"I don't know what we're going to do next," she admitted. "Glenn
Orent and Anna and I were on it all night, and we're nowhere. We
have about a hundred wordlike sounds isolated, and twenty or so are
used repeatedly, and we can't assign a meaning to any of them. And
none of the Svants ever reacted the same way twice to anything we
said to them. There's just no one-to-one relationship anywhere."
"I'm beginning to doubt they have a language," the Navy intelligence
officer said. "Sure, they make a lot of vocal noise. So do chipmunks."
"They have to have a language," Anna de Jong declared. "No sapient
thought is possible without verbalization."
"Well, no society like that is possible without some means of
communication," Karl Dorver supported her from the other flank.
He seemed to have made that point before. "You know," he added,
"I'm beginning to wonder if it mightn't be telepathy."
He evidently hadn't suggested that before. The others looked at
him in surprise. Anna started to say, "Oh, I doubt if--" and then
stopped.
"I know, the race of telepaths is an old gimmick that's been used in
new-planet adventure stories for centuries, but maybe we've finally
found one.
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