The Dark Light Years

CHAPTER SIX

Head Keeper was a sparse grey man who had recently taken to brushing his hair so that it showed under each side of his peaked cap. He had worked under Pasztor long ago — many moons before he had had trouble in walking downstairs in the morning — far below the icy cliffs of the Ross Ice Shelf. His name, as it happened, was Ross, Ian Edward Tinghe Ross, and he gave Bruce Ainson a smart salute as the explorer came up.

“Morning, Ross. How’s everything this morning? I’m late.”

“Big conference this morning, sir. They’ve only just started. Sir Mihaly is in there, of course, and the three linguists — Dr. Bodley Temple and his two associates — and a statistician, I forget his name, little man with a warty neck, you can’t miss him, and a lady — a scientist, I believe — and that Oxford philosopher again, Roger Wittgenbacher, and our American friend, Lattimore, and the novelist, Gerald Bone, and who else?”

“Good Lord, that makes about a dozen! What’s Gerald Bone doing here?”

“He’s a friend of Sir Mihaly’s, as I understand it, sir. I thought he looked a very nice man. My own reading tastes are on the more serious side, and so I don’t often read any novels, but now and again when I haven’t been well — particularly when I had that spot of bronchitis last winter, if you remember — I have dipped into one or two better novels, and I must say that I was very impressed by Mr. Bone’s Many Are The Few. The hero had bad a nervous breakdown—”

“Yes, I do recall the plot, Ross, thank you. And how are our two ETA’s?”

“Quite honestly, sir, I reckon they’re dying of boredom, and who’s to blame them!”

When Ainson entered the study room that lay behind the ETA’s cage, it was to find the conference in session. Counting heads as they nodded to him in recognition, he amassed a total of fourteen males and one female. Although they were unalike in appearance, there was a feeling of something shared about them: perhaps an air of authority.

This air was most noticeable about Mrs. Warhoon, if only because she was on her feet and in full spate when Ainson arrived. Mrs. Hilary Warhoon was the lady that Head Keeper Ross had referred to.

Though only in her mid-forties, she was well-known as a leading cosmoclectic, the new philosophico-scientific profession that attempted to sort the wheat from the chaff in the rapidly accumulating pile of facts and theories which represented Earth’s main import from space. Ainson looked at her with approval. To think she should be married to some dried old stick of a banker she could not tolerate! She was a fine figure of a woman, fashionable enough to be wearing one of the new chandelier style suits with pendants at bust, hip, and thigh level; the appeal of her face, serious though her prevalent expression might be, was not purely intellectual; while Ainson knew for a fact that she could out-argue even old Wittgenbacher, Oxford’s professional philosopher and technivision pundit. In fact, Ainson could not help comparing her with his wife, to Enid’s disadvantage. One, of course, would never dream of indieating one’s inner feelings to her, poor thing, or to anyone else, but really Enid was a poor specimen; she should have married a shopkeeper in a busy country town. Banbury. Diss. East Dereham.

Yes, that was about it….

“…feel that we have made progress this week, despite several handicaps inherent in the situation, most of them stemming — as I think the Director was the first to point out — from the fact that we have no background to the lifeform to use as a point of reference.” Mrs. Warhoon’s voice was pleasantly staccato. It scattered Ainson’s thoughts and made him concentrate on what she was saying; if Enid had been a bit more prompt with the break-fast, he might have got here in tune to hear the beginning of her speech. “My colleague, Mr. Borroughs, and I have now examined the space vehicle found on Clementina. While we are not qualified to give a technical report on it — you will be getting several technical reports on it from other sources in any case — we both were convinced that it was a vehicle developed for, if not by, the captive life-form. You will recall that eight of the lifeforms were discovered close to the vehicle; and the body of a dead one was disinterred within the vehicle itself; nine bunks, or niches that by their shape and size are intended to serve as bunks, are observable within the vehicle.

Because these bunks run in the direction we think of as vertical rather than horizontally, and are separated by what we now know to be fuel lines, they have not previously been recognized as bunks.

“Here it is appropriate to mention another trouble that we come up against continually. We do not know what is evidence and what is not.

“For instance, we now have to ask ourselves, supposing we consider it established that the lifeform has developed space travel: can space travel be regarded as a priori proof of superior intelligence?”

“That is the most penetrating question I have heard asked in the last decade,” said Wittgenbacher, nodding his head six times with the frightening assurance of a clock-work doll. “If it were posed to the masses, they would give you but one answer, or should I rather say that their many answers would take but one form. They would render an affirmative. We who are here may reckon our-selves more enlightened and would perhaps choose as a more valid example of superior intelligence the works of the analytical philosophers, where logic flows unconfused with emotion. But the masses — and who perhaps amongst us in the final analysis is to gainsay them? — would, if I may employ a colloquialism, plump for a product in which the hands as well as the mind had been employed. I do not doubt that among such a category of products the space-ship would appear to them the most outstanding.”

“I’d go along with them,” said Lattimore. He sat next to Pasztor, sucking the frame of his spectacles and listening intently.

“I might even accompany them myself,” chuckled Wittgenbacher, with more mechanical nods. “But this does raise another question. Suppose that, having granted this lifeform, so unaesthetically unhygienic in many of its habits, superior intelligence; suppose we later discover its planet of origin, and then perceive that its — um, its space-going ability is as much governed by instinctual behavior as is the ocean-going ability of our northern fur-seals. Perhaps you will correct me if I am in error, Sir Mihaly, but I believe that the Arctocephalus ursinus, the bear seal, makes a winter migration of many thousands of miles from the Bering Sea down to the shores of Mexico, where I have seen them myself when swimming in the Gulf of California.

“If we find this to be so, then not only shall we be in error in presuming superior intelligence in our friends, but we shall have to ask ourselves this: is it not possible that our own space travel is equally the outcome of instinctual behavior, and — much as the fur-seal may imagine on his swim south that his travel is prompted by his own will — may we not be pushed by an unglimpsed purpose beyond our own?”

Three reporters at the back of the room scribed busily, ensuring that tomorrow’s Times, recording the longueurs of the conference, would pinpoint this highlight in a head-line reading Space Travel: Man’s Migratory Pattern ?

Gerald Bone stood up. The novelist’s face had lit at the new thought like a child’s at sight of a new toy.

“Do I understand you. Professor Wittgenbacher, to imply that we — that our much-vaunted intelligence, the one thing that most clearly distinguishes us from the animals, may really be no more than a blind compulsion driving us in its own directions rather than in ours?”

“Why not? For all our pretensions to the arts and the humanities, our race ever since the Renaissance at least has directed its main efforts towards the twin goals of expanding its numbers and expanding outwards.” Having got the bit between his teeth, the old philosopher was not going to stop there. “In fact you may liken our leaders to the queen bee who prepares her hive to swarm and does not know why she does it. We swarm into space and do not know why we do it. Something drives—”

But he was not going to get away with it. Lattimore was the first to vent a hearty “Nonsense”, and Dr. Bodley Temple and his assistants made unsavoury noises of dissent. All round the room, the professor was given the cultural catcall.

“Preposterous theory—”

“Economic possibilities inherent in—”

“Even a techni audience would hardly—”

“I suppose the colonization of other planets—”

“One just cannot dismiss the disciplines of science—”

“Order, please,” called the Director.

In the following lull, Gerald Bone called another question to Wittgenbacher, “Then where shall we find true intellect?”

“Perhaps when we run up against our gods,” Wittgen-bacher replied, not at all put out by the heated atmosphere about him.

“We will have the linguistic report now,” Pasztor said sharply, and Dr. Bodley Temple rose, rested his right leg on the chair in front of him, rested his right elbow on his knee, so that he leant forward with an appearance of eagerness, and did not budge from that position until he had finished talking. He was a small stocky man with a screw of grey hair rising from the middle of his forehead and a pugnacious expression. He had the reputation of being a sound and imaginative scholar, and offset it with some of the nattiest waistcoats in London University. His present one, negotiating a considerable stretch of abdomen, was of antique brocade with a pattern of Purple Emperor butterflies chasing themselves about the buttons.

“You all know what the job of my team is,” he said, in a voice that Arnold Bennett would have recognized a century back as having sprung from the Five Towns. “We’re trying to learn the alien tongue without knowing if they have one, because that’s the only way there is to find out. We have made some progress, as my colleague Wilfred Brebner here will demonstrate in a moment.

“First, I’ll make a few general remarks. Our visitors, these fat chaps from Clementina, don’t understand what writing is. They have no script. That doesn’t mean any-thing with regard to their language — many African negro languages were only reduced to writing by white missionaries. Efik and Yoruba were two such languages of the Sudanic language group; almost unused languages now, I’d say.

“ I tell you all this, my friends, because until I get a better idea, I’m treating these aliens as a couple of Africans. It may bring results. It’s more positive than treating them as animals — you may recall that the first white explorers in Africa thought the negroes were gorillas — and it ensures that if we find they do have a language, then we won’t make the mistake of expecting it to follow anything like a Romance pattern.

“I am certain that our fat friends have a language — and you gents of the Press can quote me there, if you like. You’ve only got to listen to them snorting together. And it isn’t all snorts. We’ve now analyzed it from tapes and have sorted out five hundred different sounds. Though it may be that many of these sounds are the same sound delivered at a different pitch. You may know that there are terrestrial linguistic systems such as — er. Siamese and Cantonese which employ six acoustic pitches. And we can expect many more pitches with these fellows, who obviously range very freely over the sound spectrum.

“The human ear is deaf to vibrations of frequency greater than somewhere about 24,000 a second.

We have found that these chaps can go twice that, just as a terrestrial bat or a Rungstedian cat can. So one problem is that if we are to converse with them, we must get them to stay within our wavelength. For all we know, that may mean they would have to invent a sort of pidgin language that we could understand.”

“I protest,” said the statistician, who until now had been content to do little but run his tongue round his teeth. “You are now inferring, surely, that we are inferior to them.”

“I’m saying nothing of the kind. I’m saying that their range of sound is very much greater than ours.

Now, Mr. Brebner here is going to give us a few of the phonemes that we have provisionally identified.”

Mr. Brebner rose and stood swaying beside the stocky figure of Bodley Temple. He was in his mid-twenties, a slight figure with pale yellow hair, wearing a light grey suit with the hood down. His face was suffused a delicate flame color with the embarrassment of confronting his audience, but he spoke up well. “The dissections on the dead aliens have told us quite a lot about their anatomy,” he said. “If you have read the rather lengthy report, you will know that our friends have three distinct classes of apertures through which they pro-duce their characteristic noises. All these noises appear to contribute to their language, or we assume they do, just as we assume they have a language.

“First, they have in one of their heads a mouth, to which is linked a scent organ. Although this mouth is used for breathing, its main function is feeding and making what we term the oral sounds.

“Secondly, our friends have six breathing vents, three on either side of their body, and situated above their six limbs. At present we refer to these as the nostrils. They are labiate apertures and although unconnected to any vocal chords — as is the mouth — these nostrils produce a wide range of sounds.

“Thirdly, our friends also produce a variety of con-trolled sound through the rectum situated in their second head.

“Their form of speech consists of sound transmitted through all these apertures, either in turn, or any two together, or all three classes together, or all eight apertures together. You will see then that the few sounds I am now going to give you as examples are limited to the less complex ones. Tape recordings of the whole range are of course available, but are not in a very manageable form as yet. “The first word is nnnnorrrr-INK.”

To pronounce this word, Wilfred Brebner ran a light snore over the front of his throat and chased it with the little squeak represented here as “ink”. (All printed forms of the alien language used throughout this book are similarly to be treated as mere approximations.) Brebner continued with his exposition.

“Nnnnorrrr-INK is the word we have obtained several times in various contexts. Dr. Bodley Temple recorded it first last Saturday, when he brought our friends a fresh cabbage. We obtained it a second time on Saturday when I took out a packet of chewing plastic and gave pieces to Dr. Temple and to Mike. We did not hear it again till Tuesday afternoon, when it was pronounced in a situation when food was not present. Chief Keeper Ross had entered the cage where we were to see if we needed any-thing, and both creatures made the sound at the same time. We then noted that the word might have a negative con-notation, since they had refused the cabbage, and had not been offered the chew — which they would presume to be food — and might be supposed not to like Ross, who disturbs them when he cleans out their cage. Yesterday, how-ever, Ross brought them a bucket of river mud. which they like, and then we recorded nnnnorrrr-INK again, several times in five minutes. So we think at present that it refers to some variety of human activity: appearing bearing something, shall we say. The meaning will be fined down considerably as we go along. From this example you can see the process of elimination we go through with every sound.

“The bucket of river mud also brought forth another word we can recognize. This sounds like WHIP-bwut-bwip (a small whistle followed by two pouting labials). We have also heard it when grapefruit has been accepted, when porridge with sliced banana in — a dish over which they show some enthusiasm — has been accepted, and when Mike and I have been leaving in the evening. We take it therefore to be a sign of approval.

“We also think we have a sign of disapproval, although we have only heard it twice. Once it was accompanied by a gesture of disapproval, when an under-keeper caught one of our friends on the snout with a jet of water from a hose. On the other occasion, we had offered them fish, some cooked, some raw. As you are aware, they seem to be vegetarians. The sound was—”

Brebner glanced apologetically at Mrs. Warhoon as he blew a series of damp farts with his mouth, culminating with an open-mouthed groan.

“Bbbp-bbbp-bbbp-bbbp-aaaah.”

“It certainly sounds like disapproval,” Temple said.

Before the ripple of amusement died, one of the reporters said, “Dr. Temple, is this all you have to offer in the way of progress?”

“You have been given a rough guide to what we are doing.”

“But you don’t seem to have a single one of their words definitely. Why couldn’t you tackle what any lay-man would think would be the first steps, like getting them to count, and to name parts of their bodies and yours? Then at least you have something to begin on, rather than a few abstracts like ‘Appearing carrying something’.”

Temple looked down at the Purple Emperors on his waistcoat, munched his lips, and then said, “Young man, a layman might indeed think those were the first steps. But my answer to that layman and to you is that such a catalogue is only possible if the enemy — the alien is prepared to open up a conversation. These two buggers — I beg your pardon, madam — these two fellows have no interest in communicating with us.”

“Why don’t you get a computer on the job?”

“Your questions grow more foolish. You need common-sense on a job like this. What damned good would a computer be? It can’t think, nor can it differentiate between two almost identical phonemes for us. All we need is time. You can’t imagine — nor can your hypothetical layman — the difficulties that beset us, mainly because we are having to think in a realm where man has not had to think before.

Ask yourself this: what is language? And the answer is, human speech. Therefore we aren’t just doing research, we “are inventing something new: non-human speech.”

The reporter nodded glumly, Dr. Temple huffed and puffed and sat down, Lattimore rose. He perched his spectacles on the end of his nose and clasped his hands behind his back.

“As you know, Doctor, I’m new around here, so I hope you’ll appreciate I ask my questions in all innocence. My position is this. I’m a skeptic. I know that we have investigated only three hundred planets in this universe, and I know that leaves a tidy few million to go. but I still hold that three hundred is a fair sampling. None of them have yielded any form of life half as intelligent as my Siamese cat. This suggests to me that man is unique in the universe.”

“It should be no stronger than a suggestion.” Temple said.

“ Nor is it. Now, I don’t give a row of pins if there is no other form of intelligent life in the universe; man has always been on his own, and that won’t worry him. On the other hand, if some other intelligent form of human turns up elsewhere, then I’ll welcome it as readily as the next man — provided it behaves itself.

“What sticks in my gullet is when someone brings back this couple of overgrown hogs that wallow in their own filth in a way no self-respecting Earth pig would do. given the option, and insists that we try and prove that they are intelligent people! It’s just crazy. You yourself said that these hogs show no interest in trying to communicate with us. Very well. then, isn’t that a sign that they have no intelligence? Who in all this room can honestly say they would want these hogs in their own house?”

Uproar broke out again. Everyone turned and argued, not merely with Lattimore, but with each other.

Finally it was Mrs. Warhoonss voice that rode over the rumpus.

“I have a great deal of sympathy with your position, Mr. Lattimore, and I am very glad you have consented to come down and sit in on our meeting. But the brief answer” to you is that, as life takes a multitude of different forms, so we should expect intelligence to take differing forms.

We cannot conceive a differing form of intelligence. We only know that it would widen the boundaries of our thought and understanding in a way that nothing else could. Therefore, when we think we have found such intelligence, we must make sure, even if the effort takes us years.”

“That is part of my point, madam,” Lattimore said. “If intelligence were there, it would not take us years to detect We should recognize it right away, even if it came disguised as a turnip.”

“How do you account for the space ship on Clementina?’” Gerald Bone asked.

“I don’t have to account for it! These big hogs should be able to account for it If they built it, then why don’t they draw pictures of it when they’re given pencils and paper?”

“Because they travel in it doesn’t mean to say they built it.”

“Can you imagine the lowest dumbest rating on an Earth cruiser getting captured by aliens and then being unable to draw a picture of his ship when they brought him pencil and paper?”

Brebner asked, “And their language, how do you account for that?”

“I enjoyed your animal imitations, Mr. Brebner,” Lattimore said good-humouredly. “But frankly, I converse more readily with my cat than you do with those two hogs.”

Ainson spoke for the first time. He spoke sharply, annoyed that a mere interloper should be belittling his discovery.

“This is all very well, Mr. Lattimore, but you are dismissing too much too easily. We know the ETA’s have certain habits that are unpleasant by our standards. But they don’t behave together like animus; they provide companionship for each other. They converse. And the space-ship is there, whatever you may say.”

“Maybe the spaceship is there. But what is the connection between the hogs and it? We don’t know.

They may well be just the livestock that the real space travelers took along for food. I don’t know; but you don’t know either, and you are avoiding the obvious explanation. Frankly, if I were in charge of this operation, I’d pass a hefty vote of censure on the captain of the Mariestopes and more particularly on his Master Explorer for carrying out such a sloppy piece of investigation on the spot”

At this, there was a sort of ominous and uneasy ground-swell about the room. Only the reporters began to look a little happier. Sir Mihaly leant forward and explained to Lattimore who Ainson was.

Lattimore pulled a long face.

“Mr. Explorer Ainson, I fear I owe you an apology for having failed to recognize you. If you’d been here before the meeting began, we could have been introduced.”

“Unfortunately, this morning my wife—”

“But I must absolutely stick to what I said. The report on what happened on Clementina is pathetic in its amateurishness. Your stipulated week’s reconnoiter of the planet was expired when you found these animals beside the spaceship, and rather than depart from schedule you just shot up the majority of them, took a few technishots of the scene, and blasted off. This ship, for all you know, may have been the equivalent of a cattle truck, with the cattle out to wallow, while two miles away in another valley was the real ship, with real bipeds like us, people — just like Mrs. Warhoon says — that we’d give our eyes and eye teeth to communicate with, and vice versa, you can be sure.

“No, I’m sorry. Mr. Ainson. but your committees here are more bogged down than they care to admit, simply because of bad field work on your part.”

Ainson had grown very red. Something ghastly had happened in the room. The feeling had gone against him. Everyone — he knew it without looking at them — everyone was sitting in silent approval of what Lattimore said.

“Any idiot can be wise after the event,” he said. “You seem to fail to realize how unprecedented it all was. I—”

“I do realize how unprecedented it all was. I’m saying that it was unprecedented, and that therefore you should have been more thorough. Believe me. Mr. Ainson, I’ve read photostats of the report on the expedition and I’ve scrutinized the photographs that were taken, and I have the impression that the whole thing was conducted more like a big game hunt than an official expedition paid for with public money.”

“I was not responsible for the shooting of the six ETA’s. A patrol ran into them, coming back to the ship late. It went to investigate the aliens, they attacked and were shot in self-defense. You should re-read the reports.”

“These hogs show no sign of being vicious. I don’t believe that they attacked the patrol. I think they were trying to run away.”

Ainson looked about for help.

“I appeal to you, Mrs. Warhoon, is it reasonable to try and guess how these aliens behaved in their free state from a glance at their apathetic behavior in captivity?”

Mrs. Warboon had formed an immediate admiration for Bryant Lattimore; she liked a strong man.

“What other means have we for judging their behavior?” she asked.

“You have the reports, that’s what. There is a full account there for you to study.”

Lattimore returned to the attack.

“What we have in the reports, Mr. Ainson, is a summary of what the leader of the patrol told you. Is he a reliable man?”

“Reliable? Yes, he is reliable enough. There is a war on in this country, you know, Mr. Lattimore, and we can’t always choose the men we want”

“I see. And what was this man’s name?”

And indeed what was his name? Young, beefy, rather sullen. Not a bad fellow. Horton? Halter? In a calmer atmosphere he would remember at once. Controlling his voice, Ainson said, “You will find his name in the written report.”

“All right, all right, Mr. Ainson. Obviously you have your answers. What I’m saying is that you should have returned with a lot more answers. You see you are some-thing of a keyman here, aren’t you?

You’re the Master Explorer. You were trained up to just this situation. I’d say you have made it very difficult for all of us by producing inadequate or even conflicting data.”

Lattimore sat down, leaving Ainson standing.

“The nature of the data is to be conflicting,” Ainson said. “Your job is to make sense of it, not to reject it. Nobody is to blame. If you have any complaints, then they must be forwarded to Captain Bargerone.

Captain Bargerone was in charge of the whole thing, not I. Oh, and Quilter was the name of the fellow in charge of the patrol. I’ve just remembered.”

Gerald Bone spoke without rising.

“As you know, I’m a novelist, Mr. Ainson. Perhaps in this distinguished company I should say ‘only a novelist’. But one thing has worried me about your part in this.

“Mr. Lattimore says that you should have returned from Clementina with more answers than you did.

How-ever that may be, it does seem to me that you have returned with a few assumptions which, because they have come from you, have been accepted all round without challenge as fact.”

With dry mouth, Ainson waited for what was to come. Again he was aware that everyone was listening with a sort of predatory eagerness.

“We know that these ETA’s were found by a river on Clementina. Everyone also seems to accept that they are not natives of that planet As far as I can see, this notion began with you. Is that so?”

The question was a relief. This Ainson could answer.

“The notion did begin with me, Mr. Bone, though I would call it a conclusion rather than a notion. I can explain it easily, even to a layman. These ETA’s belonged to the ship; be quite clear about that Their excreta was caked all over the inside of it — a computed thirty days’ accumulation of it As additional evidence, the ship was clearly built in their image.”

“The Mariestopes, you might say, is built in the image of the common dolphin. It proves nothing about the shape of the engineers who designed it.”

“Please be courteous enough to hear me out. We found no other mammalian type life of 12B — Clementina, as it is now called. We found no animal life larger than a two-inch tail-less lizard and no insect life larger than a type of bee as big as a common shrew. In a week, with stratospheric surveys day and night you cover a planet pretty thoroughly from pole to equator. Excluding the fish in the seas, we discovered that Clementina had no animal life worth mentioning — except these big creatures that turn the scales at twenty Earth stones. And they were together in one group by the spaceship. Clearly it is an absurdity to suppose them to be natives.”

“You found them beside a river. Why should they not be an aquatic animal, possibly one that spends most of its time at sea?”

Ainson opened and shut his mouth. “Sir Mihaly, this discussion naturally raises points that a layman can hardly be expected… I mean, no purpose is served….”

“Quite so,” agreed Pasztor. “All the same, I think Gerald has an interesting point. Do you feel we can definitely rule out the possibility that these fellows are” aquatic?”

“As I’ve said, they came from the spaceship. That was absolutely conclusive, you have my word for it as the man on the spot.” As he spoke, Ainson’s eye went belligerently over the group; when it met Lattimore’s eye, Lattimore spoke.

“I would say they had the lines of a marine animal — speaking purely as a layman, of course.”

“Perhaps they are aquatic on their own planet, but that has no bearing on what they were doing on Clementina,” Ainson said. “Whatever you say, their spaceship is a spaceship, and consequently we have intelligence on our hands.”

Mihaly came to his rescue then, and called for the next report, but it was obvious that a vote of no confidence had been passed on Master Explorer Ainson.