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These wheels, now; machined steel hubs, steel rims, tubular steel spokes, drop-forged and machined axles. The Svants wouldn't be able to copy them in a thousand years. Well, in a hundred, if somebody showed them where and how to mine iron and how to smelt and work it. And how to build a steam engine. He went over and pulled a hoe out of one of the bundles.
"You have, for Terrans," Ayesha said. "For Svants, you'll just have to change it." "But how ?" "Use an analyzer; train it. That was why I took up sonics, in the first place. I had a voice like a crow with a sore throat, but by practicing with an analyzer, an hour a day, I gave myself an entirely different voice in a couple of months.
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.
His three companions agreed that that was the word for self, but that was as far as the agreement went. They rendered it, respectively, as "Pwink," "Tweelt" and "Kroosh." Gofredo gave a barking laugh. He was right; anything that could go wrong would go wrong. Lillian used a word; it was not a ladylike word at all. The Svants looked at them as though wondering what could possibly be the matter.
Sonny looked at the picture Svants seemed to have pictoral sense, for which make us thankful! and then caught his mother's sleeve and showed it to her. Mom didn't get it. Sonny took the pencil and drew another animal, with a pole travois. He made gestures. A travois dragged; it went slow. A wagon had wheels that went around; it went fast. So Lillian and Anna thought he was the village half-wit.
Hey, boss; whatta we gonna do? He patted them on the shoulders. "Take it easy." He hoped his tone would convey nonurgency. "We'll find something for you to do." He wasn't particularly happy about most of what was coming off. Giving these Svants tools was fine, but it was more important to give them technologies. The people on the ship hadn't thought of that.
Lillian took him aside, out of earshot of the two Svants, after lunch. She was almost distracted. "Mark, I don't know what I'm going to do. She's like the others. Every time I open my mouth in front of her, she's simply horrified. It's as though my voice does something loathsome to her. And I'm the one who's supposed to learn to talk to them."
Blades stamped out with a power press, welded to tubular steel handles. Well, wood for hoe handles was hard to come by on a spaceship, even a battle cruiser almost half a mile in diameter; he had to admit that. And they were about two thousand per cent more efficient than the bronze scrapers the Svants used. That wasn't the idea, though.
And none of the Svants ever reacted the same way twice to anything we said to them. There's just no one-to-one relationship anywhere." "I'm beginning to doubt they have a language," the Navy intelligence officer said. "Sure, they make a lot of vocal noise. So do chipmunks." "They have to have a language," Anna de Jong declared. "No sapient thought is possible without verbalization."
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.
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