“I’m sure it has,” said the Pentagon man, cutting him off in a way that hurt Dolbe deeply. “I’m sure it has been bloody hell. We know what you men go through here, and we honor you for it. But it’s something that’s got to be done, for the sake of preserving civilization on this planet. I mean that, gentlemen! Literally for the sake of preventing the end of humankind on this green and golden Earth of ours — the permanent end, I might add. I’m not talking a few decades in the colonies while things cool off and then we can move back planetside. I’m talking the end. Period. Final. Total.”
He said it as if he believed it. It was in fact possible that he did believe it, if only because he was a good soldier and you cannot be a good soldier if you think that those up the chain of command from you are telling you lies. And of course they were good soldiers too, and they wouldn’t think that those who had fed them the same line were lying to them. Nobody knew precisely where the buck stopped in this business. The general had a feeling that the buck went around and around on a möbius strip. Sometimes he wondered who was in charge. Not the President, certainly. It was one of his primary duties to make certain that the President never knew much about this little twig on the executive branch. The general had no illusions about the Pentagon not being part of the executive branch.
He steepled his fingers, and he looked at them long and hard, noting automatically that only Dolbe began to squirm under his gaze.
“Well, gentlemen?” he asked. “What are you going to do now? I’ve got to take some kind of reasonable answer back to my superiors — no details, mind, just a rough idea — and they aren’t feeling all that patient these days. We’ve run out of fooling around time, gentlemen. We’re right up against the wire on this one.”
There was a thick silence, with the general’s fingers drumming lightly on the table, and the air exchange whirring high and thin, and the American flag jerking limply every now and then in the mechanical breeze.
“Gentlemen?” the general prodded. “I’m a very busy man.”
“Oh, hellfire,” said Brooks Showard. He knew. Either he did the talking, or they’d all sit there until the end of time. Which, to hear the general tell it, wouldn’t be all that long. “You know what we’ve got to do next. You know perfectly well. Since you government/military shits are too chicken to slap every last goddam linguist into prison for treason or murder or inciting to riot or pandering or sodomy or whatever the hell it takes to make the fucking Lingoes cooperate — ”
“You know we can’t do that, Colonel!” The general’s lips were as stiff as two slabs of frozen bacon. “If the linguists had any excuse, any excuse, they’d withdraw from every sensitive negotiation we have underway with Aliens, and that would be the end of us! And there wouldn’t be one damn thing we could do about it, Colonel — not one damn thing!”
“ — since, like I said, you’re too chicken to do that and do it right and make it stick, there’s only one thing left. You fellows want to keep your pretty hands clean, I’m sure. But we fellows have got to steal us a linguist infant, a baby Lingoe. On your behalf, or course. For the good of all mankind. How’s that for Plan B?”
They all squirmed, then. Volunteered babies, that was nasty. But stolen babies? It wasn’t that the effing linguists didn’t deserve it, and it wasn’t that they didn’t have babies in hordes and swarms enough to console themselves with if they came up one short. But the baby didn’t exactly deserve it, somehow. They were willing to go along with the religious party line, after a fashion, but none of them was really able to swallow that stuff about the sins of the fathers being visited, etc. Stealing a baby. That was not very nice.
“Their women whelp on the public wards,” Showard observed. “It won’t be difficult.”
“Oh dear.”
The general could hardly believe he’d said that. He tried again.
“Well, by heaven!”
“Yeah?”
“Is that the only alternative remaining to us, Colonel Showard? Are you absolutely certain?”
“You have some other suggestion?” Showard snarled.
“General,” Dolbe put in, “we’ve done everything else. We know that our Interface is an exact duplicate of those the linguists use. We know our procedure is exactly the same as theirs — not that it’s much of a procedure. You put the Alien — or better still, two Aliens, if you can get a pair — in one side. You put the baby in the other. And you get out of their way. That’s all there is to it. That’s what we do, just like that’s what they do — we’ve tried it again and again. And you know what happened when we tried the test-tube babies… it was the same, only it was worse somehow. Don’t ask me to explain that. And we’ve brought in every computer expert, every scientist, every technician, every — ”
“But see here, man — ”
“No, General! There’s nothing to see. We have checked and rechecked and re-rechecked. We have gone over every last variable not just once but many many times. And it has to be, General, it has to be that for some reason known only to the linguists — and I do feel, by the way, that it constitutes treason for them to keep that knowledge to themselves — for some reason known only to them, only linguist infants are capable of learning Alien languages.”
“Some genetic reason, you mean.”
“Well? Look how inbred they are, it’s on the fine line of incest, if you ask me! What are we talking about? Thirteen families! That’s not much of a gene pool. They bring in the odd bit of outside stock now and then, sure, but basically it’s those thirteen sets of genes over and over. Sure, I’d say it’s a genetic reason.”
“General,” Beau added, “all we’re doing here is sacrificing the innocent children of nonlinguists, in something that is never going to work. It’s got to be an infant born of one of the Lines, and that is all there is to it.”
“They deny it,” said the general.
“Well, wouldn’t you deny it, in their place? It suits the traitorous bastards, controlling the whole goddam government, doling out their nuggets of wisdom to us on whatever schedule happens to strike their fancy, living off the backs and the blood of decent people. And if we have to murder innocent babies trying to do what they ought to be doing for us, well, shit, they don’t care. That just puts every American citizen, and every citizen of every country on this globe and in its colonies, all the more at their mercy. Sure they deny it!”
“They’re lying,” Showard summed up, feeling that Beau St. Clair had said about all he was going to say. “Plain flat out lying.”
“You’re sure?”
“Damn right.”
The general made the noise a restless horse makes, and then he sat there and chewed his upper lip. He didn’t like it. If the Lingoes suspected… if there was a leak… and there always were leaks…
“Shit,” said Lanky Pugh, “they’ve got so many babies, they’ll never miss one, long as we can get by with a female. Can we get by with a female?”
“Why not, Mr. Pugh?”
“Well. I mean. Can a female do it?”
The general frowned at Pugh, and then looked at the others for explanation. This was beyond him.
“We keep telling Lanky,” Showard said. “We keep explaining it to him. There is no correlation between intelligence and the acquisition of languages by infants, except at the level of gross retardation where you’ve got a permanent infant. We keep telling him that, but it offends him or something. He can’t seem to handle it.”