ted knickknacks. The
pipeline went through.

He and Sonny got the forge set up. There was no fuel for it.
A party of Marines had gone out to the woods to the east to cut
wood; when they got back, they'd burn some charcoal in the pit
that had been dug beside the camp. Until then, he and Sonny were
drawing plans for a wooden wheel with a metal tire when Lillian
came out of the headquarters hut with a clipboard under her arm.
She motioned to him.

"Come on over," he told her. "You can talk in front of Sonny;
he won't mind. He can't hear."

"Can't hear?" she echoed. "You mean--?"

"That's right. Sonny's stone deaf. He didn't even hear that rifle
going off. The only one of this gang that has brains enough to pour
sand out of a boot with directions on the bottom of the heel, and
he's a total linguistic loss."

"So he isn't a half-wit, after all."

"He's got an IQ close to genius level. Look at this; he never saw
a wheel before yesterday; now he's designing one."

[Illustration: _It's killing us it's so nice...._]

Lillian's eyes widened. "So that's why Mom's so sharp about
sign-talk. She's been doing it all his life." Then she remembered
what she had come out to show him, and held out the clipboard. "You
know how that analyzer of mine works? Well, here's what Ayesha's
going to do. After breaking a sound into frequency bands instead of
being photographed and projected, each band goes to an analyzer of
its own, and is projected on its own screen. There'll be forty of
them, each for a band of a hundred cycles, from zero to four
thousand. That seems to be the Svant vocal range."

The diagram passed from hand to hand during cocktail time, before
dinner. Bennet Fayon had been working all day dissecting the animal
they were all calling a _domsee_, a name which would stick even if
and when they learned the native name. He glanced disinterestedly at
the drawing, then looked again, more closely. Then he set down the
drink he was holding in his other hand and studied it intently.

"You know what you have here?" he asked. "This is a very close analogy
to the hearing organs of that animal I was working on. The comb, as
we've assumed, is the external organ. It's covered with small flaps
and fissures. Back of each fissure is a long, narrow membrane; they're
paired, one on each side of the comb, and from them nerves lead to
clusters of small round membranes. Nerves lead from them to a complex
nerve-cable at the bottom of the co