Wasted air, I thought, but I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t have any more intelligent ideas to offer. Hell, maybe he would turn out to be telepathic. Who was I to say?
I stood. That way I could see for myself that the alien’s eyes were open—the eyes in his proper head. Clay stayed put. He was bent forward, elbows resting on his knees, staring.
Angie kept talking, making what I’m sure she considered to be soothing sounds—if only the alien interpreted them the same way. Maybe her nonstop chatting was nerves more than anything else. If it had been me, I would have left a little silence here and there to see if the alien would respond.
It must have been ten minutes before Angie gave the alien a chance to answer. She shut up abruptly, in the middle of a sentence. For a minute or so there was absolute silence. I could hear the sound of my own breathing, but nothing more.
The alien made a series of weak, guttural sounds. I was willing to concede, as a first hypothesis, that he was speaking. But he might have been choking, or trying to clear his throat. Call it six or seven words, a dozen syllables… assuming it was speech. Whatever it was, it was still unintelligible.
Angie looked at me. “How do we start?” she asked, overlooking the many minutes of chatter she had already inflicted on the alien, and on us.
I shrugged and shook my head. “I can’t think of anything better than what you’ve been doing.”
The alien turned his head, enough to see me. He made another short series of sounds.
“I wish I understood you, fella,” I said—more practice in the fine art of understatement. I pointed at Angie. “She’s doing everything we can think of to help.”
He looked at her again.
“If only you could tell us what to do,” Angie said to him.
“Point at the other head,” I suggested.
She did that. Then she shrugged and asked, “Why?”
The alien looked at his extra head. His eyes closed after a few seconds, but did not stay closed for long. He seemed to suck in a deep breath—the oxygen mask was no longer over his mouth and nostrils—then made more sounds.
I picked up my helmet to use the radio. “Ebbie, have you been monitoring this?” The alien watched what I was doing.
“Yes, Tim. I believe that it is speech, but I do not have enough data to guess at meaning or structure.”
That stopped me for about three seconds. “I didn’t know you had routines for anything like that,” I said.
“I have very extensive language routines. I do not have all human languages in memory, and there was always the chance for something like this. If there were some way to link me directly with the alien’s computer, assuming that it is functional, it might be possible for us to develop mutual communications.”
I felt like kicking myself, or inviting Clay to do it. “If we can link Ebbie to the alien ship’s computer, she might be able to begin some sort of translation,” I said.
“Of course!” Clay slapped himself on the forehead.
Angie looked first at me, then at Clay. Her expression was almost blank.
“I never thought to ask Ebbie if she had any translation routines,” I said. It had never occurred to me. No one in my lifetime had given much serious credibility to the chance of finding aliens. Yet some dreamer had put that sort of programming into a candle computer, just in case. It would have been a lot more convenient if someone had told us about it.
Clay got up long enough to fetch the alien’s helmet, the one that had been on the head sitting on his shoulders, and handed it to Angie. She took it, pointed inside, then pointed in the general direction of the alien’s ship. The she talked into the helmet before moving it toward the alien.
He gestured toward the helmet but could not lift his hand enough to reach it. Angie held the opening near his mouth and he did more talking, not as loud as when he was talking to us.
I did more talking into my helmet, then took it over. Angie and I set the helmets together on the floor, open end to open end. “OK, Ebbie, we’ve got you set up, I think,” I said. “Let us know over the habitat radio if you get anything.”
I had no idea how long Ebbie might need to get anything we could use—if she would ever be able to. Ebbie has a lot of computing power. All of the candle ships do. They need it for a lot of things, not the least of which is the ability to keep a pilot company for two years or more at a time.
“You want to try to feed him?” I asked Angie. “Fix up some broth, maybe a ration pack, see if there’s anything he can eat?”
“We might poison him!”
“Water, at least,” I suggested. “His chemistry must be able to handle that.”
Angie hesitated, then nodded. I got a squeeze bottle and gave it to her. Angie squeezed a little water into her own mouth first, holding the spout far enough away so that the alien would be able to see that it was a clear fluid.
“Water,” Angie said. She held the tube near the alien’s mouth. He opened it a little and she gave a very gentle squeeze, just a few drops.
He obviously recognized the taste. He said something, perhaps a single word, then held his mouth open again. Angie gave him a little healthier amount this time, and then more, letting him set the pace. She stopped only when he indicated that he had had enough. He said several more words, softly, and closed his eyes for a moment.
“We’ve started communicating,” I said, looking at Clay.
Several minutes passed before we heard from Ebbie. “This is going to be difficult,” she said. “Their computer suffered damage. I can’t diagnose how much. We are starting from utter basics, scientific truths, mathematical constants, and so forth. With only the audio link you have provided, it will take hours to get to anything that you might be able to use to converse with the alien. If his computer has the necessary knowledge.”
“Do what you can, Ebbie,” I said. “If you can get to the point where the two of you can understand each other past the numbers, we can try communicating with the alien, let you and the other computer do the translating.”
“That is what I am working toward, Tim. We are working together even now.” Well, I knew that Ebbie could operate several different tasks at once—dozens of them.
The alien seemed to be a little stronger after taking his sips of water. Ten or fifteen minutes later, he gestured for another drink, and Angie gave it to him. He could lift an arm now. The first thing he did was reach up and touch the face of the head sewn to his chest. He appeared to caress its cheek. While he did, he talked softly, too softly for me to have made out the words even if I could have understood them.
“If we prop him up a little, maybe he could take some food,” I said, watching the alien pay attention to the extra head. I had to talk, had to say something, anything. Watching that macabre monologue was making my stomach feel queasy again.
“I still don’t think that we should risk that,” Angie said.
“A little broth, something more than just water,” I said. “He can’t do much if we can’t get something more into him.”
“How about some of his own food?” Clay suggested. “Did you see anything in the ship that might be food?”
“I didn’t even think about food,” I admitted.
“I’ll go have a look, bring back anything that looks even remotely as if it might be food.” I was surprised to hear Clay volunteer. Maybe he just wanted a look at the ship’s interior. Or maybe, just to give him the benefit of the doubt, he was actually caught up in trying to help a fellow pilot.