Thomas chuckled, and Jones looked infinitely confused.
“We don’t believe you,” Smith went on. “This is no news to you at all. We’ve been telling you we didn’t believe you ever since we found out what linguists were for. And it’s got diddly to do with your sexual practices, in which the government hasn’t the slightest interest.”
“It is scientifically… drivel,” said Thomas.
“So you tell us. And we don’t believe that either.”
“And?”
“And we have put up with it, because you have us by the short hairs as always. Forty-three human infants have now died in our valiant attempts to go along with the arrangement it pleases you linguists to impose upon us. And how many computer scientists are now barely capable of cutting out paper dolls from trying to deal with all this I can’t imagine.”
“Eleven, as of yesterday,” said Thomas.
“How do you know that?” demanded poor pitiful Jones.
“They know everything,” Smith told him. “It gets boring after a while.”
“So,” said Thomas, “you decided that you had to have a linguist infant, because only a linguist infant could acquire the language you call Beta-2. Despite the fact that there is no evidence whatsoever that there is any such language. And even if you had to steal the infant. Rather a primitive act, stealing a human being, don’t you think?”
Smith was not going to be led down a path at the end of which he would hear himself admitting that he didn’t consider linguists to be human beings. Not a chance. He said nothing at all, and Thomas went on.
“Mr. Smith,” he said, “Mr. Jones, I swear to you — ” and to Jones’ astonishment he suddenly looked just like the pictures of Abraham Lincoln at his most tender and trustworthy… “ — that we of the Lines are now and always have been telling you the simple truth. Never mind the dubious genetic theory involved; we’ll ignore that. But the reason that you cannot put a human infant into an Interface with a non-humanoid Alien without destroying that infant utterly has nothing whatsoever to do with whether you use an infant of the Lines or not. It has to do with the fact that no human mind can view the universe as it is perceived by a non-humanoid extraterrestrial and not self-destruct. It is as simple as that.”
“So you say,” said Smith stubbornly.
“So we say, yes. And so we have always said. We tried, very early in the days of the Interfaces, because it did not happen that in early exploration of this galaxy we encountered only humanoid Aliens. Sometimes we did, yes; but just as often, we ran into sentient beings who were crystalline, or gaseous. You will recall the infamous encounter with the population of Saturn, which was a liquid — the Lines lost three infants to that one. And when we saw we had reached a limit that could not be breached by technology, we halted there. The United States government would be well advised to do the same.”
“It cannot be true of every non-humanoid Alien species,” declared Smith. “That’s ridiculous.”
And Thomas thought that no, it wasn’t ridiculous at all. It was distressing, but it was not ridiculous. No human being could hold his breath for thirty minutes; that was a natural barrier, and one learned not to fling oneself at it. No human being, so far as he knew, could share the worldview of a non-humanoid. It was not ridiculous.
“If you people are willing to keep trying,” said Thomas reasonably, “and if you don’t mind risking the sanity and the lives of your infants in this quixotic series of gambles, that’s your business. But we linguists are genuinely tired of having you blame the results of your stupidity on us.”
“Mr. Chornyak — ”
“No. You listen to me. What you sit here saying to me is very easily summed up, Smith. It goes like this. One: we linguists do know how to Interface with non-humanoid Aliens, but we won’t — for some mysterious reason. Our inherent wickedness. Our monstrous greed. Just for the hell of it. Who knows? We just won’t. Two: you non-linguists have made a real try at using your own babies, and they’ve all died horribly, or worse than died. Three: since that comes directly from our refusal to help, we are to blame for those tragedies — we, the linguists, not you who actually put the babies in the Interface time after time after bloody time and watch them suffer unspeakably. Four: since we are to blame for all that, and since humanity really and truly needs to grab off these non-humanoid tongues, you the government are thereby by god ENTITLED to one of our babies. It’s not kidnapping, it’s our just desserts after your patient forbearance long past the point of sweet reason. We owe you one of our babies!”
Jones had always prided himself on being a sophisticated and reasonable man, and on being free of the primitive emotion of prejudice. Watching the threedies of the anti-linguist riots, he had marveled that man could so turn against his own kind and could excuse such brutality for a reason that was no reason. Once, for the color of a man’s skin. Now, for whether a man came out of the households of thirteen families of this world — out of the Lines. He had watched and felt contempt, thankful that he could not be like that, pleased that no such baseness tainted him.
His stomach twisted, now; sick, he realized that the hate he felt for the elegant man who sat there mocking them — hate that rolled through him as he had once seen pus roll from a wound — was prejudice! He hated this man with an entirely irrational blood lust. He would have taken pleasure in thumbing out his eyes. For a few words, and no doubt a few gestures. He’d been warned that a linguist could control you with gestures and you’d never suspect, when he was in training. “With the tip of their little finger, men!” the instructors used to snap at them. “With nothing more than the way they breathe, they can control you!” He’d learned that for the exams, he’d learned all kinds of crap for exams, but he hadn’t believed it. He believed it now. Because it couldn’t have been the words that Chornyak was using. Shit, he’d read those words in a hundred right-wing magazines, heard them in a hundred bars when tempers were running high, it was what anybody at all would have said in an off-guard moment, it could not be the words… No, the man had done something to his mind, he’d gotten at him somehow… with the tip of his little finger. With the way he breathed.
It did not occur to Jones that one way to avoid some of this, although it wouldn’t save you from what linguists could do with the modulations of their voices, was not to look at the linguist while he talked. He stared at him, as fascinated as a snake in a basket. Smith, on the other hand, looked at the ceiling when he wasn’t speaking directly to Chornyak and looked a little past him when he was, and he knew that Jones had been told to do the same. Jones hadn’t learned it, because he hadn’t believed it mattered.
“Mr. Chornyak,” said Smith, “we know how you feel, and you know how we feel, and it’s all very cosy. The question is not how we feel about this — nobody likes it, whatever you may think — but what the linguists will do.”
Thomas sighed and shook his head slowly.
“What can we do?” he asked. “I can imagine the reaction I’d get if I called the FBI and reported that a government agent had kidnapped one of our babies. We are as helpless in the face of government barbarism as any other citizen, Mr. Smith, and we will do what any other citizen does. We will go through the motions. Call the police, report the baby missing, pretend for the sake of its parents that a search is being made… And then we will comfort the mother in her grief as best we can.”