The stage chimed gently to remind him that there were other messages. He sighed and said, "Release next message."
As he turned back to the stereo an ugly image was forming. It was not flesh and blood at all. It was a queer, boxlike shape that hung in space within the three-dimensional stage, so lifelike that he could almost smell the acrid reek of the faint wisps of steam that issued from its edges. It was a robot, probably Scorpian—and again, since it hung easily in air, almost certainly not originating from Earth.
The creature spoke, and the Pmal rattled out its translation:
"Jen Babylon," it rapped, "you are not under any circumstances to accept transmission to Cuckoo. The consequences will be extremely grave. You have been notified."
Babylon swore softly to himself; it was a morning for confusing messages. "Release next message," he commanded; might as well get all the confusion at once.
This one at least was human—even a human being he knew! It was the dean of his department, Margaret Kooseman, seated at her desk and beaming pleasantly at the transmitter. "I'm terribly sorry to interrupt your trip, Jen, dear," she said, "but this is a very great honor! Not only for you. The whole school will benefit." Her leathery old face was flushed with pleasure. "By now," she went on, "you will have received your travel itinerary, and I suppose this message will catch up with you somewhere before you get to Boston. Please come to see me as soon as convenient. I want to take you over to the public-relations people so we can get a little publicity out of this appointment for you. I can't tell you how much I envy you!"
And the stage went to orange fuzz again.
Babylon did not try to interpret. He snapped, "Release last message."
But all it was, was a telephone code and instructions to call someone named Ben Pertin at it; and, when Babylon tried the number, it did not answer.
That was a puzzle of a whole other kind. Ben Pertin! He knew the name. It was an old school chum whom he had not seen in a good many years. Why would Pertin be calling him here? For that matter, how had Pertin tracked him down? He had not himself known he would be staying at this hotel until the peremptory recall order and travel instructions caught him between atolls, the day before . . . And something else nagged at him about Ben Pertin, although he could not think just what.
It was all very puzzling. Babylon, sitting on the tiny porch of his shack, with the rising sun making ripples of blood on the gentle lagoon, could understand only that he was being asked to do something, which someone else didn't want him to do, but which the powerful dean of his department could see a solid advantage in for herself.
He shook his head and got up for more coffee from the autobar. One alien creature told him to do something. Another ordered him not to. His dean was all smiles and sweetness without saying what she was being sweet about; and he had a call from someone he hadn't seen in years; and why was it all happening? What had suddenly made a respected, but really rather obscure, professor of quantum- dynamic linguistics suddenly so interesting that people sought him out?
There was no answer. He lifted the cup to his lips—then caught sight of the stereo box. The time! He should have been packed and out of there! That Polynesie-libre desk clerk had failed to call him; and now he had about ten minutes to get to the island's hoverport!
Jen Babylon's specialty was the deep structure of language. The fact that it was technically called "quantum- dynamic linguistics" offered clues as to what it was all about, but hardly one human being in a thousand could have explained what the name meant, and fewer than one in a million had any real grasp of its principles.
Linguistics had come a long way since the early studies of Chomsky and Babbage and Korzybski and Claude Shannon. As the pure study of the structure of language, it dated from Chomsky's discovery that sentences which seemed identical in structure were, in fact, essentially and wholly different from each other, and that, even more puzzling, every English-speaking person knew this without knowing that he did. The sentences were not complicated: "John is easy to please." "John is eager to please." Everyone understands both those sentences, and generations of grammar-school teachers have shown their ten-year-olds how to parse them, as if they were identical. Then Chomsky came along. He pointed out that they could not be the same since if you translated them from the active to the passive voice they could not follow the same rules. "It is easy to please John" is good English. "It is eager to please John" was instantly recognized as a false sentence by everyone who spoke the language, even the ten-year-olds. From clues like this Chomsky developed his theory of deep structures and of an underlying rule of law that pertained to all languages—every language that had ever existed on Earth, and even every language that ever could exist, anywhere. Sometimes his rules were called transformational grammar, and that was the beginning.
At about that same remotely historical time, Korzybski began that search for meaning he called semantics, Shannon developed the notion of the unit-quantity of information that he called a bit, and many workers, building on the pioneering Babbage and others, developed rules of expression that permitted them to draw diagrams and equations to test statements for truth or falsity. Boolean algebra and Venn diagrams played a part in what Jen Babylon did, but they, too, were only a beginning. The science was known as quantum linguistics when he came to it. The "dynamic" part was his contribution. For with Babylon's Algorithms, it was easy to write computer programs that could penetrate the deep structure of even a totally unfamiliar language, given almost any contextual clues at all.
Jen Babylon, however unprepossessing he might seem at first contact, had revolutionized his science, and now, still young, he was receiving the rewards and paying the penalties. Sometimes they were the same thing. Travel was one of the perquisites, but it also kept him from any permanent relationships. He needed the freedom to go where his work took him, sometimes at a moment's notice: to Indonesia to work on the symbolism of predawn man's first few scratched symbols (were they true writing? the most exhaustive studies had yet to be sure); to Baffin Island, to tape a few dying words from the suddenly discovered last survivor of a vanished Eskimo tribe; here to Western Polynesia. Even to the Extra-Solar Studies Commission in Beirut, when a thorny problem came up in designing translators for the languages of the other galactic races. So he spent a great deal of his time in aircraft. When he missed his shuttle to the supersonic field on Tahiti, he had experience and resource enough to find another hovercraft from the other side of Moorda; he battled through customs, carried his bag in his hand, and leaped onto the hydrogen- fueled 3000-class jet just before the doors closed and the loading ramp pulled away.
He was used to having people stare at him as he made one of these last-minute rashes. This time, though, the heads were turned in a different direction, and to Babylon's surprise he saw the woman from the hotel beach standing in a distant aisle, looking as remote as ever while an Air France stewardess expostulated with her. At least this time she was dressed! But she seemed to be wearing the same pareu, no more carefully tied than before. Whatever the problem was, it was submerged in the seat-belt sign's urgency; Babylon strapped himself into his reclining couch. The big hydrogen jet streaked off the long over-the-water runway from Faaa-Faaa Airport and pointed its narrow nose toward the distant North American shore. As it climbed at its steady 3,000 kilometers an hour Babylon pressed the sleeper button, and his chair elevated and extended itself to become an upper berth. He had cultivated the ability to sleep when he could; and he began to drift off easily . . .