Ph’theri waved an orange palm cursorily.
“May we appear over your cities? Interest ourselves in recording architectural and urban data?”
“We would prefer,” intervened Sciavoni nervously, “to arrange tours for you. There’s such a lot of air traffic over our cities, you see. The system’s really very complicated—”
“So you accept the pay-off?”
Ph’theri’s question produced an awkward hush. Nobody was willing to commit themselves. During the silence that followed, the alien’s paper-bag ears inflated to pick up tiny sounds, brought him by the scarlet wires.
Ph’theri was the first to speak.
“The Sp’thra make the following offer for what we want to buy,” he said to Sole. “We will tell you the location of the closest unused world known to us, habitable by you. The location of the nearest intelligent species known to us ready to engage in interstellar communication, together with an effective means of communication using modulated tachyon beams. Finally, we offer you an improvement on your current technology for spaceflight within your solar system—”
“In return for which you want more tapes and grammar books on microfilm?”
“No. That has been your mistake all along. Tapes and books cannot provide a full model of language in action. We need six units programmed with separate languages as far removed from each other as possible.”
“Units?”
“We need working brains competent in six linguistically diverse languages. Six is an adequate statistical sample—”
“You mean human volunteers, to go back home to your planet with you?”
“Leave Earth for the stars?” cried an American whose face—younger then, grinning toothily from the cover of Newsweek—Sole remembered from one of the Apollo missions. “I’d sure say yes to that, even if it did mean never coming home again. That’s the human spirit.” The astronaut stared defiantly round the room, as though he’d staked a claim to something.
“No,” Ph’theri retorted sharply. “That isn’t reasonable. To have our ship crowded with a zoo of beings on the loose. We have been trading with many worlds. If we took beings on board from every one—”
“That globe of yours looks big enough.”
“And I say it is full—it carries the space tide drive, which is not small. The planetary drive. And the ecology for the methane Tide Readers, who are huge beings.”
“But, methane breathers I We humans can fit in with you, surely,” the astronaut begged. “You’re just wearing a simple air filter.”
“Atmospherically compatible you may be. Whether culturally compatible, is very doubtful.”
“Then what do you mean if not live human beings!”
“What we say—language-programmed brains. In working order. Separated from the body. Machine-maintained compactly.”
“You want to cut a human brain out of its body and keep it alive in a machine for you to experiment on?”
“The requirement is for six brains, programmed with different languages. And instruction tapes.”
“Jesus Christ,” murmured Sciavoni.
“Naturally we consult on which units are most suitable,” said Ph’theri.
TEN
Lionel Rosson tossed his hair fitfully as he came into Haddon Unit out of the crisp January air, unshouldering his sheepskin coat hastily as he encountered the wall of heat.
And how about the hothouse growths within?
Damn Sole for a bastard, ducking out of sight at this first sign of trouble on his mysterious errand to America. Leaving Rosson, like some little Dutch boy, to stick his thumb in the leaking dyke. Then watch helplessly as the cracks got wider and wider.
Sole’s alibi was really as thin as ice. If Sam Bax didn’t keep up the illusion of its solidity by skating over it.
Who had that man Zwingler been?
And what was this instant-mash ‘Verbal Behaviour Seminar’ the American had invited Sole to attend? Rosson’s private theory was that some space tragedy had happened that no one had been told about. Some radical breakdown in communication with the long-flight astronauts as they swung round the world for months on end in Skylab. They’d been expelled from the womb of Earth, with its comforting tug of gravity and its well-spaced sunrises and half a hundred other natural and necessary signals, longer than any other men had been. Had they altered their patterns of thinking to fit some new celestial norm? Or fallen in between two stools—bastards of Earth and of the Stars? And now they needed rescue—conceptual rescue, before they could be rescued physically. Was that it?
A memory nagged at him—something he’d read years ago, that the initiate to the Orphic Rites in ancient Greece had to learn by heart for recitation after death. ‘I am a child of Earth and Starry Heaven. Give me to drink of…’ Of what? The waters of forgetfulness—or the waters of memory? One of the two; but he couldn’t remember which it had been. Yet the distinction was critical. Perhaps it was critical too, for the Skylab astronauts.
That man Zwingler’s paper had been about ‘Disorientation in longflight astronauts’, ‘Disorder of conceptual sets’. What if astronauts did lose their wits in that place of exile between Earth and the Stars? In that mind limbo up there. Who knew what experiments Skylab really carried as a payload? How it fitted the nowadays mood that avenging angels should always be floating overhead. Prometheans who had mastered the secrets of nuclear fire, only to become mankind’s own liver-eating eagles, soaring in perpetual orbit.
Rosson wondered too, what link, if any, there was between this hastily-convened conference on verbal behaviour, and the new Russian moon visible only over Reykjavik, Siberia and the Solomon Islands. A grandiose and meaningless gesture, to inflate such a vast balloon and hang it like a lantern in the sky—where nobody would be seeing it. So unlike the Russians. They always aimed for the maximum propaganda appeal.
Whatever the truth was (and presumably Sole knew it) damn him for a bastard ducking out of the Unit right now. At the very time when his precious Vidya was about to go crazy—and his embedded world was coming apart at the seams…
He passed the fir tree, still standing there at the foot of the Great Staircase. Though Christmas was past, it still lacked a few days till Twelfth Night—and the full ritual was being observed. The tree looked more like a skeleton than ever. An X-ray of a tree skirted about by thick green dandruff.
They should take it away sooner. It had become depressing.
Should he trace a message in the scurf for the nursing staff to read? ‘Bury me, I’m dead’. No point. They had military minds, and stuck to regulations. Regulation 217 subsection (a)—‘Christmas trees shall remain in situ till the Twelfth Day of Christmas’. Something like that.
He passed through the security airlock into the rear wing, knocked on Sam Bax’s door and walked in.
“What is it, Lionel?”
Sam Bax didn’t seem overjoyed to see him. He hadn’t, lately.
“Sam, I must know when Chris is coming back. The situation’s getting more touchy every day. There could be some real damage done before long.”
“Why can’t you hold the fort yourself, Lionel? I’ll ask Richard to take turns with you if you want. But you were Chris’s choice.”
“You haven’t told me when Chris is coming back. Or what he’s doing.”
“Lionel, I frankly don’t know when he’ll be back. Tom Zwingler telephoned from America yesterday. It seems Chris has some significant contribution to make.”