And—” He stopped.
O’Brien looked at him. “What?”
“Imperfect semantics,” Rutherford said slowly. “I wonder. Look, Jerry. Eventually we forget things like the Hut-Sut. We can thrust ’em out of our minds. But suppose you got a string of phrases you couldn’t forget? The perverse factor would keep you from erasing it mentally-the very effort to do so would cancel itself. Hm-m-m. Suppose you’re carefully warned not to mention Bill Fields’ nose. You keep repeating that to yourself ‘Don’t mention the nose.’ The words, eventually, fail to make sense. If you met Fields, you’d probably say, quite unconsciously, ‘Hello, Mr. Nose.’ See?”
“I think so. Like the story that if you meet a piebald horse, you’ll fall heir to a fortune if you don’t think about the horse’s tail till you’re past.”
“Exactly.” Rutherford looked pleased. “Get a perfect semantic formula and you can’t forget it. And the perfect formula would have everything. It’d have rhythm, and just enough sense to start you wondering what it meant. It wouldn’t necessarily mean anything, but—”
“Could such a formula be invented?”
“Yeah. Yeah. Combine language with mathematics and psychology, and something could be worked out. Could be, such a thing was accidentally written in the middle ages. What price the dance manias?”
“I don’t think I’d like it.” O’Brien grimaced. “Too much like hypnosis.”
“If it is, it’s self-hypnosis, and unconscious. That’s the beauty of it. Just for the hell of it-draw up a chair.” Rutherford reached for a pencil.
“Hey, pop,” Bill said, “why not write it in German?” Rutherford and O’Brien looked at each other, startled. Slowly a gleam of diabolic understanding grew in their eyes.
“German?” Rutherford murmured. “You majored in it, didn’t you, Jerry?”
“Yeah. And you’re no slouch at it, either. Yeah-we could write it in German, couldn’t we? The Nazis must be getting plenty sick of the Horst Wessel song.”
“Just for the… uh… fun of it,” Rutherford said, “let’s try. Rhythm first. Catchy rhythm, with a break to avoid monotony. We don’t need a tune.” He scribbled for a bit. “It’s quite impossible, of course, and even if we did it, Washington probably wouldn’t be interested.”
“My uncle’s a senator,” O’Brien said blandly.
LEFT!
LEFT!
LEFT a wife and SEVenteen children in STARVing condition with NOTHing but gingerbread LEFT
LEFT!
LEFT a wife and SEVenteen children- “Well, I might know something about it,” said Senator O’Brien.
The officer stared at the envelope he had just opened. “So? A few weeks ago you gave me this, not to be opened till you gave the word. Now what?”
“You’ve read it.”
“I’ve read it. So you’ve been annoying the Nazi prisoners in that Adirondack hotel. You’ve got ’em dizzy repeating some German song I can’t make head nor tail out of.”
“Naturally. You don’t know German. Neither do L But it seems to have worked on the Nazis.”
“My private report says they’re dancing and singing a lot of the time.”
“Not dancing, exactly. Unconscious rhythmic reflexes. And they keep repeating the… . er… .
semantic formula.”
“Got a translation?”
“Sure, but it’s meaningless in English. In German it has the necessary rhythm. I’ve already explained—”
“I know, senator, I know. But the War Department has no time for vague theories.”
“I request simply that the formula be transmitted frequently on broadcasts to Germany. It may be hard on the announcers but they’ll get over it. So will the Nazis, but by that time their morale will be shot. Get the Allied radios to cooperate—”
“Do you really believe in this?”
The senator gulped. “As a matter of fact, no. But my nephew almost convinced me. He helped Professor Rutherford work out the formula.”
“Argued you into it?”
“Not exactly. But he keeps going around muttering in German. So does Rutherford. Anyway-this can do no harm. And I’m backing it to the limit.”
“But—” The officer peered at the formula in German. “What possible harm can it do for people to repeat a song? How can it help us—”
LEFT!
LEFT!
LEFT a wife and SEVenteen children in STARVing condition with NOTHing but gingerbread LEFT
LEFT- “Aber,” said Harben, “aber, aber, aber!”
“But me no huts,” retorted his superior officer, Eggerth. “The village must be searched completely.
The High Command is quartering troops here tomorrow, on their way to the eastern front, and we must make sure there are no weapons hidden anywhere.”
“We search the village regularly.”
“Then search it again,” Eggerth ordered. “You know how those damned Poles are. Turn your back for a minute and they’ve snatched a gun out of thin air. We want no bad reports going back to the Führer. Now get out; I must finish my report, and it must be accurate.” He thumbed through a sheaf of notes. “How many cows, how many sheep, the harvest possibilities-ach. Go away and let me concentrate. Search carefully.”
“Hail,” Harben said glumly, and turned. On the way out his feet found a familiar rhythm. He started to mutter something.
“Captain Harben!”
Harben stopped.
“What the devil are you saying?”
“Oh-the men have a new marching song. Nonsense, but it’s catchy. It is excellent to march to.”
“What is it?”
Harben made a deprecating gesture. “Meaningless. It goes ‘Left, left, left a wife and seventeen children—”
Eggerth stopped him. “That. I’ve heard it. Llnsinn. Hell.” Heiling, Harben went away, his lips moving. Eggerth bent over the report, squinting in the bad light. Ten head of cattle, scarcely worth slaughtering for their meat, but the cows giving little milk . Hm-m-m. Grain-the situation was bad there, too. How the Poles managed to eat at all-they’d be glad enough to have gingerbread, Eggerth thought. For that matter, gingerbread was nutritious, wasn’t it? Why were they in starving condition if there was still gingerbread? Maybe there wasn’t much-Still, why nothing but gingerbread? Could it be, perhaps, that the family disliked it so much they ate up everything else first? A singularly shortsighted group. Possibly their ration cards allowed them nothing but gingerbread LEFT LEFT LEFT a wife and SEVenteen children in STARVing condition-Eggerth caught himself sharply, and his pencil began to move again.
The grain-he figured rather more slowly than usual, because his mind kept skipping back to a ridiculous rhythm. Verdamint! He would not-Inhabitants of the village, thirty families, or was it forty?
Forty, yes.
Men, women, children-small families mostly. Still, one could seldom expect to find seventeen children. With that many, a frau could be wealthy through bounties alone. Seventeen children. In starving condition. Why didn’t they eat the gingerbread? Ridiculous. What, in the name of Gott, did it matter whether seventeen nonexistent, completely hypothetical children ate gingerbread, or, for that matter, whether they ate nothing but gingerbread LEFT LEFT LEFT a wife and SEVenteen children-
“Hell fire and damnation!” exploded Eggerth, looking furiously at his watch. “I might have finished the report by this time. Seventeen children, pfui!”
Once more he bent to his work, determined not to think of… of-But it nibbled at the corners of his mind, like an intrusive mouse.
Each time he recognized its presence, he could thrust it away. Unfortunately, Eggerth was repeating to his subconscious, “Don’t think of it. Forget it.”