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 idea what's
back of them, or what kind of a neural hookup is connected to them.
I wish I knew how these people dispose of their dead. I need a
couple of fresh cadavers. Too bad they aren't warlike. Nothing like
a good bloody battle to advance the science of anatomy, and what we
don't know about Svant anatomy is practically the entire subject."

"I should imagine the animals hear in the same way," Meillard said.
"When the wagon wheels and the hoes and the blacksmith tools come
down from the ship, we'll trade for cattle."

"When they make the second landing in the mountains, I'm going to do
a lot of hunting," Loughran added. "I'll get wild animals for you."

"Well, I'm going to assume that the vocal noises they make are
meaningful speech," Lillian Ransby said. "So far, I've just been
trying to analyze them for phonetic values. Now I'm going to analyze
them for sound-wave patterns. No matter what goes on inside th