While the Gabriel was being built, a top-echelon linguist had read the notes and listened to the recordings of his predecessor. But he'd spent too much time in trying to make comparisons with various aspects of Siddo to those of Terran languages, dead or alive. Where he should have been setting up a system by which the crew could learn Siddo in the quickest manner, he'd indulged his scholarly inclinations. Maybe this was the reason he wasn't going on the ship. Hal didn't know. He'd been given no explanation of why he was a last-minute substitute.
So Hal swore and bent to his work. He listened to the sounds of Siddo and studied their waveforms on the oscilloscope. He labored at reproducing them with his un-Ozagenian tongue, lips, teeth, palate, and larynx. He worked on a Siddo-American dictionary, an essential which his predecessor had somewhat neglected.
Unfortunately, before he or any of his crew mates could become fully conversant in Siddo, its native speakers would be dead.
Hal worked six months, long after all but the skeleton crew had gone into the suspensor. What annoyed him most about the project was the presence of Pornsen. The gapt would have gone into deep freeze, but he had to stay awake to watch Hal, to correct any unreal behavior on his part. The only redeeming feature was that Hal did not have to talk to Pornsen unless he felt like it, because he could use the urgency of his work as an excuse. But he tired of it after a while and of the loneliness. Pornsen was the most available human being to talk to, so Hal talked to him.
Hal Yarrow was also among the first to come out of the suspensor. This, he was told, was forty years later. Intellectually, he accepted the statement. But he never really believed it. There was no change in the physical appearance of himself or his shipmates. And the only change outside the ship was in the increased brightness of the star that was their destination.
Eventually, the star became the brightest object in the universe. Then, the planets circling it became visible. Ozagen, the fourth from the star, loomed. Approximately the size of Earth, it looked – from a distance – exactly like Earth. The Gabriel slipped into orbit after feeding data into the computer. For fourteen days, the vessel whirled around the planet while observations were made from the Gabriel itself and from gigs which descended into the atmosphere and even made several landings.
Finally, Macneff told the captain to take the Gabriel down.
Slowly, using immense quantities of fuel because of her vast mass, the Gabriel eased into the atmosphere and toward Siddo, the capital city, on the central-eastern coast. It settled gently as snowfall toward an open stretch in a park in the heart of the city. Park? The entire city was a park; the trees were so plentiful that from the air Siddo looked as if only a few people lived in it, not the estimated quarter of a million. There were many buildings, some ten stories high, but they were so widely separated they did not make an aggregate impression. The streets were wide, but they were overgrown by a grass so tough it could withstand any amount of wear. Only on the busy harbor front did Siddo resemble anything like an Earth city. Here the buildings were clustered close together, and the water was packed with sail ships and paddle-wheeled steamboats.
Down came the Gabriel while the crowd that had gathered below it ran to the borders of the meadow. Its colossal gray bulk settled upon the grass and at once began imperceptibly sinking into the soil. The Sandalphon, Macneff, ordered the main port opened. And, followed close behind by Hal Yarrow, who was to assist him if he stumbled in his speech to the welcoming delegation, Macneff stepped out into the open air of the first habitable planet discovered by Earthmen.
Like Columbus, thought Hal. Will the story be the same?
Afterward, the Terrans discovered that the mighty vessel lay at right angles across and above two underground steam-railroad tunnels. There was, however, no danger of their collapsing. The holes went through solid rock with six meters of another stratum of rock and twenty meters of dirt above it. Moreover, the ship was so long that most of its weight pressed on the area outside the tunnels. After determining this, the captain decided that the Gabriel should stay where it was.
From sunrise to sunset, its personnel ventured among the natives, learning all they could of their language, customs, history, biology, and other things, data which the first expedition had failed to get.
To make sure that the wogs didn't think the Terrans were suspiciously eager to get blood samples, Hal didn't bring up the matter for six weeks. In the meantime he spent much time – with Pornsen usually present – with a native named Fobo. He was one of the two who had learned American and a little Icelandic during the first expedition. Though he didn't know any more of the former language than Hal knew of Siddo, he did know enough to speed up Hal's mastery of Siddo. Sometimes, they talked quite fluently, on a simple level, by mixings up the two tongues.
One of the things about which the Earthmen were covertly curious was the Ozagen technology. Logically, there was nothing to fear from them. As far as could be determined, the wogs had progressed no further than Earth's early-twentieth-century (A.D.) science. But the human beings had to make sure that what met the eye was all that was there. What if the wogs were hiding weapons of devastating power, waiting to catch the visitors unawares?
Missiles and atomic warheads were not to be feared. Obviously, Ozagen was not, as yet, capable of making these. But the wogs did seem to be very advanced in biological science. And this was to be dreaded as much as thermonuclear weapons. Moreover, even if disease was not used to attack the Earthmen, disease remained a deadly threat. What might be a nuisance to an Ozagenian with millennia of acquired immunity could be a swift death to a Terrestrial.
So – slow and cautious was the order. Find out everything possible. Gather data, correlate, interpret. Before beginning Project Ozagenocide, make sure that retaliation is impossible. Make sure.
Thus it was that four months after the appearance of the Gabriel above Siddo, two presumably friendly (to wogs) Terrans set out on a trip with two presumably friendly (to Terrans) wogglebugs. They were going to investigate the ruins of a city built two thousand years ago by now nearly extinct humanoids. They were inspired by a dream that had been dreamed on the planet Earth years before and light-years distant.
They rode in a vehicle fantastic to the human beings.
The motor hiccoughed, and the car jerked. The Ozagenian sitting on the right side of the rear seat leaned over and shouted something.
Hal Yarrow turned his head and yelled, 'What?'
He repeated in Siddo, ' "Abhudai'akhu?" '
Fobo, sitting directly behind Hal, stuck his mouth against the Earthman's ear. He translated for Zugu though his American sounded weird with its underlying trill and resonant approximations.
'Zugu says and emphasizes that you should pump that little rod to your right. It gives the... carburetor... more alcohol.'
The antennae on Fobo's skullcap tickled Hal's ears. Hal spoke a word-sentence consisting of thirty syllables This meant, roughly, 'I thank you.' It consisted initially of the verb used in the present masculine animate singular first person form. Attached to the verb was a syllable indicating freedom from obligation on the part of either the speaker or hearer, the inflected first person pronoun, another syllable indicating that the speaker acknowledged the hearer as most knowledgeable of the two, the third person masculine animate singular pronoun, and two syllables which, in their order of sequence, classified the whole present situation as semi-humorous. Reversed in sequence, the classifier would indicate that the situation was serious.
'What did you say?' shouted Fobo, and Hal shrugged. He suddenly realized that he had forgotten a palatal click, the lack of which either changed the meaning of the phrase or else made it completely meaningless. In either case, he did not have the time or the will to repeat.
Instead, he worked the throttle as Fobo had directed. To do so, he had to lean across the gapt, sitting at his right.
'A thousand pardons!' Hal bellowed.
Pornsen did not look at Yarrow. His hands, lying on his lap, were locked together. The knuckles were white. Like his ward, he was having his first experience with an internal combustion motor. Unlike Hal, he was scared by the loud noise, the fumes, the bumps and bangs, and the idea of riding in a manually controlled ground vehicle.
Hal grinned. He loved this quaint car, which reminded him of the pictures in the history books of Earth's automobiles during the second decade of the twentieth century. It thrilled him to be able to twist the stiff-acting wheel and feel the heavy body of the vehicle obey his muscles. The banging of the four cylinders and the reek of burning alcohol excited him. As for the rough riding, that was fun. It was romantic, like putting out to sea in a sailboat-something else he hoped to do before he left Ozagen.
Also, though he would not admit it to himself, anything that scared Pornsen pleased him.
His pleasure ended. The cylinders popped, then sputtered. The car bucked and jerked and rolled to a stop. The two wogglebugs hopped over the side of the car (no doors) and raised the hood. Hal followed. Pornsen remained on the seat. He pulled a package of Merciful Seraphim (if angels smoked, they'd prefer Merciful Seraphim) out of his uniform pocket and lit one. His hands shook.
Hal noted it was the fourth he'd seen Pornsen smoking since morning prayers. If Pornsen wasn't careful, he'd be going over the quota allowed even first-class gapts. That meant that the next time Hal got into trouble, he could ask the gapt for help by reminding him... No! That was too shameful a thought to keep in his head. Definitely unreal, belonging only in a pseudofuture. He loved the gapt as the gapt loved him, and he should not be planning such an un-Sigmenlike path of behavior.
Yet, he thought, judging from the difficulties he'd been in so far, he could use some help from Pornsen.