“It’s ten o’clock,” he said. “Time Enid and I were shuttling home; you know I keep regular hours when I’m on Earth. We’ve enjoyed the celebrations, Mihaly. We shall see you at the end of the week.”
They shook hands with returning cordiality. Provoked by one of the bursts of mischief that ensured he would never rise higher than his present sinecure, Sir Mihaly asked, “By the way, my friend, what was it Aylmer and the girl did that so conflicted with your point of view that you threw him out of your home?”
A tinge as of dusty brick mottled Bruce Ainson’s throat and jowls.
“You’d better ask him yourself; he may see fit to gratify your curiosity; I don’t see him any more,” he said stiffly. “We’ll find our own way out.
The shuttle on the district line climbed upwards through a night punctuated by the city’s orchestra of lights. It clung dizzily to its thread of rail. Enid closed her eyes and wished she had swallowed an Antivom before they boarded; she was not a good traveler.
“A tubby for your thoughts,” her husband said.
“I wasn’t thinking, Bruce.”
After a silence, Ainson said. “What were you and Mihaly talking about while I went to get your wrap?”
“I don’t remember. Trivialities. Why do you ask that?”
“How much did you see of him while I was away?”
She sighed, and the noise of the air flowing past the cab drowned the small sound she made.
“You always ask me that, Bruce, after each trip. Now stop being jealous or you’ll give me ideas; Mihaly is very sweet but he means nothing to me.”
High above outer London, the district shuttle decanted them on to the great curled lip of the Outflank Ring. Their section of the newly-built structure was crowded, so that they preserved silence as they whirled towards the non-stop lane that would take them home. But once on the monobus, their silence continued to cling. Neither felt comfortable in the other’s lack of speech, fearing unknown thought. Enid spoke first.
“Well, I’m glad success has come to you at last, Bruce. We must have a party. I’m very proud of you, you know!”
He patted her hand and smiled at her forgivingly, as one might to a child.
“There won’t be time for parties, I’m afraid. This is when the real work begins. I shall have to be round at the zoo every day, advising the research teams. They can’t very well do without me, you know.”
She stared ahead of her. She was not really disappointed; she should have expected the answer she got. And even then, instead of showing anger, she found herself trying to be friendly with him, asking one of her silly little searched-for questions.
“I suppose you are hoping very much that we can learn to talk to these creatures?”
“The government seems less excited than I had hoped. Of course I know there is this wretched war on…. Eventually there may be points emerging that prove of more importance than the language factor.”
She recognized a vagueness in his phraseology he used when there was something he was unsure of.
“What sort of points?”
He stared into the rushing night.
“The wounded ETA showed a great resistance to dying. When they dissected it on the Mariestopes, they cut it almost into chunks before it died. These things have a phenomenal resistance to pain. They don’t feel pain. They don’t… feel pain! Think of it. It’s all in the reports, buried in tables and written up technically — I’ve no patience with it any longer. But one day someone’s going to see the importance of those facts.”
Again she felt his silence fall like a stone from his lips as he looked past her through the window.
“You saw this creature being cut up?”
“Of course I did.”
She thought about all the things that men did and bore with apparent ease.
“Can you imagine it?” Ainson said. “Never to feel any pain, physical or mental….”
They were sinking down to the local traffic level. His melancholy gaze rested on the darkness that concealed their home.
“What a boon to mankind!” he exclaimed.
After the Ainsons had gone. Sir Mihaly Pasztor stood where he was, in a vacuity that occasionally merged into thought. He began to pace up and down, watched by the eyes of the two alien beings beyond the glass. Their glance finally slowed him; he came to rest on the balls of his feet, balancing, swaying gently, regarding them with folded arms, and finally addressing them.
“My dear charges, I understand the problem, and with-out having met you before, I do to a certain limited extent also understand you. Above all I understand that up until now you have only been faced with a limited type of human mind. I know spacemen, my bag-bellied friends, for I was a spaceman myself, and I know how the long dark years attract and mould an inflexible mind. You have been faced with men without the human touch, men without finer perceptions, men without the gift of empathy, men who do not readily excuse and understand because they have no knowledge of the diversity of human habits, men who because they have no insight into themselves are denied insight into others.
“In short, my dear and dung-stained charges, if you are civilized, then you need to be confronted by a properly civilized man. If you are more than animal, then it should not be too long before we understand each other. After that will be time for words to grow between us.”
One of the ETA’s deretracted his limbs, rose, and came over to the glass. Sir Mihaly Pasztor took it as an omen.
Going round to the back of the enclosure, he entered a small anteroom to the actual cage. Pressing a button, he activated the part of the floor on which he stood; it moved forward into the cage, carrying before it a low barrier, so that the Director looked rather like a prisoner entering court in a knee-high dock. The mechanism stopped. He and the ETA’s were now face to face, although a button by Pasztor’s right hand ensured that he could withdraw himself immediately, should danger threaten.
The ETA’s made thin whistles and huddled together.
Their smell, while far from being as repugnant as might have been expected, was certainly very noticeable. Mihaly wrinkled his nose.
“To our way of thought,” he said, “civilization is reckoned as the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.”
One of the ETA’s extended a limb and scratched itself.
“We have no civilizations on Earth that are not firmly founded on an alphabet. Even the aborigine sketches his fears and hopes on the rocks. But do you have fears and hopes?”
The limb, having scratched, retracted, leaving the palm of the hand merely as a six-pointed pattern in the flesh.
“It is impossible to imagine a creature larger than a flea without fears and hopes, or some such equivalent structure based on pain stimuli. Good feelings and bad feelings: they get us through life, they are our experiences of the external world. Yet if I understand the report on the autopsy of one of your late friends, you experience no pain. How radically that must modify your experience of the external world.”
One of the lizard creatures appeared. It scuttled along its host’s back and applied its little twinkling nose to a fold of skin. It became motionless, and all but invisible.
“And indeed, what is the external world? Since we can only know it through our senses, we can never know it undiluted; we can only know it as external-world-plus-senses. What is a street? To a small boy, a whole world of mystery. To a military strategist, a series of strong points and exposed positions: to a lover, his beloved’s dwelling place; to a prostitute, her place of business; to an urban historian, a series of watermarks in time; to an architect, a treaty drawn between art and necessity; to a painter, an adventure in perspective and tone; to a traveler, the location of drink and a warm bed; to the oldest inhabitant, a monument to his past follies, hopes, and hearts; to the motorist — “How then do our external worlds, yours and mine, my enigmatic kind, clash or chine? Are we not going to find that somewhat difficult to discover until we have succeeded in speaking to each other beyond a list of nouns and needs? Or do you, with our Master Explorer, prefer the proposition reversed: do we have to grasp the nature of at least your external environment before we can parley?