Meillard was really worried, now. So was Bennet 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,” Meillard said. “It’s keeping them from their work in the fields. For all we know, it may cause them to lose a 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 the 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!” Meillard called out. “Cut the power off.”
The thugg-thugg-ing stopped. The Lord Mayor rose, made an odd salaamlike bow toward the Terrans, and then turned on the people, striking with his staff and shrieking at them. A few got to their feet and joined him, screaming, pushing, tugging. Others joined. In a little while, they were all on their feet, straggling away across the fields.
Dave Questell wanted to know what it meant; Meillard explained.
“Well, what are 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 Gofredo worrying. “This happens every time we colonize an inhabited planet. We give the natives something new. Then we 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.”
Luis Gofredo was also a specialist, speaking on his subject.
While they were at lunch, Charley Loughran screened in from the other camp and wanted to talk to Bennet Fayon.
“A funny thing, Bennet. I took a shot at a bird … no, a flying 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, Charley?” Ayesha Keithley called from the table.
“Eight-point-five Mars-Consolidated pistol,” Loughran said. “I’d 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?” Fayon asked.
“You want to bet it didn’t?” she countered.
Nobody did.
Mom was sulky. She didn’t like what Dave Questell’s men were doing to the nice-noise-place. Ayesha and Lillian consoled her by taking 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 playacting. He had learned about thirty ideographs; 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.
Questell got the pump house mounded over. Ayesha came out and tried a sound-meter, and also Mom, on it while the pump was running. Neither reacted.
A good many Svants 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 to and cooperative with the Terrans. The snooper over the village reported excitement in the plaza.
Bennet Fayon had taken an airjeep to the other camp immediately after lunch. He was back by 1500, accompanied by Loughran. They carried a cloth-wrapped package into Fayon’s dissecting-room. At cocktail time, Paul Meillard had to go and get them.
“Sorry,” Fayon said, joining the group. “Didn’t notice how late it was getting. We’re still doing a post on this svant-bat; that’s what Charley’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 Ayesha’s bet, after I left. If they did, she collects. The large outer membranes in the comb seem to be unaffected, but there is considerable compression of the small round ones inside, in just one area, and more on the left side than on the right. Charley 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 Fayon. “The baby’s yours, Bennet,” she said. “This
