She pressed another button, got the photoprint out of a slot, and propped it beside the screen. Then she picked up a hand-phone and said, "_Fwoonk_," into it. It sounded like the first one, but the pattern that danced onto the screen was quite different. Where the green had been, there was a patch of pale-blue lines. She ran the other three Svants' voices, each saying, presumably, "Me." Some were mainly up in blue, others had a good deal of yellow and orange, but they all had the little patch of green lines. "Well, that seems to be the information," he said. "The rest is just noise." "Maybe one of them is saying, 'John Doe, _me_, son of Joe Blow,' and another is saying, 'Tough guy, _me_; lick anybody in town.'" "All in one syllable?" Then he shrugged. How did he know what these people could pack into one syllable? He picked up the hand-phone and said, "Fwoonk," into it. The pattern, a little deeper in color and with longer lines, was recognizably like hers, and unlike any of the Svants'. * * * * * The others came in, singly and in pairs and threes. They watched the colors dance on the screen to picture the four Svant words which might or might not all mean _me_. They tried to duplicate them. Luis Gofredo and Willi Schallenmacher came closest of anybody. Bennet Fayon was still insisting that the Svants had a perfectly comprehensible language--to other Svants. Anna de Jong had started to veer a little away from the Dorver Hypothesis. There was a difference between event-level sound, which was a series of waves of alternately crowded and rarefied molecules of air, and object-level sound, which was an auditory sensation inside the nervous system, she admitted. That, Fayon crowed, was what he'd been saying all along; their auditory system was probably such that _fwoonk_ and _pwink_ and _tweelt_ and _kroosh_ all sounded alike to them. By this time, _fwoonk_ and _pwink_ and _tweelt_ and _kroosh_ had become swear words among the joint Space Navy-Colonial Office contact team. "Well, if I hear the two sounds alike, why doesn't the analyzer hear them alike?" Karl Dorver demanded. "It has better ears than you do, Karl. Look how many different frequencies there are in that word, all crowding up behind each other," Lillian said. "But it isn't sensitive or selective enough. I'm going to see what Ayesha Keithley can do about building me a better one." Ayesha was signals and detection officer on the _Hubert Penrose_. Dave Questell mentioned that she'd had a hard day, and was probably making sack-time, and she wouldn't welcome being called at 0130. Nobody seemed to have realized that it had gotten that late. "Well, I'll call the ship and have a recording made for her for when she gets up. But till we get something that'll sort this mess out and make sense of it, I'm stopped."