"You're very kind, Margaret. Is that what you came here to tell me?"
"And so direct and to the point, too," she sighed, favoring him with a smile. "But you have to let me just breathe hard for a moment, Jen. I've just come from a faculty senate meeting and, oh, the noise and argument there! You know what they're like." He didn't, of course; plebes like himself weren't allowed in. "And this time worse than usual. Those crabby things! We were given some samples by the Public Safety Commission to try to figure out what to do about them—and would you believe it, everybody wanted them? The veterinary medicine school said they were animals, Charley Kentwell said they belonged to him because they were silicon-based and therefore inorganic chemistry, the computer people claimed they were machines—we had to give one to each of them to shut them up."
"I wouldn't have thought there was any scarcity of them," Babylon commented.
The dean nodded enthusiastically. "You see what I mean? You're always right to the point! But there's more to it—somebody even suggested you ought to take time out from your very valuable work to study them, because there's a chance that they come from one of the known galactic planets, and may have a language—"
"Margaret!"
"No, of course that was silly. I put my foot right down on that. Especially since I'm afraid you're going to have to postpone all your other work for something else, anyway."
So at last they were coming to the point! Babylon's voice was almost shaking with repressed anger as he demanded, "What are you talking about?"
"Cuckoo, I'm afraid."
"But I've already done what you asked!"
She nodded sadly. "Isn't it terrible? One does so much, and then they always demand just one more thing from you. This time it's a packet of data from Cuckoo." She fished in her dispatch case and brought out a glimmering silver ball. "This is it—ion-coded, because there's so much of it You'll have to feed it into your databank before you can work with it. It just came from the tachyon station for you."
"Margaret! My work with the ancient Polynesian dialects—"
"Yes, isn't it a pity? But we can't give you any more processor time, so you'll just have to feed all that into slow storage and clear the machines for this. I know I can rely on you. That's why, when I retire—"
"Give me the damn thing," he said sharply, unwilling to hear those vague promises again. What a waste! At least an hour to clear the databanks of the ongoing material— another hour, maybe five or six hours, for the processors to assimilate this unwieldy mass of material from Cuckoo— and then God knew how many more hours and days of puzzling it over before he could get back to his real work.
She smiled and got up, coming around the desk to touch the top of his head with her dry lips. "You're so good, Jen," she sighed, setting the gleaming sphere gently on his desk. "And, oh, yes, there's a message for you on the stereostage concerning this stuff." She giggled. "It's so funny, really—it's from yourself!"
Universities, which are always underfunded in comparison with the projects they would like to undertake, cannot function without copious supplies of slave labor. These are called "graduate students." I suppose I should be grateful, Babylon told himself, that at least Margaret gave me two extra pairs of hands—of course, I had to beg for them.
But the two graduate students were a big help all the same. Marco, the Filipino-Malay-American, had listened quietly to his instructions, nodded and gone off to arrange storage for the Polynesian material; Althea, the blond young woman from Texas, went to work instantly with a portable processor to read out the index codes from the glittering sphere and plan its storage in the databanks. She was quite a pretty young woman, and having her move about his office, with the faint wisp of perfume that seemed to follow her everywhere, reminded Babylon uncomfortably that it had been a long time since he and Sheryl had released their sexual tensions on each other. He punched out Sheryl's code once more, got the same response, swore to himself . . . and, after a moment's thought, replayed the message from Cuckoo.
His own face looked out from the stage at him, and his own voice spoke. A shiver ran up his spine as he heard himself say, "Hello, me. Is that how you say it? I mean, how I say it—or we say it?" Jen's face grinned at the other
Jen, unhappily. "Well, listen, we both know this is strange, and we both know everything either of us knew up until old Margaret talked us into this thing—so I'll come right to the point. I know you're busy. I know you don't want to do this. But I need help. I have this body of material and I have to have total interpretation of it—semantic, morphological, grammatical, every parameter there is. It's a matter of life and death, Jen. Our life."
The one and original Jen Babylon—the one on Earth— snapped it off at that point; the rest was technical instructions, and they were already being carried out.
Since there was no help for it, Babylon was slowly beginning to come around to the feeling that this new task was going to be interesting in its own right. What made Babylon a professor in the first place was the pure lust of the scholar, and here was a whole new family of tongues, tachyon-transmitted from forty thousand light-years out in space, and all his. No ear on Earth had ever heard these sounds before, no eye ever seen the markings. He drew a pad toward him and began to make notes.
"Dr. Babylon?"
He looked up, irritated. "Yes, Althea?"
"I didn't want to interrupt you, but you know I used to be pretty friendly with Sheryl, and I couldn't help seeing that you were trying to call her."
He nodded, and she went on.
"I think she's there, really, Dr. Babylon. My boyfriend lives right down the block from her and he's seen her, along with, uh, some of the—"
Babylon finished for her: "The Kooks."
"Yes. The Kooks. They've got a sort of a pad, or a commune, or whatever they call it right in her apartment house. Right next door to hers, in fact." She broke off to look at the display on her portable processor, punched a quick command, studied the result, and then looked up. "You know, Dr. Babylon," she said, "it's going to be at least a couple of hours before there's anything for you to do here."
He leaned back and rubbed his neck. "I suppose so," he agreed.
"Well, I was just thinking—you'll probably be working late once you get started. So if you wanted to take off for a few hours, Marco and I can certainly cope with inputting the data."
The more Babylon thought about it, the more it seemed like a good idea. And then there was the question of Sheryl . . .
He was already in a hovercab, human-driven this time, across the Charles and heading for the old buildings behind the Criminal Courts when he realized just how tactful Althea had been. Quite a nice girl! She had put the idea in his head and then reminded him he could do something about it, all without appearing to interfere in his private affairs at all. A woman like that, he thought, would go far—
Which his taxi would not, it seemed. It had come to a complete halt. "Sorry, pal," the cabbie said, leaning back toward the passenger section. "The damn Kooks again, wouldn't you know it? They're blocking the whole square."
Babylon leaned forward to stare over the driver's shoulder. There were more of them than ever, thousands at least, as dirty and ragged and—exalted—as ever. They were chanting in such disorder that he could make out no words, but some of the placards they carried were readable: don't defile cuckoo! and criminals belong on earth, not in heaven! and a dozen others. The police were making no effort to disperse them, just to keep them from overflowing into the streets around the Criminal Courts Building.