Slave Ship (Rare, 1966)

Ballantine paperback edition, cover code #192, March 1957, published the same month as the hardcover edition. This novel was first serialized in Galaxy Magazine in 1956. Pohl has a reputation of one of SF’s master satirists; this novel is about a world in the throes of a low-intensity global war, which appears to be an amplified representation of the Vietnam War (in which the U.S. was just becoming involved).

First they cracked the codes. The big electronic calculators that handled math codes, production lines, found it simple to decipher the small but racy vocabularies of the animals.

Then man had achieved the age-old dream: He could respond when his dog struggled to tell us something, and he could tell that foolish sheep that if he didn’t act right he’d be mutton; and, being a man, he could create the wildest, craziest secret weapon for the war that’s man’s heritage but not that of the new, now-articulate minorities.