"Oliveira and I left sagging in the breeches a Mt. We inquired of people we knew, and wrote letters to a number of them, asking what they thought of the idea of undergoing the Oliveira treatment. A few said they might if enough others did, but most of them respanded in much the same vein that Doc Wheelock had; they'd gotten used to their hair, and saw no good reason for going back to their former glabrous state.
"So, Pat,' said Oliviera to me, 'it lukes as though we don't get much fame out of our discovery. But we may steel salvage a leetle fortune. You remember that meehion-dollar reward? I sent in my application as soon as I recovered from my treatment and we should hear from the government any day.'
"We did. I was up at his apartment, and we were talking about nothing in particular, when Mrs. O. rushed in with the letter, squeaking, 'Abre la! Open eet, Roman!'
"He opened it without hurry, spread the sheet of paper out, and read it. Then he frowned and read it again. Then he laid it down, very carefully took out and lit the wrong end of a cork-tipped cigarette, and said in his levellest voice, 'I have been stupid again, Pat. I never thought that there might be a time-leemit on that reward offer. Now it seems that some crafty sanamabiche in Congress poot one een, so that the offer expired on May first. You remember, I mailed the claim on the nineteenth, and they got it on the twenty-first, three weeks too late!'
"I looked at Oliveira, and he looked at me and then at his wife, and she looked at him and then went without a word to the cabinet and got out two large bottles of tequila and three tumblers.
"Ohiveira pulled up three chairs around a little table, and settled with a sigh in one of them. 'Pat,' he said, 'I may not have a meelion dollars, but I have something more valuable by far—a woman who knows what is needed at a time like thees!'
"And that's the inside story of the Great Change, or at least of one aspect thereof. That's how it happens that, when we today speak of a platinum-blonde movie star, we aren't referring to her scalp hair alone, but the beautiful silvery pelt that covers her from crown to ankle.
"There was just one more incident. Bert Kafket had me up to his place to dinner a few nights later. After I had told him and his wife about Oliveira's and my troubles, he asked how I had made out on that depilatory-manufacturer stock I'd bought. 'I notice those stocks are back about where they started from before the Change,' he added.
"Didn't make anything to speak of,' I told him. 'About the time they started to slide down from their peak, I was too busy working for Roman to pay much attention to them. When I finally did look them up I was just able to unload with a few cents' profit per share. How did you do on those stocks you were so mysterious about last year?'
"Maybe you noticed my new car as you came in?' asked Bert with a grin. 'That's them. Or rather, it; there was only one, Jones and Galloway Company.'
"What do Jones and Galloway make? I never heard of them."
"They make'—here Bert's grin looked as if it were going to run around his head and meet behind—'currycombs!'
"And that was that. Here's Carl with the beer now. It's your deal, isn't it, Hannibal?"
LANGUAGE FOR TIME TRAVELERS
"GRADUALLY, the rainbow flicker of light died away, and Morgan Jones felt the tingle leave his body. The dial read 2438. Five hundred years! He opened the door of the compartment and climbed out.
"At first, he saw nothing but fields and woods. He was evidently in a farming country. Nobody was in sight—No, here came a rustic along the road, trudging through the dust with his eyes on the ground in front of him.
" 'Hey there!' Jones called. 'Could you give me some information?'
"The man looked up; his eyes widened with astonishment at the sight of the machine. 'Wozza ya sth?' he asked.
"Jones repeated his question.
" 'Sy; daw geh,' said the man, shaking his head.
"Now Jones looked puzzled. 'I don't seem to understand you. 'What language are you speaking?'
"Wah lenksh? Inksh lenksh, coss. Wah you speak? Said, sah-y, daw geh-ih. Daw, neitha. You fresh? Jumm?'
"Jones had an impulse to shake his head violently, the same feeling he always had when the last word of a crossword puzzle eluded him. The man had understood him, partly, and the noises he made were somehow vaguely like English, but no English such as Jones had ever heard. 'Inksh lenksh' must be 'English language'; 'sah-y daw geh-ih' was evidently 'sorry, don't get it.'
" 'What,' he asked, 'is a fresh jumm?'
" 'Nevva huddum?' said the rustic, scorn in his tone. 'Fresh people, go Oui, oui, parlez-vous français, va t'en, sale bête!' He did this with gestures. Then he stiffened. 'Jumms go'-he clicked his heels together-'Achtung! Vorwärts, marsch! Guten Tag, meine Herren! Verstehen Sie Deutsch? Fresh from Fress; Jumms from Jummy. Geh ih?'
"Yes, I suppose so,' said Jones. His mind was reeling slightly—"
Thus might almost any novel on the time-travel theme or the Rip Van Winkle theme begin. The author, having landed his hero in the far future, may either ascribe telepathy to the people of the time, or remark on how the English language will have changed. The foregoing selection shows—in somewhat more detail than do most of the stories—a few of the actual changes that might take place. To be strictly consistent, I should have changed the French and German selection also, but, in the first place, I don't know enough about French and German to predict their future evolution, and, in the second, it would have made the rustic's explanation utterly unintelligible. It might be interesting to consider in detail just what change may occur. To do this thing right we shall have to first take a brief look at the language's present state and its past history.
English is a Teutonic language, like German, Dutch, and Swedish, with a large infusion—perhaps a majority—of French words. Its parent tongue, Anglo-Saxon, was more highly inflected than its descendant—less so than Latin, but about as much so as modern German* Anglo-Saxon would sound to a modern hearer as much like a foreign language as German; English didn't become what would be intelligible to us until about the 16th Century. English of the 1500s would sound to us like some sort of Scotch dialect, because it had the rolled "r" and the fricative consonants heard in German: ich, ach (that's what all those silent gh's in modern English spelling mean—or rather, used to mean) which have been retained in Scottish English, but lost or transformed in most other kinds of English. We have a fair idea of the pronunciation of Shakespeare's time because about then people began writing books on the subject. It's amusing to reflect that if Shakespeare returned to Earth, he'd get along passably in Edinburgh; he could manage, with some difficulty, in Chicago—but he'd be hopelessly lost in London, whose dialect would differ most radically from his! So much for the "language of Shakespeare"!
* For instance, the noun end in Anglo-Saxon had these forms:
Singular Plural
Nominative ende endas
Genitive endes enda
Dative ende endum
Accusative ende eudas
[I once complained to the late Willy Ley about German's damnable inflected articles and adjectives, which have defeated my half-century of effort to learn to speak the language correctly. In his deep, heavily accented voice, Willy said: "It is very simple. You only have to be born there!" L.S. de C., 1977.]
Authors are fairly safe in having the people of the future speak English—which is very convenient for the authors. Aside from the fact that nobody can prove them wrong, English is, today, well on the way to becoming the world's international language. It is probably taught in the schools of more countries than any other. In number of speakers it is exceeded only by Cantonese and Mandarin, the chief languages of China, each of which is divided into a myriad of mutually unintelligible dialects; its nearest rivals, Spanish and German, are far behind it in number of speakers. It's a concise Ianguage,* and the simplicity of its gammar makes it easy to learn, though its fearsome spelling is an obstacle to the student. It's a safe bet that another century will see it as the second language of every passably educated person on Earth, and in another millennium it may well be the only living language.