"H. Beam Piper - Naudsonce" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

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
soundwave patterns. No matter what goes on inside their private nervous systems, the sounds exist as
waves in the public atmosphere. I'm going to assume that the Lord Mayor and his stooges were all trying
to say the same thing when they were pointing to themselves, and I'm going to see if all four of those
sounds have any common characteristic."

By the time dinner was over, they were all talking in circles, none of them hopefully. They all made
recordings of the speech about the slithy toves in the Malemute Saloon; Lillian wanted to find out what
was different about them. Luis Gofredo saw to it that the camp itself would be visible-lighted, and
beyond the lights he set up more photoelectric robot sentries and put a couple of snoopers to circling on
contragravity, with infra-red lights and receptors. He also insisted that all his own men and all Dave
Questell's Navy construction engineers keep their weapons ready to hand. The natives in the village were
equally distrustful. They didn't herd the cattle up from the meadows where they had been pastured, but
they lighted watchfires along the edge of the mound as soon as it became dark.

It was three hours after nightfall when something on the indicator board for the robot sentries went off
like a startled rattlesnake. Everybody, talking idly or concentrating on writing up the day's observations,
stiffened. Luis Gofredo, dozing in a chair, was on his feet instantly and crossing the hut to the instruments.
His second-in-command, who had been playing chess with Willi Schallenmacher, rose and snatched his
belt from the back of his chair, putting it on.

"Take it easy," Gofredo said. "Probably just a cow or a horseтАФlocal equivalentтАФthat's strayed over
from the other side."

He sat down in front of one of the snooper screens and twisted knobs on the remote controls. The
monochrome view, transformed from infra red, rotated as the snooper circled and changed course. The
other screen showed the camp receding and the area around it widening as its snooper gained altitude.

"It's not a big party," Gofredo was saying. "I can't seeтАФ Oh, yes I can. Only two of them."

The humanoid figures, one larger than the other, were moving cautiously across the fields, crouching low.
The snooper went down toward them, and then he recognized them. The man and woman whom the
blue-robed villager had tried to shove out of the queue, that afternoon. Gofredo recognized them, too.

"Your friends, Mark. Harry," he told his subordinate, "go out and pass the word around. Only two, and
we think they're friendly. Keep everybody out of sight; we don't want to scare them away."

The snooper followed closely behind them. The man was no longer wearing his apron; the woman's tunic
was even more tattered and soiled. She was leading him by the hand. Now and then, she would stop and
rum her head to the rear. The snooper over the mound showed nothing but half a dozen fire-watchers
dozing by their fires. Then the pair were at the edge of the camp lights. As they advanced, they seemed