“I am certain that our fat friends have a language — and you gents of the Press can quote me there, if you like. You’ve only got to listen to them snorting together. And it isn’t all snorts. We’ve now analyzed it from tapes and have sorted out five hundred different sounds. Though it may be that many of these sounds are the same sound delivered at a different pitch. You may know that there are terrestrial linguistic systems such as — er. Siamese and Cantonese which employ six acoustic pitches. And we can expect many more pitches with these fellows, who obviously range very freely over the sound spectrum.
“The human ear is deaf to vibrations of frequency greater than somewhere about 24,000 a second.
We have found that these chaps can go twice that, just as a terrestrial bat or a Rungstedian cat can. So one problem is that if we are to converse with them, we must get them to stay within our wavelength. For all we know, that may mean they would have to invent a sort of pidgin language that we could understand.”
“I protest,” said the statistician, who until now had been content to do little but run his tongue round his teeth. “You are now inferring, surely, that we are inferior to them.”
“I’m saying nothing of the kind. I’m saying that their range of sound is very much greater than ours.
Now, Mr. Brebner here is going to give us a few of the phonemes that we have provisionally identified.”
Mr. Brebner rose and stood swaying beside the stocky figure of Bodley Temple. He was in his mid-twenties, a slight figure with pale yellow hair, wearing a light grey suit with the hood down. His face was suffused a delicate flame color with the embarrassment of confronting his audience, but he spoke up well. “The dissections on the dead aliens have told us quite a lot about their anatomy,” he said. “If you have read the rather lengthy report, you will know that our friends have three distinct classes of apertures through which they pro-duce their characteristic noises. All these noises appear to contribute to their language, or we assume they do, just as we assume they have a language.
“First, they have in one of their heads a mouth, to which is linked a scent organ. Although this mouth is used for breathing, its main function is feeding and making what we term the oral sounds.
“Secondly, our friends have six breathing vents, three on either side of their body, and situated above their six limbs. At present we refer to these as the nostrils. They are labiate apertures and although unconnected to any vocal chords — as is the mouth — these nostrils produce a wide range of sounds.
“Thirdly, our friends also produce a variety of con-trolled sound through the rectum situated in their second head.
“Their form of speech consists of sound transmitted through all these apertures, either in turn, or any two together, or all three classes together, or all eight apertures together. You will see then that the few sounds I am now going to give you as examples are limited to the less complex ones. Tape recordings of the whole range are of course available, but are not in a very manageable form as yet. “The first word is nnnnorrrr-INK.”
To pronounce this word, Wilfred Brebner ran a light snore over the front of his throat and chased it with the little squeak represented here as “ink”. (All printed forms of the alien language used throughout this book are similarly to be treated as mere approximations.) Brebner continued with his exposition.
“Nnnnorrrr-INK is the word we have obtained several times in various contexts. Dr. Bodley Temple recorded it first last Saturday, when he brought our friends a fresh cabbage. We obtained it a second time on Saturday when I took out a packet of chewing plastic and gave pieces to Dr. Temple and to Mike. We did not hear it again till Tuesday afternoon, when it was pronounced in a situation when food was not present. Chief Keeper Ross had entered the cage where we were to see if we needed any-thing, and both creatures made the sound at the same time. We then noted that the word might have a negative con-notation, since they had refused the cabbage, and had not been offered the chew — which they would presume to be food — and might be supposed not to like Ross, who disturbs them when he cleans out their cage. Yesterday, how-ever, Ross brought them a bucket of river mud. which they like, and then we recorded nnnnorrrr-INK again, several times in five minutes. So we think at present that it refers to some variety of human activity: appearing bearing something, shall we say. The meaning will be fined down considerably as we go along. From this example you can see the process of elimination we go through with every sound.
“The bucket of river mud also brought forth another word we can recognize. This sounds like WHIP-bwut-bwip (a small whistle followed by two pouting labials). We have also heard it when grapefruit has been accepted, when porridge with sliced banana in — a dish over which they show some enthusiasm — has been accepted, and when Mike and I have been leaving in the evening. We take it therefore to be a sign of approval.
“We also think we have a sign of disapproval, although we have only heard it twice. Once it was accompanied by a gesture of disapproval, when an under-keeper caught one of our friends on the snout with a jet of water from a hose. On the other occasion, we had offered them fish, some cooked, some raw. As you are aware, they seem to be vegetarians. The sound was—”
Brebner glanced apologetically at Mrs. Warhoon as he blew a series of damp farts with his mouth, culminating with an open-mouthed groan.
“Bbbp-bbbp-bbbp-bbbp-aaaah.”
“It certainly sounds like disapproval,” Temple said.
Before the ripple of amusement died, one of the reporters said, “Dr. Temple, is this all you have to offer in the way of progress?”
“You have been given a rough guide to what we are doing.”
“But you don’t seem to have a single one of their words definitely. Why couldn’t you tackle what any lay-man would think would be the first steps, like getting them to count, and to name parts of their bodies and yours? Then at least you have something to begin on, rather than a few abstracts like ‘Appearing carrying something’.”
Temple looked down at the Purple Emperors on his waistcoat, munched his lips, and then said, “Young man, a layman might indeed think those were the first steps. But my answer to that layman and to you is that such a catalogue is only possible if the enemy — the alien is prepared to open up a conversation. These two buggers — I beg your pardon, madam — these two fellows have no interest in communicating with us.”
“Why don’t you get a computer on the job?”
“Your questions grow more foolish. You need common-sense on a job like this. What damned good would a computer be? It can’t think, nor can it differentiate between two almost identical phonemes for us. All we need is time. You can’t imagine — nor can your hypothetical layman — the difficulties that beset us, mainly because we are having to think in a realm where man has not had to think before.
Ask yourself this: what is language? And the answer is, human speech. Therefore we aren’t just doing research, we “are inventing something new: non-human speech.”
The reporter nodded glumly, Dr. Temple huffed and puffed and sat down, Lattimore rose. He perched his spectacles on the end of his nose and clasped his hands behind his back.
“As you know, Doctor, I’m new around here, so I hope you’ll appreciate I ask my questions in all innocence. My position is this. I’m a skeptic. I know that we have investigated only three hundred planets in this universe, and I know that leaves a tidy few million to go. but I still hold that three hundred is a fair sampling. None of them have yielded any form of life half as intelligent as my Siamese cat. This suggests to me that man is unique in the universe.”