“What happened, Mark? Trouble?”
“All over now.” He told Gofredo what had happened. Dorver was still objecting:
“… Social precedence; the Svant may have been right, according to local customs.”
“Local customs be damned!” Gofredo 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 heartbrokenly 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?” Gofredo asked. “And the others were scared, too?”
“That’s right. They all saw you fire yours; the noise scared them.”
Gofredo 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 Meillard 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 ax for every third house. They took them around in an airjeep 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 crosscut saws were another matter. Nobody was quite sure that the (nobility? capitalist-class? politicians? prominent citizens?) wouldn’t simply appropriate them for themselves. Paul Meillard 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.
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 soundproofed for Lillian to study recordings in. It was cocktail time when they returned; conversationally, it was a continuation from lunch. Karl Dorver 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 seemed 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 Gofredo 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, are agreed,” 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,” Dorver said, becoming more excited. “It’s a mental aristocracy; an especially gifted group of telepaths, in agreement and 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.”
Bennet Fayon 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 a neural hookup is connected to them. I wish I knew how these people dispose 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 hear in the same way,” Meillard said. “When the wagon wheels and the hoes and the blacksmith tools come down from the ship, we’ll trade for cattle.”
“When they make the second landing in the mountains, I’m going to do a lot of hunting,” Loughran 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 toves in the Malemute Saloon; Lillian wanted to find out what was different about them. Luis Gofredo 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 contragravity, with infrared
