“That was good, Mom,” Gofredo told her. “Now, you and Sonny come along; we’ll issue you equipment and find you billets.” He added, “What in blazes are we going to feed them; Extee Three?”
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 coveralls; Lillian gave the woman a lavender bathrobe, and Anna contributed a red scarf. They found them quarters in 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, Bennet?” Meillard asked, when the two Svants 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 rule’s not reversible. Things we eat might kill them,” Fayon said. “Meats will be especially dangerous. And no caffeine, and no alcohol.”
“Alcohol won’t hurt them,” Schallenmacher 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. C2H5OH is the same on any planet.”
“Well, we’ll get native foodstuffs tomorrow,” Meillard 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 Sonny’s the village half-wit.”
Anna de Jong agreed. “Even if we don’t understand Svant 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!” Dorver 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 seventeen-twenty cycles. The odd thing is that when I try to repeat the sound, it isn’t there.”
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 handphone 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 handphone 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
