But with what? There was no such thing as a war weapon any more. Of course it would be possible to assemble one of the old lithium-hydride bombs, but there didn't seem to be any chance of getting close enough to Uranus to do any good--not with the new weapon the Uranians had. There was nothing to do but wait and see what turned up at the Court tomorrow. So the Spacemen milled around the Spacemen's Bar that night, grumbling and restless and keeping half an eye on Webster. * * * * * The recital started early. The auditorium was packed. Many of those there had been on Uranus and knew what the Uranians were like. The recital was old stuff to them. They heard how the rocket ships had successively explored Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn and found them all lifeless, even sporeless. They heard how the ships approached Uranus with no lively hope of finding anything worth while--of everyone's surprise to discover an advanced civilization flourishing there. They heard the transcribed voice describe what the Uranians looked like: "... about a hundred and fifty centimeters tall. They have three legs and three arms each composed of three segments of massive bone surrounded by a heavy layer of fat and leatherlike skin. Each limb terminates in a small prehensile finger. The body measures forty-five centimeters in diameter on the average. The top portion of the body has three eyes, three nostrils, and two mouths. One mouth is used for water, the other for food. In appearance, the Uranians seem outlandish to Earthly eyes. They walk...." The experienced men smiled. Outlandish, he says. They looked like a three-armed watermelon sitting upright on a three-legged stool. A man could drive himself nuts trying to keep track of how they walked. Two feet were always on the ground, the third one moving forward. Each foot took its own turn. The end result was that each Uranian seemed to have dozens of feet when he was in motion. And he could change direction with the startling suddenness of an ant. His body wouldn't turn at all; he'd just suddenly begin moving off at a tangent. "... no language as we know it. They communicate with one another in short bursts of sound which verge on the supersonic. We understand their speech only by means of instruments which graph the duration and pitch of the sounds they make. As a consequence our intercourse with them is limited. We have been able...." Frank Wadden smiled to himself, remembering the endless hours on Uranus trying to make sense out of the shrill bleats of the Uranians. Wadden's Group Leader had been the man that finally found the key. Like all keys, it had been simple. The shrill bleats were a code. Each bleat of a certain pitch and duration conveyed a concept, a word picture, in much the same way that the Chinese language did. But the human voice couldn't reach the high range where the Uranians conversed, so sound machines had to be used. And they were far from satisfactory.