“Hilary, I’d stand by you at any time.”
The Ur-Organic style (like all art movement labels, the name was inaccurate to the point of meaninglessness) had perpetrated a nasty whimsy in Mrs. Warhoon’s office. She and Lattimore stepped into a popinjay’s heart. Under a magnification of 200,000, the fibrous tissue ran and knotted in bas-relief over ceiling and floor as well as walls. In the middle of it, lonely, green about one eye, sat Aylmer Ainson, his head indistinct against a galaxy of striated aortal muscle. He stood when Mrs. Warhoon and Lattimore entered.
Poor little devil, thought Lattimore. The lady here is somewhat up a gum tree in concluding that it was any-thing so simple as a black eye that led this boy to want to maroon himself on a strange planet. His whole history — and his parents’ history, and so their parents’ history, and so back to those first deluded dimwits who decided that animal life wasn’t good enough for them — everything has led to this act of his; the black eye was just a clincher. And who would say, who could be a fly-sized god and see it all, that the clincher was accidental? Maybe the poor kid had to provoke the assault to reassure himself that the outside world was the aggressor.
Somewhere, Lattimore thought (but with as much complacency as trepidation, as he realized) my upbringing took the wrong turning, or I would not diagnose so much meaning from the hangdog-proud way this kiddie stood up for us.
“Sit down, Mr. Melmoth,” Mrs. Warhoon said, in a pleasant voice Lattimore found unpleasant. “This is the Flight Advisor, Mr. Lattimore. He knows as well as any-one the communication problems you will be up against, and can give you pointers on the subject.”
“How do you do, sir,” young Ainson said, smiling round his puffy eye.
“Firstly, the larger programme,” said Mrs. Warhoon, and chose a military phrase with winsome self-consciousness, “just to put you in the picture, as they say. When we come out of TP flight, we shall be in a star cluster that contains at least fifteen planets, of which six, to judge by a remote technivisual survey conducted by the Mariestopes, have Earth-type atmospheres. Our aliens, as you know, were found beside a space vehicle — whether it belonged to them or to an allied species, we hope to deter-mine soon. But its suggests that we may find space flight established in this cluster. In that case we shall need to survey all inhabited planets. It was planned before we left Earth that on the first such planet we should deposit an unmanned observation post. Since then, however, I have had a further idea, which Captain Pestalozzi has agreed to let me carry out.
“My idea is simply to leave a volunteer with the observation post Since we could furnish him with provisions and food synthesizers, and the natives, as we know by our captive specimens, will not be hostile, such a volunteer would be quite secure from danger. As we now see, you have consented to be that volunteer.”
Safe in the blown-up popinjay heart, they all smiled at each other.
But does he detect, Lattimore asked himself, the lie in Mrs. Warhoon’s words? Who knows yet what hells these rhinomen may create on their home ground, who knows if there isn’t some man-devouring form of fanner who uses the rhinomen as greedily as we use the Improved Danish Landrace pig? And of course the old Lattimoronic question, who knows what hells this latter day Saint Anthony will create for himself in his alien wilderness? That ill wind cannot be sheltered from, but the others can.
“And, naturally, we will see you are well-armed,” he said, aware by Mrs. Warhoon’s glance that she saw the remark as a minor betrayal.
Compressing her lips, she turned back to Ainson.
“Now to what we expect you to do. We expect you to learn to communicate with the aliens.”
“But the experts couldn’t do that on Earth. How do you expect me—”
“We shall train you, Mr. Melmoth. There are nine whole ship’s days before we break out of TP, and much can be learnt in that time. On Earth, it may have been that an impossible task was attempted; on the aliens’ home planet, when we can see them in their own context, the task will be much lighter. Indeed, the aliens should be very much more communicative in their own environment. We think that probably the wonders of Earth, the size of our starships, and so on, may have partly paralyzed their responses.
“As you may know, we had six alien bodies on which thorough dissections were performed. Our specimens were of different ages, some young, some old. From analysis of their bone tissue, we think they may attain ages of some hundreds of years; their insusceptibility to pain tends to support this theory.
If this is so, then it should follow that they would have protracted childhoods.
“Now I get to my next point. The learning time of any species is in its early days, its babydays, and wherever we go in the galaxy we can expect to find the same rule applying. Children on Earth who through some misadventure learn no language are at twelve or thirteen too old to learn one. This has been proved many times with babies, for instance, in India, who have been tended by monkeys or wolves. Once the time of childhood is past, they are past acquiring the gift of speech.
“So I have reasoned, Mr. Melmoth, that the only time that the aliens might be able to learn our tongue would be during their early years. It will be your job to live as close as you possibly can to one such infant alien.
“It may be — we don’t deny it — that it will prove impossible to communicate with these creatures. But the proof must be conclusive. After we have left you, we shall go to investigate the other planets in the cluster; no doubt we shall capture a group of the aliens and take them back to Earth, or even establish a base on one of the other planets, but that will have to wait on local conditions. Meanwhile, you will be my Number One project.”
For a moment, Aylmer said nothing. He was thinking, in fact, about the winds of chance, and how wildly they blew. Only a brief while ago he was so stickily involved in the web of personal relationships formed by his father, his mother, his girl, and, to a lesser degree, his uncle Mihaly. Now that he was miraculously free, there was one question in particular he wanted to ask: “How long will you be leaving me on this planet?”
“Well, it will be for no longer than a year, that I promise,” Mrs. Warhoon told him, and was relieved to see his frown dissolve. They all smiled at each other again, though both men looked ill at ease.
“How does all that sound to you?” Mrs. Warhoon asked Aylmer Ainson sympathetically.
For heck sake tell her that you realize you have stuck your neck out too far to stomach, thought Lattimore, toying with a metaphor he had mixed some days earlier. Tell her that you can’t afford to pay such a high price for the catharsis you need. Or look at me for assistance and I’ll put in a word for you.
The boy did look at Lattimore, but there were pride and excitement rather than appeal in the glance.
Okay, Lattimore thought, so my diagnosis was a complete cock-up. So he’s a hero rather than a couch case. A man is his own responsibility.
“I feel very honored to be given such an assignment,” Aylmer Ainson said.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Like a dog that has been harshly spoken to. the universe had resumed its customary position. No longer did it cause the Gansas to surround it Instead, it surrounded the big ship, and the big ship sat on the planet with its nose in the air.
In honor of the ship’s captain, the planet had been christened Pestalozzi — though as Navigator Gleet had pointed out there were more pleasant names.
Everything on Pestalozzi was fine.
Its air contained the right admixture of oxygen at ground level, and lacked any vapors that might offend terrestrial lungs. Even better, it harbored — and they had Med Section’s word for it — no bacterium or virus that Med Section could not cope with if necessary.