I watched Mark
explaining that steel knives were dangerously sharp; they got the
demonstration, but when he tried to tie words onto it, it threw
them completely."
"ALL RIGHT. Pass that," Loughran conceded. "But if they have
telepathy, why do they use spoken words?"
"Oh, I can answer that," Anna said. "Say they communicated by speech
originally, and developed their telepathic faculty slowly and without
realizing it. They'd go on using speech, and since the message would
be received telepathically ahead of the spoken message, nobody would
pay any attention to the words as such. Everybody would have a spoken
language of his own; it would be sort of the instrumental
accompaniment to the song."
"Some of them don't bother speaking," Karl nodded. "They just toot."
"I'll buy that, right away," Loughran agreed. "In mating, or
in group-danger situations, telepathy would be a race-survival
characteristic. It would be selected for genetically, and the
non-gifted strains would tend to die out."
It wouldn't do. It wouldn't do at all. He said so.
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