Odd indeed. If a Svant said something, he made sound waves; if she imitated the sound, she ought to imitate the wave pattern. He said so, and she agreed.
“But come back here and look at this,” she invited.
She had been using a visibilizing analyzer; in it, a sound was 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, “Fwoonk.” 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 photoprint out of a slot, and propped it beside the screen. Then she picked up a hand-phone and said, “Fwoonk,” 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 Svants’ voices, each saying, presumably, “Me.” Some were mainly up in 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 Joe 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 hand-phone and said, “Fwoonk,” into it. The pattern, a little deeper in color and with longer lines, was recognizably like hers, and unlike any of the Svants’.
The others came in, singly and in pairs and threes. They watched the colors dance on the screen to picture the four Svant words which might or might not all mean me. They tried to duplicate them. Luis Gofredo and Willi Schallenmacher came closest of anybody. Bennet Fayon was still insisting that the Svants had a perfectly comprehensible language—to other Svants. Anna de Jong had started to veer a little away from the Dorver Hypothesis. There was a difference between 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, Fayon crowed, was what he’d been saying all along; their auditory system was probably such that fwoonk and pwink and tweelt and kroosh all sounded alike to them.
By this time, fwoonk and pwink and tweelt and kroosh had 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?” Karl Dorver demanded.
“It has better ears than you do, Karl. Look how many different frequencies there are in that word, all crowding up behind each other,” Lillian said. “But it isn’t sensitive or selective enough. I’m going to see what Ayesha Keithley can do about building me a better one.”
Ayesha was signals and detection officer on the Hubert Penrose. Dave Questell mentioned that she’d had a hard day, and was probably making sack-time, and she wouldn’t welcome being called at 0130. Nobody seemed to have realized that it had gotten that late.
“Well, I’ll call the ship and have a recording made for her for 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,” Dorver told her. “What these people gibber at us doesn’t even make as much sense as the Shooting of Dan McJabberwock. 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. You see what we’re up against?”
“You don’t know what their vocal organs are like, do you?” the girl in naval uniform in the screen asked.
Lillian shook her head. “Bennet Fayon’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-string 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. Charley Loughran and Willi Schallenmacher, who were returning to the Hubert Penrose to join the other landing party, began assembling their luggage. The others went outside, Howell among them.
Mom and Sonny were watching the two craft grow larger and closer above, keeping close to a group of spacemen; Sonny 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 ghroogh-ghrooghing 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. Bennet Fayon 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. Fayon stopped short. “Unholy Saint Beelzebub, no!” he cried. The cook said something in reply, shrugging. Fayon came back, talking to himself.
“Terran carniculture pork,” he said, when he returned. “Zarathustra pool-ball fruit. Potato-flour hotcakes, with 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.”
Lillian 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 Questell what you want,” Meillard 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.”
The two sixty-foot collapsium-armored turtles settled to the ground and went off contragravity. 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. Hoes, in bundles. Scythe blades. A hand forge, with a crank-driven fan blower, and a hundred and fifty pound anvil, and sledges and cutters and swages and tongs.
Everybody was busy, and Mom and Sonny were fidgeting, gesturing toward the work with their own empty hands. Hey, boss; whatta we gonna do? He patted them on the shoulders.
“Take it easy.” He hoped his tone would convey nonurgency. “We’ll find something for you to do.”
He wasn’t particularly happy about most of what was coming off. Giving these Svants tools was fine, but it was more important 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 Svants 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 a power press, welded to tubular 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 two thousand per cent 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,
