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 Orent and Anna and I were on it all night, and we’re nowhere. We have about a hundred wordlike sounds isolated, and twenty or so are used repeatedly, and we can’t assign a meaning to any of them. And none of the Svants 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,” Karl Dorver 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’ve finally found one.”
“I don’t like it, Karl,” Loughran 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 boodly-oodly-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 wave length can’t be picked up with their sets.”
“The deuce it can’t,” Gofredo 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 gobbledygook 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. Pass that,” Loughran 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’d go on using speech, and since the message would be received telepathically ahead of the spoken message, nobody would pay any attention to the words as such. Everybody would have a spoken language of his own; it would be sort of the instrumental accompaniment to the song.”
“Some of them don’t bother speaking,” Karl nodded. “They just toot.”
“I’ll buy that, right away,” Loughran agreed. “In mating, or in group-danger 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 progress.”
The sun was barely past noon meridian before the Svants, who had ventured 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 breechclouts, entering houses, and emerging in long robes. There seemed to be no bows or spears in evidence, but the big horn sounded occasionally. Paul Meillard was pleased. Even if it had been by sign-talk, which he rated with worm-fishing for trout or shooting sitting rabbits, he had gotten 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 Meillard. 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 McJabberwock again,” he told Meillard. “This is where we came in yesterday.”
Something Meillard 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. “Fwoonk,” he said. Then he pointed to Meillard. “Hoonkle,” he said.
“They got it!” Lillian was hugging herself joyfully. “I knew they ought to!”
Meillard indicated himself and said, “Fwoonk.”
That wasn’t right. The village elder
