pattern on high-speed film, automatically developed it, and
then made a print-copy and projected the film in slow motion on a
screen. When she pressed a button, a recorded voice said, "_Fwoonk_."
An instant later, a pattern of vertical lines in various colors and
lengths was projected on the screen.

"Those green lines," she said. "That's it. Now, watch this."

She pressed another button, got the photoprint out of a slot, and
propped it beside the screen. Then she picked up a hand-phone and
said, "_Fwoonk_," into it. It sounded like the first one, but the
pattern that danced onto the screen was quite different. Where the
green had been, there was a patch of pale-blue lines. She ran the
other three Svants' voices, each saying, presumably, "Me." Some were
mainly up in blue, others had a good deal of yellow and orange, but
they all had the little patch of green lines.

"Well, that seems to be the information," he said. "The rest is
just noise."

"Maybe one of them is saying, 'John Doe, _me_, son of Joe Blow,'
and another is saying, 'Tough guy, _me_; lick anybody in town.'"

"All in one syllable?" Then he shrugged. How did he know what these
people could pack into one syllable? He picked up the hand-phone and
said, "Fwoonk," into it. The pattern, a little deeper in color and
with longer lines, was recognizably like hers, and unlike any of
the Svants'.

* * * * *

The others came in, singly and in pairs and threes. They watched
the colors dance on the screen to picture the four Svant words
which might or might not all mean _me_. They tried to duplicate
them. Luis Gofredo and Willi Schallenmacher came closest of anybody.
Bennet Fayon was still insisting that the Svants had a perfectly
comprehensible language--to other Svants. Anna de Jong had started to
veer a little away from the Dorver Hypothesis. There was a difference
between event-level sound, which was a series of waves of alternately
crowded and rarefied molecules of air, and object-level sound, which
was an auditory sensation inside the nervous system, she admitted.
That, Fayon crowed, was what he'd been saying all along; their
auditory system was probably such that _fwoonk_ and _pwink_ and
_tweelt_ and _kroosh_ all sounded alike to them.

By this time, _fwoonk_ and _pwink_ and _tweelt_ and _kroosh_ had
become swear words among the joint Space Navy-Colonial Office
contact team.

"Well, if I hear the two sounds alike, why does