The Second H. Beam Piper Omnibus

by H. Beam Piper

  Charley Loughran and Willi Schallenmacher had gone up to the ship on one of the landing craft; they accompanied the landing party that went down into the mountains. Ayesha Keithley arrived late in the afternoon on another landing craft, with five or six tons of instruments and parts and equipment, and a male Navy warrant-officer helper.

  They looked around the lab Lillian had been using at one end of the headquarters hut.

  "This won't do,” the girl Navy officer said. “We can't get a quarter of the apparatus we're going to need in here. We'll have to build something."

  Dave Questell was drawn into the discussion. Yes, he could put up something big enough for everything the girls would need to install, and soundproof it. Concrete, he decided; they'd have to wait till he got the water line down and the pump going, though.

  There was a crowd of natives in the fields, gaping at the Terran camp, the next morning, and Gofredo decided to kill the animal-until they learned the native name, they were calling it Domesticated Type C. It was herded out where everyone could watch, and a Marine stepped forward unslung his rifle took a kneeling position, and aimed at it. It was a hundred and fifty yards away. Mom had come out to see what was going on; Sonny and Howell, who had been consulting by signs over the construction of a wagon, were standing side by side. The Marine squeezed his trigger. The rifle banged, and the Domesticated-C bounded into the air, dropped, and kicked a few times and was still. The natives, however, missed that part of it; they were howling piteously and rubbing their heads. All but Sonny. He was just mildly surprised at what had happened to the Dom.-C.

  Sonny, it would appear, was stone deaf.

  * * * *

  As anticipated, there was another uproar later in the morning when the ditching machine started north across the meadow. A mob of Svants, seeing its relentless progress toward a field of something like turnips, gathered in front of it, twittering and brandishing implements of agriculture, many of them Terran-made.

  Paul Meillard was ready for this. Two lorries went out; one loaded with Marines, who jumped off with their rifles ready. By this time, all the Svants knew what rifles would do beside make a noise. Meillard, Dorver, Gofredo and a few others got out of the other vehicle, and unloaded presents. Gofredo did all the talking. The Svants couldn't understand him, but they liked it. They also liked the presents, which included a dozen empty half-gallon rum demijohns, tarpaulins, and a lot of assorted knickknacks. The pipeline went through.

  He and Sonny got the forge set up. There was no fuel for it. A party of Marines had gone out to the woods to the east to cut wood; when they got back, they'd burn some charcoal in the pit that had been dug beside the camp. Until then, he and Sonny were drawing plans for a wooden wheel with a metal tire when Lillian came out of the headquarters hut with a clipboard under her arm. She motioned to him.

  "Come on over,” he told her. “You can talk in front of Sonny; he won't mind. He can't hear."

  "Can't hear?” she echoed. “You mean-?"

  "That's right. Sonny's stone deaf. He didn't even hear that rifle going off. The only one of this gang that has brains enough to pour sand out of a boot with directions on the bottom of the heel, and he's a total linguistic loss."

  "So he isn't a half-wit, after all."

  "He's got an IQ close to genius level. Look at this; he never saw a wheel before yesterday; now he's designing one."

  Lillian's eyes widened. “So that's why Mom's so sharp about sign-talk. She's been doing it all his life.” Then she remembered what she had come out to show him, and held out the clipboard. “You know how that analyzer of mine works? Well, here's what Ayesha's going to do. After breaking a sound into frequency bands instead of being photographed and projected, each band goes to an analyzer of its own, and is projected on its own screen. There'll be forty of them, each for a band of a hundred cycles, from zero to four thousand. That seems to be the Svant vocal range."

  The diagram passed from hand to hand during cocktail time, before dinner. Bennet Fayon had been working all day dissecting the animal they were all calling a domsee, a name which would stick even if and when they learned the native name. He glanced disinterestedly at the drawing, then looked again, more closely. Then he set down the drink he was holding in his other hand and studied it intently.

  "You know what you have here?” he asked. “This is a very close analogy to the hearing organs of that animal I was working on. The comb, as we've assumed, is the external organ. It's covered with small flaps and fissures. Back of each fissure is a long, narrow membrane; they're paired, one on each side of the comb, and from them nerves lead to clusters of small round membranes. Nerves lead from them to a complex nerve-cable at the bottom of the comb and into the brain at the base of the skull. I couldn't understand how the system functioned, but now I see it. Each of the larger membranes on the outside responds to a sound-frequency band, and the small ones on the inside break the bands down to individual frequencies."

  "How many of the little ones are there?” Ayesha asked.

  "Thousands of them; the inner comb is simply packed with them. Wait; I'll show you."

  He rose and went away, returning with a sheaf of photo-enlargements and a number of blocks of lucite in which specimens were mounted. Everybody examined them. Anna de Jong, as a practicing psychologist, had an M.D. and to get that she'd had to know a modicum of anatomy; she was puzzled.

  "I can't understand how they hear with those things. I'll grant that the membranes will respond to sound, but I can't see how they transmit it."

  "But they do hear,” Meillard said. “Their musical instruments, their reactions to our voices, the way they are affected by sounds like gunfire—"

  "They hear, but they don't hear in the same way we do,” Fayon replied. “If you can't be convinced by anything else, look at these things, and compare them with the structure of the human ear, or the ear of any member of any other sapient race we're ever contacted. That's what I've been saying from the beginning.” “They have sound-perception to an extent that makes ours look almost like deafness,” Ayesha Keithley said. “I wish I could design a sound-detector one-tenth as good as this must be."

  Yes. The way the Lord Mayor said fwoonk and the way Paul Meillard said it sounded entirely different to them. Of course, fwoonk and pwink and tweelt and kroosh sounded alike to them, but let's don't be too picky about things.

  * * * *

  There were no hot showers that evening; Dave Questell's gang had trouble with the pump and needed some new parts made up aboard the ship. They were still working on it the next morning. He had meant to start teaching Sonny blacksmithing, but during the evening Lillian and Anna had decided to try teaching Mom a nonphonetic, ideographic, alphabet, and in the morning they co-opted Sonny to help. Deprived of his disciple, he strolled over to watch the work on the pump. About twenty Svants had come in from the fields and were also watching, from the meadow.

  After a while, the job was finished. The petty officer in charge of the work pushed in the switch, and the pump started, sucking dry with a harsh racket. The natives twittered in surprise. Then the water came, and the pump settled down to a steady thugg-thugg, thugg-thugg.

  The Svants seemed to like the new sound; they grimaced in pleasure and moved closer; within forty or fifty feet, they all squatted on the ground and sat entranced. Others came in from the fields, drawn by the sound. They, too, came up and squatted, until there was a semicircle of them. The tank took a long time to fill; until it did, they all sat immobile and fascinated. Even after it stopped, many remained, hoping that it would start again. Paul Meillard began wondering, a trifle uneasily, if that would happen every time the pump went on.

  "They get a positive pleasure from it. It affects them the same way Luis’ voice does."

  "Mean I have a voice like a pump?” Gofredo demanded.

  "Well, I'm going to find out,” Ayesha Keithley said. “The next time that starts, I'm going to make a recording, and compare it with your voice-recording. I'll give fi
ve to one there'll be a similarity."

  Questell got the foundation for the sonics lab dug, and began pouring concrete. That took water, and the pump ran continuously that afternoon. Concrete-mixing took more water the next day, and by noon the whole village population, down to the smallest child, was massed at the pumphouse, enthralled. Mom was snared by the sound like any of the rest; only Sonny was unaffected. Lillian and Ayesha compared recordings of the voices of the team with the pump-sound; in Gofredo's they found an identical frequency-pattern.

  "We'll need the new apparatus to be positive about it, but it's there, all right,” Ayesha said. “That's why Luis’ voice pleases them."

  "That tags me; Old Pump-Mouth,” Gofredo said. “It'll get all through the Corps, and they'll be calling me that when I'm a four-star general, if I live that long."

  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 play-acting. 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 co-operative 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 isn't psychological. I won't accept a case of psychosomatic compound fracture."

  "Don't be too premature about it, Anna. I think that's more or less what you have, here."

  Everybody looked at him, surprised. His subject was comparative technology. The bio and psycho-sciences were completely outside his field.

  "A lot of things have been bothering me, ever since the first contact. I'm beginning to think I'm on the edge of understanding them, now. Bennet, the higher life-forms here-the people, and that domsee, and Charley's svant-bat-are structurally identical with us. I don't mean gross structure, like ears and combs. I mean molecular and cellular and tissue structure. Is that right?"

  Fayon nodded. “Biology on this planet is exactly Terra type. Yes. With adequate safeguards, I'd even say you could make a viable tissue-graft from a Svant to a Terran, or vice versa."

  "Ayesha, would the sound waves from that pistol-shot in any conceivable way have the sort of physical effect we're considering?"

  "Absolutely not,” she said, and Luis Gofredo said: “I've been shot at and missed with pistols at closer range than that."

  "Then it was the effect on the animal's nervous system."

  Anna shrugged. “It's still Bennet's baby. I'm a psychologist, not a neurologist."

  "What I've been saying, all along,” Fayon reiterated complacently. “Their hearing is
different from ours. This proves it.

  "It proves that they don't hear at all."

  He had expected an explosion; he wasn't disappointed. They all contradicted him, many derisively. Signal reactions. Only Paul Meillard made the semantically appropriate response:

  "What do you mean, Mark?"

  "They don't hear sound; they feel it. You all saw what they have inside their combs. Those things don't transmit sound like the ears of any sound-sensitive life-form we've ever seen. They transform sound waves into tactile sensations."

  Fayon cursed, slowly and luridly. Anna de Jong looked at him wide-eyed. He finished his cocktail and poured another. In the snooper screen, what looked like an indignation meeting was making uproar in the village plaza. Gofredo cut the volume of the speaker even lower.

  "That would explain a lot of things,” Meillard said slowly. “How hard it was for them to realize that we didn't understand when they talked to us. A punch in the nose feels the same to anybody. They thought they were giving us bodily feelings. They didn't know we were insensible to them."

  "But they do ... they do have a language,” Lillian faltered. “They talk."

  "Not the way we understand it. If they want to say, ‘Me,’ it's tickle-pinch-rub, even if it sounds like fwoonk to us, when it doesn't sound like pwink or tweelt or kroosh. The tactile sensations, to a Svant, feel no more different than a massage by four different hands. Analogous to a word pronounced by four different voices, to us. They'll have a code for expressing meanings in tactile sensation, just as we have a code for expressing meanings in audible sound."

  "Except that when a Svant tells another, ‘I am happy,’ or ‘I have a stomach-ache,’ he makes the other one feel that way too,” Anna said. “That would carry an awful lot more conviction. I don't imagine symptom-swapping is popular among Svants. Karl! You were nearly right, at that. This isn't telepathy, but it's a lot like it."