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

Yes. The way the Lord Mayor said fwoonk and the way Paul Meillard said it sounded entirely different
to them. Of course, fwoonk and pwink and tweelt and kroosh sounded alike to them, but let's don't be
too picky about things.

There were no hot showers that evening; Dave QuestellтАЩs gang had trouble with the pump and needed
some new parts made up aboard the ship. They were still working on it the next morning. He had meant
to start teaching Sonny blacksmithing, but during the evening Lillian and Anna had decided to try teaching
Mom a nonphonetic, ideographic, alphabet, and in the morning they co-opted Sonny to help. Deprived
of his disciple, he strolled over to watch the work on the pump. About twenty Svants had come in from
the fields and were also watching, from the meadow.

After a while, the job was finished. The petty officer in charge of the work pushed in the switch, and the
pump started, sucking dry with a harsh racket. The natives twittered in surprise. Then the water came,
and the pump settled down to a steady thugg-thugg, thugg-thugg.

The Svants seemed to like the new sound; they grimaced in pleasure and moved closer; within forty or
fifty feet, they all squatted on the ground and sat entranced. Others came in from the fields, drawn by the
sound. They, too, came up and squatted, until there was a semicircle of them. The tank took a long time
to fill; until it did, they all sat immobile and fascinated. Even after it stopped, many remained, hoping that it
would start again. Paul Meillard began wondering, a trifle uneasily, if that would happen every time the
pump went on.

"They get a positive pleasure from it. It affects them the same way Luis' voice does."
Mean I have a voice like a pump?" Gofredo demanded.

"Well, I'm going to find out," Ayesha Keithley said. "The next time that starts, I'm going to make a
recording, and compare it with your voice-recording. I'll give five to one there'll be a similarity."

Questell got the foundation for the sonics lab dug, and began pouring concrete. That took water, and the
pump ran continuously that afternoon. Concrete-mixing took more water the next day, and by noon the
whole village population, down to the smallest child, was massed at the pumphouse, enthralled. Mom
was snared by the sound like any of the rest; only Sonny was unaffected. Lillian and Ayesha compared
recordings of the voices of the team with the pump-sound; in Gofredo's they found an identical
frequency-pattern.

"We'll need the new apparatus to be positive about it, but it's there, all right," Ayesha said. "That's why
Luis' voice pleases them."

"That tags me: Old Pump-Mouth," Gofredo said. "It'll get all through the Corps, and they'll be calling me
that when I'm a four-star general, if I live that long."

Meillard was really worried, now. So was Bennet Fayon. He said so that afternoon at cocktail time.

"It's an addiction," he declared. "Once they hear it, they have no will to resist; they just squat and listen. I
don't know what it's doing to them, but I'm scared of it."

"I know one thing it's doing," Meillard said. "It's keeping them from their work in the fields. For all we
know, it may cause them to lose a crop they need badly for subsistence."

The native they had come to call the Lord Mayor evidently thought so, too. He was with the others, the