Uproar of many queer voices again, with the kitten's basso purr breaking through: "It is to discuss you, Dr. Jen Babylon. We have no use here for quantum-dynamic linguistics practiced by primitive races. You are a waste of scarce resources! What makes you think this language can be translated? Suppose the creatures who spoke it do not think of the world the way we do? Suppose their interests are internal? abstract? mathematical? Suppose their mode of communication is telepathic, or evocative, or—"
Suddenly Babylon was fed up. "Suppose you shut up," he snapped. "It's obvious that your race is among the primitive ones in this respect! Look. What do you use language for? To communicate. What do you communicate about? Matters of mutual interest. Without the mutuality there is no communication—not because the language fails to conceptualize the material, but because the material itself is not mutual—"
He paused, because Doc Chimp was shaking his head worriedly. "At any rate," he went on after a moment, "I have confidence that I can untangle the language, farlink will help. If necessary I'll send tapes back to my lab—to the laboratories in Boston for analysis by the mainframe equipment there. Trust me, we'll get it solved," he said, aware that he was trying to placate this group of unpleasant personalities.
A rattle sounded from the whole Scorpian, translated by the Pmal as harsh laughter. "Negative trust," it said. "Defer decision on 'solved.' Not relevant in any case. Entire project, also entire function of investigation of 'Cuckoo' object, as well as 'Cuckoo' object itself, of no further importance. Recommend termination."
The meeting went on beyond that, but Babylon understood little of what was happening. The galactic creatures seemed to have had the practice of the disorderly assemblies long enough that they could understand what was going on. Or more likely, didn't really care. Babylon had not. When all of them were chirping or buzzing or thundering at once, the Pmals were swamped. Only fragmentary phrases came out, in disconnected order.
Yet when they were outside Doc Chimp said moodily, "Well, I think it went well enough, Dr. Babylon—"
"Jen, please."
"—Jen, but you never know with these creatures." He tugged Babylon out of the main corridor into a smaller one, heading back toward their own quarters of the orbiter; a flight of T'Worlie fluttered out of the way, exuding a quick barnyard odor of mild annoyance. "But maybe you'd better do what you said and get your other self back on Earth to help. We may not have very much time."
"All right," Babylon said, gasping with the effort of trying to match the chimpanzee in tug-and-kick along the corridors. "I don't see what the hurry is, though."
The chimp paused, grabbing a handhold with one skinny arm and snatching Babylon in midflight with the other. He glanced up and down the corridor, his face stiff with worry. "You don't?" he whispered softly. "I thought you were listening, inside there. Didn't you wonder what that Scorpian meant by 'termination'?"
EIGHT
He should have taken the subtrain to Cambridge, but he wanted the exercise. Now the weather had turned wet and cold and the wind whipped raindrops up the Charles River. Jen Babylon shivered and tried to walk faster across the bridge.
That was hard to do, because there were knots of people standing about, staring at the water—strange time for rubbernecking! Babylon stepped down off the sidewalk to pass one milling cluster, coming perilously close to the rushing stream of hovertaxis and vans, and an elderly woman stepped out ahead of him, coming toward him. "Careful!" he snapped, rescuing her from the traffic lanes.
"Oh, sorry," she said, putting her hand out to reassure herself by touching him. "Ugly-looking things, aren't they?"
Not knowing what she was talking about, he nodded, slipped past her back onto the sidewalk, and found himself in a clear place. He glanced over the railing at the water, and then he saw.
The river's edge was alive with huge, glass-bodied crabs.
The woman had certainly been right; the ugly things surrounded the water-filtration plant like scuttling crustacean ghosts. Babylon imagined he could hear the clicking and slithering even on the bridge, though it was impossible, of course, with the traffic so close behind him. Filthy creatures! And more and more of them all the time, appearing at shipyards and LH-storage facilities, stopping traffic on main arteries and even threatening the tachyon- transmission center. The authorities first tried to control them, then to destroy—explosives, flamethrowers, clubs, even by running Army tanks and road rollers over them to crush them. But the beings were virtually indestructible. Men with hammers, they had discovered, could blind them by pounding their eyes into rubble, and then the creatures became immobile and could be carted away. But they multiplied faster than one-on-one tactics could destroy them— in what way, no one knew. In the Middle Ages people believed that mice were spontaneously generated in piles of unwashed clothing; now the best opinion anyone could give was that the crabs appeared automatically in shallow water. So much for the steady advance of scientific knowledge!
They were a problem—but not particularly Jen Babylon's problem, and he had plenty of his own. A robot hover- taxi hesitated before him, waiting for a clump of pedestrians to get out of the way, and Babylon gave up the thought of exercise and jumped in. His problems were waiting for him at the university. It was impossible to put them off forever—though, Babylon thought wistfully, what an attractive idea that was! It seemed impossible that only a few weeks ago he had been taping old native dialects on Bora-Bora, with no worry in the world except the hope of promotion and the demands of his work.
As soon as he got to his desk he tried one more time to confront the most personal of his problems by dialing Sheryl's call code on the stereophone.
And, one more time, it was her recorded image that answered him, not herself. "I'm terribly sorry," it said, "that I am not able to be here in person just now. I am occupied in higher work." Higher work! Madness, Babylon thought, as the recorded figure paused. There was a look of exaltation on her gaunt, consecrated face. This was not the offhanded, faintly bored Sheryl who had been his bed companion for so many months. The real Sheryl was drawling and mostly amused, where this person was . . . obsessed; Sheryl was fastidious about her appearance and dress, while this person had thrown on the first garments that presented themselves, and her hair had not been washed, or even brushed, for days. In a sudden burst of rapture the figure whispered, "I Cry the imminent majesty of Cuckoo" . . . and vanished.
Babylon watched the image shatter into golden mist and fade away. He was sorely troubled. It was not as if he had any commitment to Sheryl. They had never talked of any permanent relationship, much less marriage. Yet—they had been lovers for more than a year, had shared more intimacies than merely the bed. Could he let her do this to herself?
Or—more to the point—did he have any way to stop her?
A voice from the doorway brought him face to face with the second of his problems: Dean Margaret Kooseman. "Oh, Jen dear," she whispered, a sad smile of compassion on her weather-beaten face, "how terrible this must be for you. Such a sweet, pretty girl, to get mixed up with those horrid Kooks!"
"Yes, well, thanks, Margaret," Babylon said gruffly, taking off his glasses to see her more directly. It did not pay to let Margaret Kooseman too far inside your private life. "What can I do for you?"
She came in and sat primly down beside his desk, relaxed as she gazed around the room. In one corner the processor was turning pages in an old missionary's dictionary of Hawaiian, inputting dialects to correlate against Babylon's own, more recent data; in another, two different information-handling machines were purring to each other as they matched sounds against sense. "What a nice, orderly person you are, Jen," she said approvingly. "In this very disordered world, you're priceless!"