"Don't be too premature about it, Anna. I think that's more or less what you have, here." Everybody looked at him, surprised. His subject was comparative technology. The bio and psycho-sciences were completely outside his field. "A lot of things have been bothering me, ever since the first contact. I'm beginning to think I'm on the edge of understanding them, now. Bennet, the higher life-forms here--the people, and that domsee, and Charley's svant-bat--are structurally identical with us. I don't mean gross structure, like ears and combs. I mean molecular and cellular and tissue structure. Is that right?" Fayon nodded. "Biology on this planet is exactly Terra type. Yes. With adequate safeguards, I'd even say you could make a viable tissue-graft from a Svant to a Terran, or vice versa." "Ayesha, would the sound waves from that pistol-shot in any conceivable way have the sort of physical effect we're considering?" "Absolutely not," she said, and Luis Gofredo said: "I've been shot at and missed with pistols at closer range than that." "Then it was the effect on the animal's nervous system." Anna shrugged. "It's still Bennet's baby. I'm a psychologist, not a neurologist." "What I've been saying, all along," Fayon reiterated complacently. "Their hearing is different from ours. This proves it. "It proves that they don't hear at all." He had expected an explosion; he wasn't disappointed. They all contradicted him, many derisively. Signal reactions. Only Paul Meillard made the semantically appropriate response: "What do you mean, Mark?" "They don't _hear_ sound; they _feel_ it. You all saw what they have inside their combs. Those things don't transmit sound like the ears of any sound-sensitive life-form we've ever seen. They transform sound waves into tactile sensations." Fayon cursed, slowly and luridly. Anna de Jong looked at him wide-eyed. He finished his cocktail and poured another. In the snooper screen, what looked like an indignation meeting was making uproar in the village plaza. Gofredo cut the volume of the speaker even lower. "That would explain a lot of things," Meillard said slowly. "How hard it was for them to realize that we didn't understand when they talked to us. A punch in the nose feels the same to anybody. They thought they were giving us bodily feelings. They didn't know we were insensible to them." "But they do ... they do have a language," Lillian faltered. "They talk." "Not the way we understand it. If they want to say, 'Me,' it's _tickle-pinch-rub_, even if it sounds like _fwoonk_ to us, when it doesn't sound like _pwink_ or _tweelt_ or _kroosh_. The tactile sensations, to a Svant, feel no more different than a massage by four different hands. Analogous to a word pronounced by four different voices, to us. They'll have a code for expressing meanings in tactile sensation, just as we have a code for expressing meanings in audible sound."