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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.
"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 officer on the Hubert Penrose. Dave Questell mentioned that she'd had a hard day, and was probably making sack-time, and she wouldn't welcome being called at 0130. Nobody seemed to have realized that it had gotten that late.
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.
"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 five 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.
"Ayesha's coming down this afternoon, with a lot of equipment," she said. "We're not exactly going to count air molecules in the sound waves, but we'll do everything short of that. We'll need more lab space, soundproofed." "Tell Dave Questell what you want," Meillard said. "Do you really think you can get anything?" She shrugged. "If there's anything there to get.
There's a whole string of them ahead. At least, we sent them away happy. I hope." "You're going to make permanent camp where you are now?" one of the other officers asked. Lieutenant-Commander Dave Questell; ground engineering and construction officer. "What do you need?" There were two viewscreens from pickups aboard the 2500-foot battle cruiser.
"Why would they mound the village up?" Questell, in the screen wondered. "You don't think the river gets up that high, do you? Because if it does " Schallenmacher shook his head. "There just isn't enough watershed, and there's too much valley. I'll be very much surprised if that stream, there" he nodded at the hundred-power screen "ever gets more than six inches over the bank."
The big town was two hundred and fifty miles down the valley, at the forks of the main river, a veritable metropolis of almost three thousand people. That was where the treaty would have to be negotiated. "You'll want more huts. You'll want a water tank, and a pipeline to that stream below you, and a pump," Questell said. "You think a month?" Meillard looked at Lillian Ransby. "What do you think?"
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.
"He has enough to worry about now, without starting him on whether we'll do these people more harm than good." Two more landing craft had come down from the Hubert Penrose; they found Dave Questell superintending the unloading of more prefab-huts, and two were already up that had been brought down with the first landing. A name for the planet had also arrived. "Svantovit," Karl Dorver told him.
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