“And have I not suddenly deviated into sense, sows? For might it not be that you two forlorn creatures are merely hostages to the larger question. Perhaps we shall never communicate with either of the pair of you. But you are a sign that somewhere — perhaps not too many light years from Clementina — is a planet full of your kind. If we went there, if we caught you in your natural haunts, then we would understand so much more about you, would see far more precisely what we should be trying to parley about. We not only need linguists here; we need a couple of starships searching the worlds near Clementina. I must make the point to Lattimore.”
The ETA’s did nothing.
“I warn you, man is a very persistent creature. If the external world won’t come to him, he will go to the external world. If you have vocabularies to shed, prepare to shed them now.”
Their eyes had closed.
“Have you lapsed into unconsciousness or prayer? The latter would be wiser, now that you are in the hands of man.”
Philosophizing was not all that went on that first night that Mariestopes rested her terrigenous bulk on Earth; there was also house-breaking.
Not that Rodney Walthamstone could help it, as his defense explained when the case came up. It was a compulsion of a not unusual sort in these modern days, when every other month saw the return of ships which had probed into the very depths of the cosmos. Ordinary mortals sailed on those terrible — and he used the word without intending hyperbole — those terrible voyages; mortals, m’lud, like Rodney Walthamstone, upon whom space could not but have an overwhelming effect. This was well known, and had been designated Bestar’s Syndrome ten years ago (named after the celebrated psychodynamician, m’lud).
Out in the cosmos, all the fundamental symbols and furnishings of man’s minds were lacking, brutally lacking. One did not have to agree with the French philosopher Deutch that cosmos and mind were the two opposed poles of the magnet of entirety to realize that space travel imposed a great strain on any man, and that he might return to Earth with a hunger for normality that could not be satisfied through legal channels. Granted that be so. then it was this law and not the mind of man that should be altered; man had gone out into the infinite starry depths: it was up to the law to make itself somewhat less earthbound (laughter).
What symbol had more powerful hold over man’s mind than a house, that symbol of home, of shelter from the hostile world, of civilization itself? So in this case of housebreaking, unfortunate though it was that the house owner had been coshed, the court should see that the not unheroic accused had merely been searching for a symbol. Of course, he admitted freely to having been slightly under the influence of drink at the same time, but Bestar’s Syndrome allowed — The judge, allowing that the defense had a point, said he was nevertheless tired of space ratings who came back to Earth and treated England as if it were a bit of the undeveloped cosmos. Thirty days behind bars might convince the prisoner that there was a considerable difference between the two.
The court adjourned for lunch, and a Miss Florence Walthamstone was led weeping from the court into the nearest public house.
“Hank, honey, you aren’t really going to join the Space Corps, are you? You aren’t going off into space again, are you?”
“I told you. honey, just on a Flight-by-Flight arrangement, like I had in the Exploration Corps.”
“I’ll never understand you men, not if I live to be a thousand. What’s out there, that attracts you? What do you get out of it?”
“Hell, it’s a way of earning your living. Better than an office job, isn’t it? I’m a brainy guy, honey, you don’t seem to realize, passed all my exams, but there’s so much competition here in America.”
“But what do you get out of it, that’s what I want to know.”
“I told you, I may wind up captain. Now how about let-ting the subject rest for a bit, hey?”
“I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“You didn’t? Well, who do you think did, then? Some-times I think you and me just don’t talk the same language.”
“Darling. Darling! Darling, don’t you think it’s time we got up now?”
“Mmm?”
“It’s ten o’clock, darling.”
“Mmm, Early yet.”
“I’m hungry.”
“I was dreaming about you, Gussie.”
“We were going to get the eleven o’clock ferry across to Hong Kong, remember? You were going to sketch today, remember?”
“Mmm. Kiss me again, darling.”
“Mmm. Darling.”
CHAPTER SIX
Head Keeper was a sparse grey man who had recently taken to brushing his hair so that it showed under each side of his peaked cap. He had worked under Pasztor long ago — many moons before he had had trouble in walking downstairs in the morning — far below the icy cliffs of the Ross Ice Shelf. His name, as it happened, was Ross, Ian Edward Tinghe Ross, and he gave Bruce Ainson a smart salute as the explorer came up.
“Morning, Ross. How’s everything this morning? I’m late.”
“Big conference this morning, sir. They’ve only just started. Sir Mihaly is in there, of course, and the three linguists — Dr. Bodley Temple and his two associates — and a statistician, I forget his name, little man with a warty neck, you can’t miss him, and a lady — a scientist, I believe — and that Oxford philosopher again, Roger Wittgenbacher, and our American friend, Lattimore, and the novelist, Gerald Bone, and who else?”
“Good Lord, that makes about a dozen! What’s Gerald Bone doing here?”
“He’s a friend of Sir Mihaly’s, as I understand it, sir. I thought he looked a very nice man. My own reading tastes are on the more serious side, and so I don’t often read any novels, but now and again when I haven’t been well — particularly when I had that spot of bronchitis last winter, if you remember — I have dipped into one or two better novels, and I must say that I was very impressed by Mr. Bone’s Many Are The Few. The hero had bad a nervous breakdown—”
“Yes, I do recall the plot, Ross, thank you. And how are our two ETA’s?”
“Quite honestly, sir, I reckon they’re dying of boredom, and who’s to blame them!”
When Ainson entered the study room that lay behind the ETA’s cage, it was to find the conference in session. Counting heads as they nodded to him in recognition, he amassed a total of fourteen males and one female. Although they were unalike in appearance, there was a feeling of something shared about them: perhaps an air of authority.
This air was most noticeable about Mrs. Warhoon, if only because she was on her feet and in full spate when Ainson arrived. Mrs. Hilary Warhoon was the lady that Head Keeper Ross had referred to.
Though only in her mid-forties, she was well-known as a leading cosmoclectic, the new philosophico-scientific profession that attempted to sort the wheat from the chaff in the rapidly accumulating pile of facts and theories which represented Earth’s main import from space. Ainson looked at her with approval. To think she should be married to some dried old stick of a banker she could not tolerate! She was a fine figure of a woman, fashionable enough to be wearing one of the new chandelier style suits with pendants at bust, hip, and thigh level; the appeal of her face, serious though her prevalent expression might be, was not purely intellectual; while Ainson knew for a fact that she could out-argue even old Wittgenbacher, Oxford’s professional philosopher and technivision pundit. In fact, Ainson could not help comparing her with his wife, to Enid’s disadvantage. One, of course, would never dream of indieating one’s inner feelings to her, poor thing, or to anyone else, but really Enid was a poor specimen; she should have married a shopkeeper in a busy country town. Banbury. Diss. East Dereham.