United States or Canada ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He was wondering what sort of work he could invent for her when Karl Dorver called to him from the door of the headquarters hut. "Mark, can you spare Mom for a while?" he asked. "We want her to look at pictures and show us which of the animals are meat-cattle, and which of the crops are ripe." "Think you can get anything out of her?" "Sign-talk, yes. We may get a few words from her, too."
"We keep a snooper over the village; fit it with a loud-speaker and a timer; it can give them their thugg-thugg, on schedule, automatically." "We might give the Lord Mayor a recording and a player and let him decide when the people ought to listen if that's the word to it," Dorver said. "Then it would be something of their own." "No!" He spoke so vehemently that the others started.
Then he said, "You," to Luis Gofredo. It went around the contact team; when it came to him, he returned it to point of origin. "I don't think they get it at all," he added in a whisper. "They ought to," Lillian said. "Every language has a word for self and a word for person-addressed." "Well, look at them," Karl Dorver invited.
The big things, the size of rhinoceroses, are draft animals and nothing else; they're not eaten," Dorver said. "I don't know whether the meat isn't good, or is taboo, or they are too valuable to eat. They eat all the other three species, and milk two of them. I have an idea they grind their grain in big stone mortars as needed." That was right; he'd seen things like that.
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.
Major Gofredo, barely over the minimum Service height requirement; his name was Old Terran Spanish, but his ancestry must have been Polynesian, Amerind and Mongolian. Karl Dorver, the sociographer, six feet six, with red hair. Bennet Fayon, the biologist and physiologist, plump, pink-faced and balding. Willi Schallenmacher, with a bushy black beard....
"Well, no society like that is possible without some means of communication," Karl Dorver supported her from the other flank. He seemed to have made that point before. "You know," he added, "I'm beginning to wonder if it mightn't be telepathy." He evidently hadn't suggested that before. The others looked at him in surprise. Anna started to say, "Oh, I doubt if " and then stopped.
"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!"
"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.
The other stuff would be harder to distribute, and Paul Meillard and Karl Dorver were arguing about how to handle it. If they weren't careful, a lot of new bowie knives would get bloodied. "Have them form a queue," Anna suggested. "That will give them the idea of equal sharing, and we'll be able to learn something about their status levels and social hierarchy and agonistic relations."
Word Of The Day