I turned. The panel she was pointing at was about three feet high by five feet long, sitting on top of a boxlike piece of equipment that had appeared with their entrance. As I looked, an elliptical pool of blackness seemed to flood out and cover the corner areas of the slab. I stepped close to it and found myself looking into, rather than at, the darkness, as if it had depth and I was looking down into a three-dimensional space.
As I focused in, deeper into the darkness, I saw that it was alive with shifting, moving fans of lights, something like the aurora borealis with its successions of milky colors spreading out over the northern sky at night. These lights I watched now moved much faster than the northern lights I was used to, and their pattern was much more complex. But, otherwise, they were remarkably similar.
They were similar to something else, too. I stared at them, unable to quite zero in on what they reminded me of. Then it burst on me.
“Of course!” I said, turning to Dragger and the others. “Those are time storm force line patterns, extremely slowed, but still force line patterns in action.”
The four of them looked at me. Then Dragger turned to Obsidian.
“Thank you, Obsidian,” she said. She looked back at me. “Thank you, Marc.”
She turned around and began to lead the rest out.
I stared after her, and at the rest of them.
“Wait a second!” I said.
“Marc,” said Obsidian behind me. “Marc, I said you might be working yourself up for a disappointment—”
“Disappointment!” I said. “The hell with that! I said they’re force line patterns, and they are. Come on back here—Dragger, the rest of you. You can’t just walk out. You owe me an explanation, if I want one. I’ve picked up enough about your time to know that!”
They slowed and stopped. For a moment they stood in a group, and I had the strong impression that a discussion was going on, although I could not hear a word or see a lip movement. Then they turned back into the room, Dragger still leading, and came to face me again.
“There is no explanation to give,” Dragger said. “We wished to test you for a sensitivity we feel is necessary, if you and your group are to be allowed to stay in the present. Unfortunately, you don’t seem to show that sensitivity.”
“And how do you figure that?” I said. “You showed me a pattern of time storm forces in action, I told you what they were— where’s the indication of a lack of sensitivity on my part?”
“Marc,” said Dragger, “I’m sorry to say that what you looked at was not what you said it was.”
“Not a pattern of force lines from the time storm?”
“No. I’m sorry.” Once more she turned to go and the others shifted with her.
“Damn it, come back here!”
“Marc—” It was Porniarsk, now, trying to interpose.
“Porniarsk, stay out of this! You too, Obsidian! Dragger, you others, turn around. Come back! I don’t know what the idea is, your trying to lie to me like this. But it’s not working. You think I don’t know time storm forces when I see them? Obsidian’s been told what I’ve done and been through with Porniarsk here. You must know what I told him—or didn’t you do your homework? If you do know what I told him, you know you can’t get away with showing me a pattern of the storm lines and claiming it’s something else.”
The four stood facing each other in silence. After a second, Obsidian took three quick steps across the floor and joined them. They stood motionless and voiceless, facing each other for a long minute. Then they all turned to face me.
“Marc,” said Obsidian, “I assure you, that was not a representation of lines of force from what you call the time storm. It was a projected pattern of conceptual rhythms common to all minds in our present-day culture. If you had shown a capability for responding to those rhythms, the pattern would have evoked some common images in your mind—water, gas, star, space... and so on. Apparently, it didn’t; so we have to conclude that you don’t have the capability to respond in modern terms. That’s all. You don’t gain anything by this insisting that you were looking at a representation of temporal force lines.”
“I see!” I said.
Because suddenly I did. And suddenly I was so sure I was right that I went ahead without even bothering to check the words out in my head before I said them.
“In fact,” I said, “I see a lot of things. One of them is that I understand you better than you understand me—and I’m going to prove that right now. You see, I know you can’t sluff me off and send me back with that answer, if I say the proper words. Your responsibility reflex won’t let you; and I’m going to say the proper words now. The words are—you and these people here, and everyone else you know, have one galloping cultural blindness. You’re dead blind in an area where I’m not; and I can see it where you can’t, because I’m standing outside your culture and looking in at it. Your whole set of rules is based on the fact that you can’t deny me a hearing on that point. Now that it’s been raised, you have to settle conclusively whether I’m right about what I’m saying, or wrong. If I’m wrong, then you can get rid me. But if I’m right, then you, all of you, are going to have to learn different—from me. Am I right?”
I stopped speaking and waited. They merely stood there.
“Well?” I said. “Am I right, or aren’t I? Am I entitled to a hearing or not?”
They looked at each other and stood for a moment longer. Then they all turned back to me.
“Marc,” said Obsidian, “we’ll have to consult about this. In theory at least, you’re right. You’ll get your hearing. But now we have to talk the whole matter over, and that’s going to take a little time. Meanwhile, because of the importance of your challenge to us, it seems you’re going to have to learn our way of communicating after all.”
35
It developed that the reason they had not tried to teach me, and Porniarsk .for that matter, how to communicate in their way was because of an assumption on their part that, conceptually, we were not up to such education. But since I had now told them that I believed the shoe was on the other foot, and that I knew things of which they couldn’t conceive, their original reason for not teaching me had become indefensible. In short, whether I could actually handle their language effectively, or not, I had to be given a chance to explain myself in it, so that the accusation couldn’t arise that I had failed to make my point because I had not been given the chance to state it in fully understandable terms.
That much established, the actual process of learning turned out to be easy. As Obsidian had said, they had devices and techniques for teaching. Within twenty-four hours, Porniarsk and I could handle all four modes of their communication. These were sound; signal (limb-waving, etc.); attitudinal (which was really another form of signal, since it meant communicating with physical attitudes—body language); and modification-of-surroundings, which essentially meant communicating by playing games with the surrounding scenery, whether illusory or real.
These four modes actually duplicated each other. That is, they had each been single, exclusive methods of communication originally, and had been combined as amplifying redundancies. Actually, I would be able to make my argument completely in the verbal mode. But if I should be questioned on a particular verbal statement, I could now nail down what I meant by repeating what I had said in one or more of the other modes. In theory, any statement made in as few as two modes established its message beyond any possibility of ambiguity.
So, I was ready for argument in twenty-four hours. The debate was not called to order, however, for the equivalent of three more Earth days. I was not too unhappy about that because it gave me time to do some thinking. Under pressure, I had jumped to a conclusion, there in that moment when Dragger and the others had turned to walk out; and that jump had been genuine inspiration. But now I needed to build that inspiration up into a solid, cohesive argument.