st," Anna interpolated.

"When I tried it, they acted like a lot of puppies being petted,
and when Mark tried it, they were simply baffled. I watched Mark
explaining that steel knives were dangerously sharp; they got the
demonstration, but when he tried to tie words onto it, it threw
them completely."

"ALL RIGHT. Pass that," Loughran conceded. "But if they have
telepathy, why do they use spoken words?"

"Oh, I can answer that," Anna said. "Say they communicated by speech
originally, and developed their telepathic faculty slowly and without
realizing it. They'd go on using speech, and since the message would
be received telepathically ahead of the spoken message, nobody would
pay any attention to the words as such. Everybody would have a spoken
language of his own; it would be sort of the instrumental
accompaniment to the song."

"Some of them don't bother speaking," Karl nodded. "They just toot."

"I'll buy that, right away," Loughran agreed. "In mating, or
in group-danger situations, telepathy would be a race-survival
characteristic. It would be selected for genetically, and the
non-gifted strains would tend to die out."

It wouldn't do. It wouldn't do at all. He said so.

"Look at their technology. We either have a young race, just emerged
from savagery, or an old, stagnant race. All indications seem to
favor the latter. A young race would not have time to develop
telepathy as Anna suggests. An old race would have gone much farther
than these people have. Progress is a matter of communication and
pooling ideas and discoveries. Make a trend-graph of technological
progress on Terra; every big jump comes after an improvement in
communications. The printing press; railways and steamships; the
telegraph; radio. Then think how telepathy would speed up progress."

* * * * *

The sun was barely past noon meridian before the Svants, who had
ventured down into the fields at sunrise, were returning to the
mound-village. In the snooper-screen, they could be seen coming up
in tunics and breechclouts, entering houses, and emerging in long
robes. There seemed to be no bows or spears in evidence, but the big
horn sounded occasionally. Paul Meillard was pleased. Even if it had
been by sign-talk, which he rated with worm-fishing for trout or
shooting sitting rabbits, he had gotten something across to them.

When they went to the village, at 1500, they had trouble getting
their lorry down. A