Gerald Bone spoke without rising.
“As you know, I’m a novelist, Mr. Ainson. Perhaps in this distinguished company I should say ‘only a novelist’. But one thing has worried me about your part in this.
“Mr. Lattimore says that you should have returned from Clementina with more answers than you did.
How-ever that may be, it does seem to me that you have returned with a few assumptions which, because they have come from you, have been accepted all round without challenge as fact.”
With dry mouth, Ainson waited for what was to come. Again he was aware that everyone was listening with a sort of predatory eagerness.
“We know that these ETA’s were found by a river on Clementina. Everyone also seems to accept that they are not natives of that planet As far as I can see, this notion began with you. Is that so?”
The question was a relief. This Ainson could answer.
“The notion did begin with me, Mr. Bone, though I would call it a conclusion rather than a notion. I can explain it easily, even to a layman. These ETA’s belonged to the ship; be quite clear about that Their excreta was caked all over the inside of it — a computed thirty days’ accumulation of it As additional evidence, the ship was clearly built in their image.”
“The Mariestopes, you might say, is built in the image of the common dolphin. It proves nothing about the shape of the engineers who designed it.”
“Please be courteous enough to hear me out. We found no other mammalian type life of 12B — Clementina, as it is now called. We found no animal life larger than a two-inch tail-less lizard and no insect life larger than a type of bee as big as a common shrew. In a week, with stratospheric surveys day and night you cover a planet pretty thoroughly from pole to equator. Excluding the fish in the seas, we discovered that Clementina had no animal life worth mentioning — except these big creatures that turn the scales at twenty Earth stones. And they were together in one group by the spaceship. Clearly it is an absurdity to suppose them to be natives.”
“You found them beside a river. Why should they not be an aquatic animal, possibly one that spends most of its time at sea?”
Ainson opened and shut his mouth. “Sir Mihaly, this discussion naturally raises points that a layman can hardly be expected… I mean, no purpose is served….”
“Quite so,” agreed Pasztor. “All the same, I think Gerald has an interesting point. Do you feel we can definitely rule out the possibility that these fellows are” aquatic?”
“As I’ve said, they came from the spaceship. That was absolutely conclusive, you have my word for it as the man on the spot.” As he spoke, Ainson’s eye went belligerently over the group; when it met Lattimore’s eye, Lattimore spoke.
“I would say they had the lines of a marine animal — speaking purely as a layman, of course.”
“Perhaps they are aquatic on their own planet, but that has no bearing on what they were doing on Clementina,” Ainson said. “Whatever you say, their spaceship is a spaceship, and consequently we have intelligence on our hands.”
Mihaly came to his rescue then, and called for the next report, but it was obvious that a vote of no confidence had been passed on Master Explorer Ainson.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The sun, as its inalienable custom was, went to bed at sun-set. At the same time, Sir Mihaly Pasztor put on a dinner jacket and went to meet the guests he had invited to dine at his flat. This was a month after the dismal meeting at the zoo when Bruce Ainson had received the intellectual equivalent of a flea in his ear.
Since then, the situation could not be said to have unproved. Dr. Bodley Temple had accumulated an impressive hoard of alien phonemes, none of which had a certain English equivalent. Lattimore had amplified in print the views he had expressed at the meeting. Gerald Bone — traitorously, thought Pasztor — had done a malicious little skit on the meeting for Punch.
These were but pin-pricks. The fact was, there was no progress being made. There was no progress being made chiefly because the aliens, imprisoned in their hygienic cell, showed no interest in the humans, nor any wish to co-operate in any of the stunts the humans devised. This disobliging attitude had its effect on the research team trying to deal with them; their increasing moroseness became increasingly punctuated with bouts of self-pitying oration, as if, like a Communist millionaire, they felt impelled to explain a position of some delicacy.
The general public, too, reacted adversely to the alien cold shoulder. The intelligent man in the street could have appreciated an intelligent alien, no matter what his shape, as a new distraction to compete with the world series, the grim news from Charon, where Brazil seemed to be winning the war, or the leaping taxes that were a natural concomitant to both war and TP travel. Gradually the queues that stood all day to see the aliens in the afternoon dwindled away (after all, they didn’t move about much, and they looked not so very different from terrestrial hippos, and you weren’t allowed to throw nuts at them in case it turned out they really lived in skyscrapers back home) and went back to their old routine of watching instead the Pinfold III primaritals, which indulged in a form of group intercourse every hour on the hour.
Pasztor was, as it happened, thinking of intercourse as he ushered his guest, Mrs. Hilary Warhoon, into his modest dining-closet; or if not thinking of it, reviewing with a whimsical smile at his own weaknesses the fantasies with which he had indulged himself half an hour before Mrs. Warhoon’s arrival.
But no, she was not quite enchanting enough, and Mr. Warhoon by repute was too powerful and spiteful, and anyhow Sir Mihaly no longer had the zest necessary to carry off one of those illicit affairs — even though “illicit” was one of the more alluring words in the English language.
She sat down at the table and sighed.
“It’s wonderful to relax. I’ve had a vile day.”
“Busy?”
“I’ve made work. But I’ve accomplished nothing. And I’m oppressed by a sense of failure.”
“You, Hilary? You are far from being a failure.”
“I was thinking of it less in a personal than in a general or racial sense. Do you want me to elaborate?
I’d like to elaborate.”
He held up his hands in playful protest.
“My idea of civilized intercourse is not to repress but to bring forth, to elaborate. I have never been other than interested in what you have to say.”
There were three globular table ovens standing on the table. As she began to speak, he opened the refrigerated drawers on his right and began to put their contents into the ovens to cook: Fera de Travers, the salmon of Lake Geneva, to begin with, to be followed by eland steaks flown that morning from the farms of Kenya with, to add a touch of the exotic, fingertips, the Venusian asparagus.
“When I say I’m oppressed by a general failure,” Mrs. Warhoon said, attacking a dry sherry, “I’m fully aware that it sounds rather pretentious. ‘Who am I among so many?’, as Shaw once said in a different context. It’s the old problems of definitions, with which the aliens have confronted us in dramatic new guise. Perhaps we cannot converse with them until we have decided for ourselves what constitutes civilization. Don’t raise that suave eye-brow at me. Mihaly; I know civilization does not consist of lying indolent in one’s own droppings — though it’s possible that if we had a guru here he would tell us it did.
“When you take any one quality by which we measure civilization, you will find it missing from various cultures. Take the whole question of crime. For over a century, we have recognized crime as a symptom of sickness or unhappiness. Once we recognized that in practice as well as theory, crime statistics dropped dramatically for the first time. But in many periods of high civilization, life imprisonment was customary, heads fell like petals. Certainly kindness or understanding or mercy are not signs of civilization, any more than war and murder are signs of the lack of it.