Off The Main Sequence

by Robert A. Heinlein

  “Minor adaptations — some spectacular, almost none of them basic. Of course there was very little progress made under communism; a totalitarian political religion is incompatible with free investigation. Let me digress: the communist interregnum was responsible for the New Men getting together and organizing. Most New Men are scientists, for obvious reasons. When the commissars started ruling on natural laws by political criteria — Lysenkoism and similar nonsense — it did not sit well; a lot of us went underground.

  “I’ll skip the details. It brought us together, gave us practice in underground activity, and gave a backlog of new research, carried out underground. Some of it was obviously dangerous; we decided to hang onto it for a while. Since then such secret knowledge has grown, for we never give out an item until it has been scrutinized for social hazards. Since much of it is dangerous and since very few indeed outside our organization are capable of real original thinking, basic science has been almost at a public standstill.

  “We hadn’t expected to have to do it that way. We helped to see to it that the new constitution was liberal and — we thought — workable. But the new Republic turned out to be an even poorer thing than the old. The evil ethic of communism had corrupted, even after the form was gone. We held off. Now we know that we must hold off until we can revise the whole society."

  “Kettle Belly," Joe said slowly, “you speak as if you had been on the spot. How old are you?"

  “I’ll tell you when you are the age I am now. A man has lived long enough when he no longer longs to live. I ain’t there yet. Joe, I must have your answer, or this must be continued in our next."

  “You had it at the beginning — but, see here. Kettle Belly, there is one job I want promised to me."

  “Which is?"

  “I want to kill Mrs. Keithley."

  “Keep your pants on. When you’re trained, and if she’s still alive then, you’ll be used for that purpose —"

  “Thanks!"

  “— provided you are the proper tool for it." Baldwin turned toward the mike, called out, “Gail!" and added one word in the strange tongue.

  Gail showed up promptly. “Joe," said Baldwin, “when this young lady gets through with you, you will be able to sing, whistle, chew gum, play chess, hold your breath, and fly a kite simultaneously — and all this while riding a bicycle under water. Take him, sis, he’s all yours."

  Gail rubbed her hands. “Oh, boy!"

  “First we must teach you to see and to hear, then to remember, then to speak, and then to think."

  Joe looked at her. “What’s this I’m doing with my mouth at this moment?"

  “It’s not talking, it’s a sort of grunting. Furthermore English is not structurally suited to thinking. Shut up and listen."

  In their underground classroom Gail had available several types of apparatus to record and manipulate light and sound. She commenced throwing groups of figures on a screen, in flashes. “What was it, Joe?"

  “Nine-six-oh-seven-two — That was as far as I got."

  “It was up there a full thousandth of a second. Why did you get only the left hand side of the group?"

  “That’s all the farther I had read."

  “Look at all of it. Don’t make an effort of will; just look at it." She flashed another number.

  Joe’s memory was naturally good; his intelligence was high — just how high he did not yet know. Unconvinced that the drill was useful, he relaxed and played along. Soon he was beginning to grasp a nine-digit array as a single gestalt; Gail reduced the flash time.

  “What is this magic lantern gimmick?" he inquired.

  “It’s a Renshaw tachistoscope. Back to work."

  Around World War II Dr. Samuel Renshaw at the Ohio State University was proving that most people are about one-fifth efficient in using their capacities to see, hear, taste, feel and remember. His research was swallowed in the morass of communist pseudoscience that obtained after World War III, but, after his death, his findings were preserved underground. Gail did not expose Gilead to the odd language he had heard until he had been rather thoroughly Renshawed.

  However, from the time of his interview with Baldwin the other persons at the ranch used it in his presence — Sometimes someone — usually Ma Carver — would translate, sometimes not. He was flattered to feel accepted, but gravelled to know that it was at the lowest cadetship. He was a child among adults.

  Gail started teaching him to hear by speaking to him single words from the odd language, requiring him to repeat them back. “No, Joe. Watch.’ This time when she spoke the word it appeared on the screen in sound analysis, by a means basically like one long used to show the deaf-and-dumb their speech mistakes. “Now you try it."

  He did, the two arrays hung side by side. “How’s that, teacher?" he said triumphantly.

  “Terrible, by several decimal places. You held the final guttural too long —" She pointed. “— the middle vowel was formed with your tongue too high and you pitched it too low and you failed to let the pitch rise. And six other things. You couldn’t possibly have been understood. I heard what you said, but it was gibberish. Try again. And don’t call me 'teacher’. “

  “Yes, ma’am," he answered solemnly.

  She shifted the controls; he tried again. This time his analysis array was laid down on top of hers; where the two matched, they cancelled. Where they did not match, his errors stood out in contrasting colors. The screen looked like a sun burst.

  “Try again, Joe." She repeated the word without letting it affect the display.

  “Confound it, if you would tell me what the words mean instead of treating me the way Milton treated his daughters about Latin, I could remember them easier."

  She shrugged. “I can’t, Joe. You must learn to hear and to speak first. Speedtalk is a flexible language; the same word is not likely to recur. This practice word means: The far horizons draw no nearer.’ That’s not much help, is it?"

  The definition seemed improbable, but he was learning not to doubt her. He was not used to women who were always two jumps ahead of him. He ordinarily felt sorry for the poor little helpless cuddly creatures; this one he often wanted to slug. He wondered if this response were what the romancers meant by “love"; he decided that it couldn’t be.

  “Try again, Joe." Speedtalk was a structurally different speech from any the race had ever used. Long before, Ogden and Richards bad shown that eight hundred and fifty words were sufficient vocabulary to express anything that could be expressed by “normal" human vocabularies, with the aid of a handful of special words — a hundred odd — for each special field, such as horse racing or ballistics. About the same time phoneticians had analyzed all human tongues into about a hundred-odd sounds, represented by the letters of a general phonetic alphabet.

  On these two propositions Speedtalk was based.

  To be sure, the phonetic alphabet was much less in number than the words in Basic English. But the letters representing sound in the phonetic alphabet were each capable of variation several different ways — length, stress, pitch, rising, falling. The more trained an ear was the larger the number of possible variations; there was no limit to variations, but, without much refinement of accepted phonetic practice, it was possible to establish a one-to-one relationship with Basic English so that one phonetic symbol was equivalent to an entire word in a “normal" language, one Speedtalk word was equal to an entire sentence. The language consequently was learned by letter units rather than by word units — but each word was spoken and listened to as a single structured gestalt.

  But Speedtalk was not “shorthand" Basic English. “Normal" languages, having their roots in days of superstition and ignorance, have in them inherently and unescapably wrong structures of mistaken ideas about the universe. One can think logically in English only by extreme effort so bad it is as a mental tool. For example, the verb “to be" in English has twenty-one distinct meanings, every single one of which is false-to-fact.

  A symbolic structure, inven
ted instead of accepted without question, can be made similar in structure to the real world to which it refers. The structure of Speedtalk did not contain the hidden errors of English; it was structured as much like the real world as the New Men could make it. For example, it did not contain the unreal distinction between nouns and verbs found in most other languages. The world — the continuum known to science and including all human activity — does not contain “noun things" and “verb things"; it contains space-time events and relationships between them. The advantage for achieving truth, or something more nearly like truth, was similar to the advantage of keeping account books in Arabic numerals rather than Roman.

  All other languages made scientific, multi-valued logic almost impossible to achieve; in Speedtalk it was as difficult not to be logical. Compare die pellucid Boolean logic with the obscurities of the Aristotelean logic it supplanted.

  Paradoxes are verbal, do not exist in the real world — and Speedtalk did not have such built into it. Who shaves the Spanish Barber? Answer: follow him around and see. In the syntax of Speedtalk the paradox of the Spanish Barber could not even be expressed, save as a self-evident error.

  But Joe Greene-Gilead-Briggs could not learn it until he had learned to hear, by learning to speak. He slaved away; the screen continued to remain lighted with his errors.

  Came finally a time when Joe’s pronunciation of a sentence-word blanked out Gail’s sample; the screen turned dark. He felt more triumph over that than anything be could remember.

  His delight was short. By a circuit Gail had thoughtfully added somedays earlier the machine answered with a flourish of trumpets, loud applause, and then added in a cooing voice, “Mama’s good boy!"

  He turned to her. “Woman, you spoke of matrimony. If you ever do manage to marry me, I’ll beat you.’

  “I haven’t made up my mind about you yet," she answered evenly. “Now try this word, Joe —"

  Baldwin showed up that evening called him aside. “Joel C’mere. Listen, lover boy, you keep your animal nature out of your work, or I’ll have to find you a new teacher."

  “But —"

  “You heard me. Take her swimming, take her riding, after hours you are on your own. Work time — strictly business. I’ve got plans for you; I want you to get smarted up."

  “She complained about me?"

  “Don’t be silly. It’s my business to know what’s going on."

  “Hmm. Kettle Belly, what is this shopping-for-a" husband she kids about? Is she serious, or is it just intended to rattle me?"

  “Ask her. Not that it matters, as you won’t have any choice if she means it. She has the calm persistence of the law of gravitation."

  “Ouch! I had had the impression that the 'New Men’ did not bother with marriage and such like, as you put it, 'monkey customs’."

  “Some do, some don’t. Me, I’ve been married quite a piece, but I mind a mousy little member of our lodge who had had nine kids by nine fathers — all wonderful genius-plus kids. On the other hand I can point out one with eleven kids — Thalia Wagner — who has never so much as looked at another man. Geniuses make their own rules in such matters, Joe; they always have. Here are some established statistical facts about genius, as shown by Armatoe’s work —"

  He ticked them off. “Geniuses are usually long lived. They are not modest, not honestly so. They have infinite capacity for taking pains. They are emotionally indifferent to accepted codes of morals — they make their own rules. You seem to have the stigmata, by the way."

  “Thanks for nothing. Maybe I should have a new teacher, is there anyone else available who can do it."

  “Any of us can do it, just as anybody handy teaches a baby to talk. She’s actually a biochemist, when she has time for it."

  “When she has time?"

  “Be careful of that kid, son. Her real profession is the same as yours — honorable hatchet man. She’s killed upwards of three hundred people." Kettle Belly grinned — “If you want to switch teachers, just drop me a wink."

  Gilead-Greene hastily changed the subject. “You were speaking of work for me; how about Mrs. Keithley? Is she still alive?"

  “Yes, blast her."

  “Remember, I’ve got dibs on her."

  “You may have to go to the Moon to get her. She’s reported to be building a vacation home there. Old age seems to be telling on her; you had better get on with your home work if you want a crack at her." Moon Colony even then was a center of geriatrics for the rich. The low gravity was easy on their hearts, made them feel young — and possibly extended their lives.

  “Okay, I will."

  Instead of asking for a new teacher Joe took a highly polished apple to their next session. Gail ate it, leaving him very little core, and put him harder to work than ever. While perfecting his hearing and pronunciation, she started him on the basic thousand-letter vocabulary by forcing him to start to talk simple three and four-letter sentences, and by answering him in different word-sentences using the same phonetic letters. Some of the vowel and consonant sequences were very difficult to pronounce.

  Master them he did — He had been used to doing most things easier than could those around him; now he was in very fast company. He stretched himself and began to achieve part of his own large latent capacity. When he began to catch some of the dinner-table conversation and to reply in simple Speedtalk — being forbidden by Gail to answer in English — she started him on the ancillary vocabularies.

  An economical language cannot be limited to a thousand words; although almost every idea can be expressed somehow in a short vocabulary, higher orders of abstraction are convenient. For technical words Speedtalk employed an open expansion of sixty of the thousand-odd phonetic letters. They were the letters ordinarily used as numerals; by preceding a number with a letter used for no other purpose, the symbol was designated as having a word value.

  New Men numbered to the base sixty-three times four times five, a convenient, easily factored system, most economical, i. e., the symbol “100" identified the number described in English as thirty-six hundred — yet permitting quick, in-the-head translation from common notation to Speedtalk figures and vice versa.

  By using these figures, each prefaced by the indicator — a voiceless Welsh or Burmese “1" — a pool of 215,999 words (one less than the cube of sixty) were available for specialized meaning without using more than four letters including the indicator. Most of them could be pronounced as one syllable. These had not the stark simplicity of basic Speedtalk; nevertheless words such as “ichthyophagous" and “constitutionality" were thus compressed to monosyllables. Such shortcuts can best be appreciated by anyone who has heard a long speech in Cantonese translated into a short speech in English. Yet English is not the most terse of “normal" languages — and expanded Speedtalk is many times more economical than the briefest of “normal" tongues.

  By adding one more letter (sixty to the fourth power) just short of thirteen million words could be added if needed — and most of them could still be pronounced as one syllable.

  When Joe discovered that Gail expected him to learn a couple of hundred thousand new words in a matter of days, he balked. “Damn it. Fancy Pants, I am not a superman. I’m in here by mistake."

  “Your opinion is worthless; I think you can do it. Now listen."

  “Suppose I flunk; does that put me safely off your list of possible victims?"

  “If you flunk, I wouldn’t have you on toast. Instead I’d tear your head off and stuff it down your throat. But you won’t flunk; I know. However," she added, “I’m not sure you would be a satisfactory husband; you argue too much."

  He made a brief and bitter remark in Speedtalk.

  She answered with one word which described his shortcomings in detail. They got to work.

  Joe was mistaken; he learned the expanded vocabulary as fast as he heard it. He had a latent eidetic memory; the Renshawing process now enabled him to use it fully. And his mental processes, always fast, had become faster
than he knew.

  The ability to learn Speedtalk at all is proof of supernormal intelligence; the use of it by such intelligence renders that mind efficient. Even before World War II Alfred Korzybski had shown that human thought was performed, when done efficiently, only in symbols; the notion of “pure" thought, free of abstracted speech symbols, was merely fantasy. The brain was so constructed as to work without symbols only on the animal level; to speak of “reasoning" without symbols was to speak nonsense.

  Speedtalk did not merely speed up communication — by its structures it made thought more logical; by its economy it made thought processes enormously fester, since it takes almost as long to think a word as it does to speak it.

  Korzybsld’s monumental work went fallow during the communist interregnum; Das Kapital is a childish piece of work, when analyzed by semantics, so the politburo suppressed semantics — and replaced it by ersatz under me same name, as Lysenkoism replaced the science of genetics.

  Having Speedtalk to help him learn more Speedtalk, Joe learned very rapidly. The Renshawing had continued; he was now able to grasp a gestalt or configuration in many senses at once, grasp it, remember it, reason about it with great speed.

  Living time is not calendar time; a man’s life is the thought that flows through his brain. Any man capable of learning Speedtalk had an association time at least three times as fast as an ordinary man. Speedtalk itself enabled him to manipulate symbols approximately seven times as fast as English symbols could be manipulated. Seven times three is twenty-one; a new man had an effective life time of at least sixteen hundred years, reckoned in flow of ideas.

  They had time to become encyclopedic synthesists, something denied any ordinary man by the straitjacket of his sort of time.

  When Joe had learned to talk. to read and write and cipher, Gail turned him over to others for his real education. But before she checked him out she played him several dirty tricks.

  For three days she forbade him to eat. When it was evident that he could think and keep his temper despite low blood-sugar count, despite hunger reflex, she added sleeplessness and pain — intense, long, continued, and varied pain. She tried subtly to goad him into irrational action; he remained bedrock steady, his mind clicking away at any assigned task as dependably as an electronic computer.