable tissue graft from a savant to a terran or vice versa. Ayesha, with a sound way. from that pistol shot in any conceivable way have the sort of physical effect we're considering?" Absolutely not, she said. And Louis Cofredo said, I've been shot at and missed with pistols at closer range than that.

Then it was the effect on the animal's nervous system. Anna shrugged. It's still been its baby. I'm a psychologist, not a neurologist. What I've been saying all along," Phelon reiterated complacently. Their hearing is different from ours. This proves it. It proves that they don't hear at all.

He had expected an explosion. He wasn't disappointed. They all contradicted him many derisively. Signal reactions. Only Paul Millard made the semantically appropriate response. What do you mean, Mark? They don't hear a sound. They feel it.

You saw what they have inside their combs. Those things don't transmit sound like the ears of any sound-sensitive life-form we've ever seen. They transform sound waves into tactile sensations. Fion cursed slowly and luridly. Anna De Jong looked at him wide-eyed. He finished his cocktail and poured another. In the snooper screen what looked like an indignation meeting was making uproar in the village plaza.

Cofredo cut the volume of the speaker even lower. That would explain a lot of things, Millard said slowly. How hard it was for them to realize that we didn't understand when they talked to us. A punch in the nose feels the same to anybody. They thought they were giving us bodily feelings. They didn't know we were insensible to them. But they do. They do have a language.

Lily and faltered, they talk. Not the way we understand it. If they want to say me, it's tickle, pinch, rub, even if it sounds like foonk to us. When it doesn't sound like quink or tweedle or crush, the tactile sensations to a savant feels no more different than a massage by four different hands, analogous to a word pronounced by four different voices to us.

They'll have a code for expressing meanings in tactile sensation, just as we have a code for expressing meanings in audible sound. Except that when a svant tells another, I am happy, or I have a stomachache, he makes the other one feel that way, too, Anna said. That would carry an awful lot more conviction. I don't imagine symptom swapping is popular among Svants. Carl, you were nearly right at that. This isn't telepathy, but it's a lot like it.

So it is. Darver, who had been mourning his departed telepathy theory, said brightly. And look how it explains their society. Peaceful. Everybody in quick agreement. He looked at the screen and gulped. The Lord Mayor and his party had formed one clump, and the opposition was grouped at the other side of the plaza.

They were screaming in unison at each other. they make their decisions by endurance the party that can resist the feelings of the other longest converts their opponents pure democracy gopheredo declared rule by the party that can make the most noise and i'll bet that when they're sick they go around chanting i am well i feel just fine anna said otto's suggestion would really work here think of the feedback too one sabat has a feeling He verbalizes it, and the sound of his own voice reinforces it to him. It is induced to his hearers, and they verbalize it, reinforcing it in themselves and to him. This could go on and on. Yes, it has. Look at their technology.

He felt more comfortable. Now he was on home ground again. A friend of mine, speaking about a mutual acquaintance, once said, When they installed her circuits, they put in such big feeling circuits that there was no room left for any thinking circuits. I think that's a perfect description of what I estimate Svant mentality to be. Take these bronze knives and the musical instruments. Wonderful.

The work of individuals trying to express feeling in metal or wood, but get an idea like the wheel or even a pair of tongs? Poo! How would you state the first law? of motion, or the second law of thermodynamics, in tickle-pinch rub terms. Sonny could grasp an idea like that. Sonny's handicap, if you call it that, cuts him off from feel-thinking. He can think logically instead of sensually.

He sipped his cocktail and continued, I can understand why the villages mounded up, too. I realized that while I was watching Dave's gang bury the pump-house. I'd been bothered by that, and by the absence of granaries for all the grain they raise, and by the number of people for so few in such small houses. I think the village is mostly underground, and the houses are just entrances, sound-proof to shelter them from uncomfortable natural noises, thunderstorms, for instance. The horn was braying in the snooper-screen speaker.

Somebody wondered what it was for. Gafredo laughed. I thought at first that it was a war-horn. It isn't. It's a peace-horn, he said. Public tranquilizer. The first day they brought it out and blew it at us to make us peaceable. Now I see why Sonny is rejected and persecuted, Anna was saying.

He must make all sorts of horrible noises that he can't hear. That's not the word. We have none of it. and nobody but his mother can stand being near him. Like me, Lillian said, now I understand. Just think of the most revolting thing that can be done to you physically. That's what I do to them every time I speak. And I always thought I had a nice voice, she added pathetically.

You have, for Terrans, Ayesha said. For savants, you'll just have to change it. But how? Use an analyzer. Train it. That was why I took up sonics in the first place. I had a voice like a crow with a sore throat. But by practicing with an analyzer, an hour a day,

I gave myself an entirely different voice in a couple of months. Just try to get some pump-sounding frequencies into it like Lewis's. But why? I'm no use here. I'm a linguist. And these people haven't any language that I could ever learn, and they couldn't even learn ours. They couldn't learn to make sounds as sounds. You've been doing very good work with Mom on those ideographs, Mallard said. Keep it up till

you've taught her the lingua-tera basic vocabulary, and with her help, we can train a few more. They can be our interpreters. We can write what we want them to say to the others. It'll be clumsy, but it'll work. And it's about the only thing I can think of that will. And it will improve in time, Ayesha added. And we can make vocoders and visualizers. Paul, you have authority to requisition personnel from the ship's company. Draft me.

I'll stay here and work on it. The rumpus in the village plaza was getting worse. The Lord Mayor and his adherents were being outshouted by the opposition. Better do something about that in a hurry, Paul, if you don't want a lot of swanth's shot, Gafredo said. Give that another half hour, and we'll have visitors with bows and spears. Ayesha, you have a recording of the pump, Ballard said. Load a record player onto a jeep and fly over the village and play it for them.

Do it right away. Anna, get mom in here. We want to get her to tell that gang that from now on, at noon and for a couple of hours after sunset when the work's done, there will be free public pump concerts over the village plaza. Ayesha and her warrant officer helper and a Marine lieutenant went out hastily. Everybody else faced the screen to watch. In fifteen minutes an air-cheap was coming in on the village.

As it circled low a new sound, the steady thug-thug-thug-thug of the pump began. The yelling and twittering and the blaring of the peace-horn died out almost at once. As the jeep circled down to housetop level, the two contending faction clumps broke apart. Their component individuals moved into the center of the plaza and squatted, staring up, letting the delicious waves of sound caress them. Do we have to send a detail in a Jeep to do that twice a day? Gafredo asked. We keep a snooper over the village.

Fit it with a loud speaker and a timer. It can give them their thug-thug on schedule automatically. We might give the Lord Mayor a recording and a player and let him decide when the people ought to listen, if that's the word to it, Darver said. Then it would be something of their own. No, he spoke so vehemently that the other started. You know what we're.

would happen? Nobody would be able to turn it off. They'd all be hypnotized or doped or whatever it is. They'd just sit in a circle around it till they starve to death, and when the power unit gave out the record player would be surrounded by a ring of skeletons. We'll just have to keep on playing it for them ourselves. Terran's burden. They'll give us a sanction over them, Gafredo observed. Extra thug-thug, if they're very good. shut it off on them if they act nasty and find out what lillian has in her voice that the rest of us don't have and make a good loud recording of that and stash it away along with the rest of the heavy weapons ammunition you know you're not going to have any trouble at all when we go down country to talk to the king or whatever this is better than fire water ever was we must never misuse our advantage lewis malard said seriously We must use it only for their good.

He really meant it, only you had to know some general history to study technological history, and it seemed to him that that pious assertion had been made a few times before. Some of the others who had made it had really meant it, too, but that had made little difference in the long run. Feon and Anna were talking enthusiastically about the work ahead of them. I don't know where your subject ends and mind begins, Anna was saying. We'll just have to handle it between us. What are we going to call it?

We certainly can't call it hearing. None auditory sonic sense is the only thing I can think of, Fayon said. And that's such a clumsy term. Mark, you thought of it first. Anna said, what do you think? None auditory sonic sense. It isn't any worse than domesticated times. C, and that got cut down to size.

Nodzance. End of Part 5. End of Nodzance by H. Beam Piper.