During that day, and the next, and the next, Havig labored tirelessly while the other Earthmen sat by, more or less useless except to serve in verb-dramatizing charades. Bernard found the lengthy sessions tremendously draining on his patience. There was little he could do but sit in the broiling sun and watch Havig perform.
And the performance was incredible. On the fifth day, the Norglans were putting together plausible sentences out of a fund of nearly five hundred words. And though they fumbled and forgot and became confused some of the time, it was evident that they were fantastically quick learners. Five words out of six seemed to stick the first time. And, of course, the broader their linguistic base became, the simpler it was to teach them new words.
By the seventh day, enough of a mutual understanding had been reached to begin negotiations in earnest. The first order of business was setting up a place to meet; squatting in the open while colony-building went on all around was not ideal. At Havig’s suggestion, the Norglans erected a tent in the middle of the colony area where further discussion could take place.
As the tent went up, the Earthmen smiled in relief. A week on this planet had left them parboiled and blistered by the sun. The aliens did not seem to mind; they sweated, but their pigmentation evidently protected them from any tissue damage. Bernard, on the other hand, looked more than a bit lobsterish. Dominici had begun to tan, but most of the other Earthmen still experienced discomfort.
On the ninth morning, negotiations began. Stone, it had been decided, would do the actual talking, Havig would provide linguistic midwifery. Bernard would make cultural observations, Dominici biophysical ones, that would enable Earth to understand the aliens better. The Technarch had picked his men with care.
In the tent, a rough wooden table had been rigged. The aliens sat on their heels at one side; apparently they had no use for chairs. The Earthmen, in the absence of seats, adopted a crosslegged squat.
Havig said, “This Earthman is called Stone. He will talk to you today.”
The biggest of the three Norglans, who identified himself as Zagidh—whether that was an honorific title or his personal name, there was no way of telling—said, “He is Stone called? I touch?”
An eight-fingered hand reached out and grasped Stone’s arm as it lay on the conference table. The chubby diplomat blinked in alarm, then smiled as the Norglan prodded a fingertip into the soft flesh of his forearm.
Zagidh released the hand and fixed all the Earthmen in a saucer-eyed glare. “Stone is hard. He is not-hard.”
Havig said, “Stone is label, not description.”
The alien puzzled that one over for a while. Dominici murmured, “Curse you for having a name like that, Stone. We may never get past this point because you aren’t made out of granite.”
But the alien seemed to grasp the distinction between a proper name and a nominal description within moments. Zagidh conferred briefly with his two comrades, then said: “I am Zagidh. You are Stone-label. But label is a not-truth.”
It took ten minutes more before Havig was willing to concede that Zagidh really understood the point. The Earthmen fidgeted; if, thought Bernard, we bog down on fine points like this, how are we ever going to get anything important ever settled?
Stone threaded a tortuous verbal path, with much help and correction from Havig. After two hours he was dripping wet, but he had succeeded in establishing several vital points:
That Earth was the nucleus of a colonial empire.
That the Norglan home world, wherever it was, was a similar center of colonial expansion.
That some sort of conflict between the two dynamic planet-systems was inevitable.
That, therefore, it was vital here and now to decide which parts of the galaxy should be reserved for Norglan and which for Terran expansion.
Zagidh and his companions wrestled with these four points and appeared to show a complete understanding of what they meant. There was a brief but fervid discussion between the three Norglans. Then the alien to Zagidh’s left rose and left the tent.
Zagidh grimaced in the now-familiar facial agony that preceded any major statement of his. The alien said slowly, “This is serious matter. I—we—do not hold authority. We—you can no further talk. Others—we must come.”
The four sentences seemed to exhaust the Norglan. His tongue licked out, dog-like, and he panted. Rising, he and the remaining blueskin exited without a further word, leaving the startled Earthmen alone.
EIGHT
“What do you figure this means?” Stone asked uneasily. It was half an hour since the Norglans had left the tent. A few curious greenskins had drifted past the tent to peer in at the Earthmen, but their blue overseers had shouted them back to work, and since then the Earthmen in the tent had not been disturbed.
“Obviously Zagidh and his friends realized they’d stumbled into something too big for them to handle,” Bernard said. “Suppose you were a colonial administrator busy digging wells and building shelters, and some alien beings dropped down out of the sky and told you they wanted to hold a discussion about carving up the universe? Would you sit down and write a treaty on your own hook—or would you pass the buck back to the Archonate as fast as you could?”
“Yes—yes, of course,” Stone said. “They’ve gone to get higher-ups. But how long will it take?”
“If they’ve got a transmat equivalent,” Dominici pointed out, “it won’t take any time at all. And if not…”
“If not,” Bernard said, “we may be here a while.”
They fell silent. Bernard walked to the tentflap and looked out. Work was proceeding, without a hitch. The Norglans were not ones for wasting time when it came to setting up a colony, apparently.
There was nothing to do now but wait. Bernard scowled. This entire mission was a first-class education in patience. Laurance and his men sat quietly in the corner, no longer active participants in the negotiations, simply letting the minutes trickle past. Havig, with his Neopuritan self-control, showed no outward manifestation of impatience.
“Anybody bring a set of pyramid-dice?” Dominici asked. “We could get a good game going in here.”
“You’d be offending Havig,” Stone pointed out. “His people don’t countenance gambling.”
The linguist smiled thinly. “These sly remarks tire me. Do I actively interfere with your behavior? I live by my own example—but I’ve never maintained that you should do the same.”
Bernard’s lips firmed tightly. He found himself envying Havig’s glacial self-restraint. At least the linguist could sit quietly, almost as quietly as the spacemen, waiting for the uncertain hours to pass.
Now it was three hours since the Norglans had made their abrupt exit. Mid-afternoon had come; a blistering shroud of heat lay over the clearing, but the greenskins toiled on without seeming to mind. Inside the tent, the air was hot and hard to breathe, and twice Bernard fought back the desperate temptation to guzzle the remaining contents of his canteen. He rationed himself: a drop now, another drop fifteen minutes later. Just enough to keep his parched throat moist.
“We’ll wait around until sundown,” Laurance said. “If they don’t come back by then, we’ll go back to the ship and try again tomorrow morning. How does that sound, Dr. Bernard?”
“As good a suggestion as any,” the sociologist agreed. “Sundown’s the normal time for breakup of a meeting. They won’t have any reason to get insulted if we leave then.”
“But how about the insult to us?” Dominici demanded with sudden warmth. “These damned bluefaces just picked up without a word and left us to roast in here all afternoon! Why the deuce should we be so concerned about their feelings, when they left us…”