Yes, that was about it….
“…feel that we have made progress this week, despite several handicaps inherent in the situation, most of them stemming — as I think the Director was the first to point out — from the fact that we have no background to the lifeform to use as a point of reference.” Mrs. Warhoon’s voice was pleasantly staccato. It scattered Ainson’s thoughts and made him concentrate on what she was saying; if Enid had been a bit more prompt with the break-fast, he might have got here in tune to hear the beginning of her speech. “My colleague, Mr. Borroughs, and I have now examined the space vehicle found on Clementina. While we are not qualified to give a technical report on it — you will be getting several technical reports on it from other sources in any case — we both were convinced that it was a vehicle developed for, if not by, the captive life-form. You will recall that eight of the lifeforms were discovered close to the vehicle; and the body of a dead one was disinterred within the vehicle itself; nine bunks, or niches that by their shape and size are intended to serve as bunks, are observable within the vehicle.
Because these bunks run in the direction we think of as vertical rather than horizontally, and are separated by what we now know to be fuel lines, they have not previously been recognized as bunks.
“Here it is appropriate to mention another trouble that we come up against continually. We do not know what is evidence and what is not.
“For instance, we now have to ask ourselves, supposing we consider it established that the lifeform has developed space traveclass="underline" can space travel be regarded as a priori proof of superior intelligence?”
“That is the most penetrating question I have heard asked in the last decade,” said Wittgenbacher, nodding his head six times with the frightening assurance of a clock-work doll. “If it were posed to the masses, they would give you but one answer, or should I rather say that their many answers would take but one form. They would render an affirmative. We who are here may reckon our-selves more enlightened and would perhaps choose as a more valid example of superior intelligence the works of the analytical philosophers, where logic flows unconfused with emotion. But the masses — and who perhaps amongst us in the final analysis is to gainsay them? — would, if I may employ a colloquialism, plump for a product in which the hands as well as the mind had been employed. I do not doubt that among such a category of products the space-ship would appear to them the most outstanding.”
“I’d go along with them,” said Lattimore. He sat next to Pasztor, sucking the frame of his spectacles and listening intently.
“I might even accompany them myself,” chuckled Wittgenbacher, with more mechanical nods. “But this does raise another question. Suppose that, having granted this lifeform, so unaesthetically unhygienic in many of its habits, superior intelligence; suppose we later discover its planet of origin, and then perceive that its — um, its space-going ability is as much governed by instinctual behavior as is the ocean-going ability of our northern fur-seals. Perhaps you will correct me if I am in error, Sir Mihaly, but I believe that the Arctocephalus ursinus, the bear seal, makes a winter migration of many thousands of miles from the Bering Sea down to the shores of Mexico, where I have seen them myself when swimming in the Gulf of California.
“If we find this to be so, then not only shall we be in error in presuming superior intelligence in our friends, but we shall have to ask ourselves this: is it not possible that our own space travel is equally the outcome of instinctual behavior, and — much as the fur-seal may imagine on his swim south that his travel is prompted by his own will — may we not be pushed by an unglimpsed purpose beyond our own?”
Three reporters at the back of the room scribed busily, ensuring that tomorrow’s Times, recording the longueurs of the conference, would pinpoint this highlight in a head-line reading Space Traveclass="underline" Man’s Migratory Pattern ?
Gerald Bone stood up. The novelist’s face had lit at the new thought like a child’s at sight of a new toy.
“Do I understand you. Professor Wittgenbacher, to imply that we — that our much-vaunted intelligence, the one thing that most clearly distinguishes us from the animals, may really be no more than a blind compulsion driving us in its own directions rather than in ours?”
“Why not? For all our pretensions to the arts and the humanities, our race ever since the Renaissance at least has directed its main efforts towards the twin goals of expanding its numbers and expanding outwards.” Having got the bit between his teeth, the old philosopher was not going to stop there. “In fact you may liken our leaders to the queen bee who prepares her hive to swarm and does not know why she does it. We swarm into space and do not know why we do it. Something drives—”
But he was not going to get away with it. Lattimore was the first to vent a hearty “Nonsense”, and Dr. Bodley Temple and his assistants made unsavoury noises of dissent. All round the room, the professor was given the cultural catcall.
“Preposterous theory—”
“Economic possibilities inherent in—”
“Even a techni audience would hardly—”
“I suppose the colonization of other planets—”
“One just cannot dismiss the disciplines of science—”
“Order, please,” called the Director.
In the following lull, Gerald Bone called another question to Wittgenbacher, “Then where shall we find true intellect?”
“Perhaps when we run up against our gods,” Wittgen-bacher replied, not at all put out by the heated atmosphere about him.
“We will have the linguistic report now,” Pasztor said sharply, and Dr. Bodley Temple rose, rested his right leg on the chair in front of him, rested his right elbow on his knee, so that he leant forward with an appearance of eagerness, and did not budge from that position until he had finished talking. He was a small stocky man with a screw of grey hair rising from the middle of his forehead and a pugnacious expression. He had the reputation of being a sound and imaginative scholar, and offset it with some of the nattiest waistcoats in London University. His present one, negotiating a considerable stretch of abdomen, was of antique brocade with a pattern of Purple Emperor butterflies chasing themselves about the buttons.
“You all know what the job of my team is,” he said, in a voice that Arnold Bennett would have recognized a century back as having sprung from the Five Towns. “We’re trying to learn the alien tongue without knowing if they have one, because that’s the only way there is to find out. We have made some progress, as my colleague Wilfred Brebner here will demonstrate in a moment.
“First, I’ll make a few general remarks. Our visitors, these fat chaps from Clementina, don’t understand what writing is. They have no script. That doesn’t mean any-thing with regard to their language — many African negro languages were only reduced to writing by white missionaries. Efik and Yoruba were two such languages of the Sudanic language group; almost unused languages now, I’d say.
“ I tell you all this, my friends, because until I get a better idea, I’m treating these aliens as a couple of Africans. It may bring results. It’s more positive than treating them as animals — you may recall that the first white explorers in Africa thought the negroes were gorillas — and it ensures that if we find they do have a language, then we won’t make the mistake of expecting it to follow anything like a Romance pattern.