Naudsonce | Page 9

out and he was thumbing the safety off.
The Svant stopped short, then dropped the knife, ducked his head, and
threw his arms over it to shield his comb. He backed away a few steps,
then turned and bolted into the nearest house. The others, including the
woman in the ragged tunic, were twittering in alarm. Only the man in
the leather apron was calm; he was saying, tonelessly,
"Ghrooogh-ghrooogh."
Luis Gofredo was coming up on the double, followed by three of his
riflemen.
"What happened, Mark? Trouble?"

"All over now." He told Gofredo what had happened. Dorver was still
objecting:
"... Social precedence; the Svant may have been right, according to
local customs."
"Local customs be damned!" Gofredo became angry. "This is a Terran
Federation handout; we make the rules, and one of them is, no pushing
people out of line. Teach the buggers that now and we won't have to
work so hard at it later." He called back over his shoulder, "Situation
under control; get the show going again."
The natives were all grimacing heartbrokenly with pleasure. Maybe the
one who got thrown on his ear--no, he didn't have any--was not one of
the more popular characters in the village.
"You just pulled your gun, and he dropped the knife and ran?" Gofredo
asked. "And the others were scared, too?"
"That's right. They all saw you fire yours; the noise scared them."
Gofredo nodded. "We'll avoid promiscuous shooting, then. No use
letting them find out the noise won't hurt them any sooner than we have
to."
Paul Meillard had worked out a way to distribute the picks and shovels
and axes. Considering each house as representing a family unit, which
might or might not be the case, there were picks and shovels enough to
go around, and an ax for every third house. They took them around in
an airjeep and left them at the doors. The houses, he found, weren't
adobe at all. They were built of logs, plastered with adobe on the
outside. That demolished his theory that the houses were torn down
periodically, and left the mound itself unexplained.
The wheelbarrows and the grindstone and the two crosscut saws were
another matter. Nobody was quite sure that the (nobility?
capitalist-class? politicians? prominent citizens?) wouldn't simply
appropriate them for themselves. Paul Meillard was worried about that;

everybody else was willing to let matters take their course. Before they
were off the ground in their vehicles, a violent dispute had begun, with
a bedlam of jabbering and shrieking. By the time they were landing at
the camp, the big laminated leather horn had begun to bellow.
* * * * *
One of the huts had been fitted as contact-team headquarters, with all
the view and communication screens installed, and one end partitioned
off and soundproofed for Lillian to study recordings in. It was cocktail
time when they returned; conversationally, it was a continuation from
lunch. Karl Dorver was even more convinced than ever of his telepathic
hypothesis, and he had completely converted Anna de Jong to it.
"Look at that." He pointed at the snooper screen, which gave a view of
the plaza from directly above. "They're reaching an agreement already."
So they seemed to be, though upon what was less apparent. The horn
had stopped, and the noise was diminishing. The odd thing was that
peace was being restored, or was restoring itself, as the uproar had
begun--outwardly from the center of the plaza to the periphery of the
crowd. The same thing had happened when Gofredo had ordered the
submachine gun fired, and, now that he recalled, when he had dealt
with the line-crasher.
"Suppose a few of them, in the middle, are agreed," Anna said. "They
are all thinking in unison, combining their telepathic powers. They
dominate those nearest to them, who join and amplify their telepathic
signal, and it spreads out through the whole group. A mental
chain-reaction."
"That would explain the mechanism of community leadership, and I'd
been wondering about that," Dorver said, becoming more excited. "It's
a mental aristocracy; an especially gifted group of telepaths, in
agreement and using their powers in concert, implanting their opinions
in the minds of all the others. I'll bet the purpose of the horn is to
distract the thoughts of the others, so that they can be more easily
dominated. And the noise of the shots shocked them out of

communication with each other; no wonder they were frightened."
Bennet Fayon was far from convinced. "So far, this telepathy theory is
only an assumption. I find it a lot easier to assume some fundamental
difference between the way they translate sound into sense-data and the
way we do. We think those combs on top of their heads are their
external hearing organs, but we have no