and these people haven't
any language that I could ever learn, and they couldn't even learn
ours. They couldn't learn to make sounds, as sounds."

"You've been doing very good work with Mom on those ideographs,"
Meillard said. "Keep it up till you've taught her the Lingua Terra
Basic vocabulary, and with her help we can train a few more. They
can be our interpreters; we can write what we want them to say to
the others. It'll be clumsy, but it will work, and it's about the
only thing I can think of that will."

"And it will improve in time," Ayesha added. "And we can make
vocoders and visibilizers. Paul, you have authority to requisition
personnel from the ship's company. Draft me; I'll stay here and
work on it."

The rumpus in the village plaza was getting worse. The Lord Mayor
and his adherents were being out-shouted by the opposition.

"Better do something about that in a hurry, Paul, if you don't want
a lot of Svants shot," Gofredo said. "Give that another half hour
and we'll have visitors, with bows and spears."

"Ayesha, you have a recording of the pump," Meillard said. "Load a
record-player onto a jeep and fly over the village and play it for
them. Do it right away. Anna, get Mom in here. We want to get her to
tell that gang that from now on, at noon and for a couple of hours
after sunset, when the work's done, there will be free public
pump-concerts, over the village plaza."

* * * * *

Ayesha and her warrant-officer helper and a Marine lieutenant
went out hastily. Everybody else faced the screen to watch. In
fifteen minutes, an airjeep was coming in on the village. As it
circled low, a new sound, the steady _thugg-thugg, thugg-thugg_
of the pump, began.

The yelling and twittering and the blaring of the peace-horn died out
almost at once. As the jeep circled down to housetop level, the two
contending faction-clumps broke apart; their component individuals
moved into the center of the plaza and squatted, staring up, letting
the delicious waves of sound caress them.

"Do we have to send a detail in a jeep to do that twice a day?"
Gofredo asked. "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 o