ing a lot of the empty wine and
whisky bottles that had been hoarded for the past four years.

At lunch, the talk was almost exclusively about the language problem.
Lillian Ransby, who had not gotten to sleep before sunrise and had
just gotten up, was discouraged.

"I don't know what we're going to do next," she admitted. "Glenn
Orent and Anna and I were on it all night, and we're nowhere. We
have about a hundred wordlike sounds isolated, and twenty or so are
used repeatedly, and we can't assign a meaning to any of them. 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."

"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.

"I know, the race of telepaths is an old gimmick that's been used in
new-planet adventure stories for centuries, but maybe we've finally
found one."

"I don't like it, Karl," Loughran said. "If they're telepaths, why
don't they understand us? And if they're telepaths, why do they talk
at all? And you can't convince me that this boodly-oodly-doodle of
theirs isn't talking."

"Well, our neural structure and theirs won't be nearly alike,"
Fayon said. "I know, this analogy between telepathy and radio
is full of holes, but it's good enough for this. Our wave length
can't be picked up with their sets."

"The deuce it can't," Gofredo contradicted. "I've been bothered
about that from the beginning. These people act as though they got
meaning from us. Not the meaning we intend, but some meaning. When
Paul made the gobbledygook speech, they all reacted in the same
way--frightened, and then defensive. The you-me routine simply
bewildered them, as we'd be at a set of semantically lucid but
self-contradictory statements. When Lillian tried to introduce
herself, they were shocked and horrified...."

"It looked to me like actual physical disgu