"I 'ate to say it, but I don' believe those fluoroscopes are going to do much good."
In a moment, the table had been in an uproar again.
Spangler grunted, switched on his speakwrite and began to dictate a report of the conference. "To Claude Keith-Ingram, Chief Comm DeptSecur," he said. "Most Secret. Most Urgent." He thought for a moment, then rapidly gave an account of Pembun's statement, adding that Dr. Baustian doubted the validity of his information, and that Pembun admitted he had never seen any actual evidence of the Rithians' alleged protean ability.
He read it over, then detached the spool and tossed it into the out tube.
He was still unsatisfied.
He had done everything he could be expected to do, exactly according to regulations. If policy were to be changed, it was not for him to change it. Logic and instinct both assured him that Pembun was not to be taken seriously.
But there was something else Pembun had said that still bothered him, for a reason he could not explain. He had not included it in his report; it would have seemed, to put it mildly, frivolous.
Pembun had said:
"There's one more thing you got to watch out for—those Rithi got a 'ell of a sense of yumor."
Spangler passed his hand over the intercom. "Gordon," he said.
"Yes, sir?"
"Did you find quarters for Mr. Pembun?"
"Yes sir."
"Where is he?"
"G-level, section seven, Suite One-eleven."
"Right," said Spangler, flicking his hand over the intercom to break the connection. He stood up, walked out of the office, and buzzed a scooter.
"G-level," he said into its mechanical ear.
II
The door of Suite 111 was ajar. Inside, a baritone voice was singing to the accompaniment of some stringed instrument. Spangler paused and listened.
There was a final chord, then a hollow wooden thump and jangle as the instrument was set down; then the clink of ice cubes in a glass.
Spangler put his hand over the doorplate. The chime was followed by Pembun's voice calling, "Come awn in!"
Pembun was comfortably slumped in a recliner, with his collar undone and his feet high. The glass in his hand, judging by color, contained straight whiskey. On a low table at his side were the remains of a man-sized meal, a decanter, an ice bucket and several clean glasses, and the instrument—a tiny, round-bellied thing with three strings.
The little man swung himself lithely around and rose. "I was 'oping somebody would cawl," he said happily. "Gets kind of lonesome in this place—lonesomer than the mountings a thousand miles from anybody, some'ow. 'Ere, take the company seat, Commissioner. A glawss of w'iskey?"
Spangler took an upright chair. "This will do nicely," he said. "No thanks to the whiskey—I haven't your stomach."
Pembun looked startled, then smiled. "I'll get them to sen' up some soda," he said. He swung himself into the recliner again, reached for the intercom and gave the order.
"W'y I looked surprised for a minute w'en you said that," he explained, turning sidewise on the recliner, "is becawse we got an expression on Man'aven. Wen we say, 'I 'aven' got your stomach,' that means I don' like you, we're not sympathetic. 'E no ay to stomá."
Spangler felt an unexpected twinge of guilt—of course Pembun knew he wasn't liked—and then a wave of irritation. Damn the man! How did he always manage to put one in the wrong?
He kept his voice casual and friendly. "What was that you were singing, just before I came in?"
"Oh, that—'Odum Pawkee Mont a Mutting.' " He picked up the instrument and sang the chorus Spangler had heard. Spangler listened, charmed in spite of himself. The melody was simple and jaunty—the kind of thing, he told himself, that would go well sung on muleback… or the backs of whatever ill-formed beasts the Manhavenites used instead of mules.
Pembun put the instrument down. "In English, that means, 'Old Man Pawkey climbs a mounting, clouds 'ide Old Man Pawkey. Old Man Pawkey climbs a mounting, all for a cup of coffee!' "
"Is there more?"
Pembun made his eyes comically wide. "Oh, shoo! There's 'bout a trillion verses. I only know every tenth one, about, but we'd be 'ere all night if I sang 'em. It's kind of a saga. Old Man Pawkey was a settler who lived up in the Desperation Mountings in the early days. That's in the temperate zone, but even so it's awful wild country, all straight up and straight down. 'E loved coffee, but of course there wasn' any. Well, 'e 'eard there was some in the spaceport town, Granpeer, down in the plateau country, and 'e went there, on foot. Twenty-two 'undred kilometers. Or so they say."
The conveyor door popped open. Pembun went over to get the soda and pour Spangler a drink. "There were some big things done in those days," he added, "but there were some big lies told, too."
Spangler felt an obscure shock that made him jumpy again. In the conscious effort to sympathize with Pembun, to understand the man in his own terms, he had managed to build up a picture which was really not too hard to admire: the wild, colorful, free life of the frontier, the hardships accepted and conquered, the deeds of heroism casually done, et cetera, et cetera. And then Pembun himself, in half a sentence, had indifferently rejected that picture. "There were some big lies told, too."
Pembun didn't believe in the Empire; all right. But—if he had no respect for his own planet's traditions, then what in the name of sanity did he believe in?
Spangler was a man who tried hard to be liberal. But now, staring at Pembun's round brown face, the yellowish whites of his eyes, he thought once more: It's a waste of time to try to understand this man. He's not civilized; he thinks like an animal. There's simply no point of contact.
He said abruptly, "At the meeting, you mentioned something about the Rithians' 'sense of humor.' What, exactly, did you mean?"
He was thinking: In a few minutes I'll be back in my office. I'll drink half of this highball, precisely, and then go.
Pembun leaned back in the relaxer, head turned slightly, eyes alert on Spangler. "Well," he said, "they're kind of peculiar, in this way. They're a real 'ighly-advanced people, technologically—you know that. But the things that strike them funny remind you more of a kind of backwoods planet, like Man'aven. Maybe that's w'y we got along so well with them—Man'aven yumor is kind of primitive. Pulling out a chair we'n a man goes to sit down. That kind of thing. But they beat us.
"They'll go forty miles out of their way to play a joke, even w'en it isn' good business. I've 'eard a novel written by one of their big authors—twelve spools, mus' be more than five 'undred thousan' words long—jus' so 'e could build up to a dirty joke at the end. It was a bes'-seller in their solar system. An' they're crazy about puns—plays on words. Some of their sentences you're suppose' to read as many as fifteen, twenty different ways."
Spangler's memory groped uneasily for a moment and then produced a relevant fact from his training days. "Like Joyce," he said. "The twentieth-century decadent."
"Uh-mm," Pembun agreed. "I use' to be able to quote pages of Finnegans Wake: 'riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation…' That's primer talk, compared to Rithi literature."