Genus Homo

by L. Sprague De Camp

  In unison twenty-six thumbs were placed to twenty-six noses, one hundred and four fingers twiddled defiantly, and from twenty-six mouths came a long, rich, liquid Bronx cheer.

  "That'll give the old boys something to think about!"

  "Gee, it looks like we've scared 'em or something," Janet Rodriguez observed. "They're going away."

  "That's a committee meeting if I ever saw one," Scherer reassured her. "They're just going to wrangle over what they've found out and decide what to do next."

  Next morning the investigators were back. Lord Percy was accompanied by a smallish female gorilla, who was carrying a notebook. They entered the cage and squatted side by side against one wall. Lord Percy beckoned to Bridger. When the chemist approached, he fumbled in a bag he was carrying slung over one shoulder and produced an egg slightly larger than a hen's. He held it up and made a sound like "Glk."

  Bridger, hunkering down opposite him, gravely answered, "Glk."

  The gorilla frowned, pointed at his own mouth and then at the egg, and repeated: "Glk." Then he pointed at Bridger's mouth.

  "Maybe he wants you to eat it, Henley," Wilson called.

  Bridger waved Wilson to silence. He thought a minute, then pointed to his own mouth and at the egg, and said: "Egg."

  Lord Percy showed all his teeth in the gorilla equivalent of a grin. "Igg?" he said.

  "Not igg—egg."

  "Ugg?"

  "Nope. Egg, egg, egg!"

  "Ih—uh—egg?"

  "Good—that's pretty nearly right. What else have you got there?" The female gorilla was making marks in her notebook with a massive kind of pencil. "Oh—that's a fish."

  "Fith?"

  "No, fish!"

  "Fiss?"

  "Not fiss—fish! Fish!"

  "Fissss?"

  Bridger shook his head and repeated the word, opening his mouth and pointing at his tongue. Lord Percy tried to imitate him, but merely produced a sound like a leaky soda-fountain.

  The next item from the bag was an apple. After a few tries the gorilla was able to say something approximating "epple."

  Then, adjusting his monocle, Lord Percy held up one hand, pointing to it with the other. When he had learned the world "hand" he proceeded with other parts of his anatomy.

  "That's a thumb. Fingers. An arm. Head. Eyes. Nose. Mouth. Ear. Neck. Chest. That's—oop!" Bridger lowered his voice, and his definition was lost to the crowd if its nature was not.

  The anatomy lesson finished, the big gorilla pointed at his assistant and said something like "Blungblungth". So? thought Bridger; pleased to meet you, Miss Blungblungth. I'd be glad to recommend you for a secretarial position any day. He pointed to himself and said slowly, "Henley Davenport Bridger."

  "En-lee Dev-un—Dev-un—" Lord Percy became hopelessly bogged down.

  "Oh, just call me Bridger. Bridger!"

  "Blidza?"

  "All right—Blidza, if you insist. One handle's as good as another."

  The gorilla pointed at Ruth Pierne, who was the nearest of the others. "Blidza?" he said.

  My God no, you hairy dimwit, thought the chemist. Why did you have to pick her, of all people? He shook his head and and said patiently, "Pierne."

  "Pen-nee? Pee-en-nee?" Lord Percy quickly pointed at Ruth and at several of the other women and repeated, "Pee-en-nee?"

  "Wrong again. Oh—I see what's the matter." Bridger pointed at himself and swept his hand across the group of watchers in an all-inclusive gesture. "Men," he said. Then he pointed at Lord Percy, his assistant, and the apes outside the bars. "Gorillas."

  With that misunderstanding cleared up, Bridger again indicated himself and said "Bridger," then pointed at Lord Percy. The gorilla beamed and replied, "T'kluggl!"

  I suppose introductions are in order, Bridger thought. One by one he called the people over: "Richard Nelson Packard—John Joseph Macdonald—Enid Bennett Hansen—" The secretary scribbled furiously, chewing on the end of her tongue as she struggled to convert the unfamiliar sounds into gorilla shorthand.

  T'kluggl, as their examiner-in-chief was evidently named, grew tired of this rollcall and made impatient sounds to fix Bridger's attention. He went through the motions of putting something into his mouth, chewing it vigorously, and swallowing it. Then he stared expectantly.

  "Eat," said Bridger.

  The gorilla got another apple out of his bag and ate it. Then he said slowly, "Opple—epple—eat—T'Kluggl," and assumed the expression of a cat that has just consumed a canary.

  Bridger grinned back at him. "T'kluggl eats apple," he corrected. "Keep it up, old ape, we're doing fine!" And he clapped T'Kluggl on the shoulder. The brute's a much decenter sort than a lot of people I've known, he thought; we're going to get along just fine.

  The language lesson continued all day. Bridger gave the name of every object in sight, and demonstrated the meanings of as many of the common verbs, such as stand, sit, lie, walk, run and jump, as could be acted out. For some of the more complex concepts he called upon other members of the party to stage little acts in illustration. This pantomime brought on another of Wilson's little inspirations.

  "Look here," he broke in, "T'kluggl ought to get this. Dave, put your arm around Miss Hansen. That's it—closer. Now look at each other." The bus driver and the principal complied, the former with a notable lack of enthusiasm, the latter with a hint of alarm.

  "Now that, T'kluggl," said Wilson, "is love."

  "Love," repeated the ape gravely. Bridger's poker face stood him in good stead, but the others whooped and the victims of the prank drew apart as though they had found each other red hot.

  "Say, Henley," put in Franchot. "Since you're getting so thick with the old monk, why don't you hint that we'd like a more civilized diet?"

  "Yeah," chimed in another voice, "and what about beds?" "Tell him I want my clothes." "And what about some modern plumbing?"

  "One thing at a time, folks," Bridger pleaded. "It'll be a while yet before we can get ideas like those across. I'll do the best I can, but we've survived this arrangement so far and a couple of days more won't kill us."

  With the aid of gestures, Bridger indicated that he wanted a notebook and pencil like the ones the secretary was using. When these had been supplied, he proceeded with the lesson by drawing pictures and pronouncing the appropriate words. The gorilla finally departed, scowling at the notebook and mumbling under his breath.

  Next morning, when T'kluggl appeared, Bridger greeted him with, "Good morning, T'kluggl."

  "Good munning, Blidza," replied the ape. "T'kluggl talk men talk—ess?" He seemed very pleased with his effort.

  And so the language lesson was taken up where it had been left. Bridger found that whereas the names of common objects and the verbs denoting simple actions were easy to put across, other parts of speech presented more difficulties and abstractions left them floundering. The word "yesterday" had them knotting their foreheads for half an hour before T'kluggl seemed to catch on.

  The next day T'kluggl stopped short in the middle of conjugating the verb "make" and cried: "Blidza—g'llillas come flom Fonmlith. Men come flom?" He paused expectantly.

  "You mean, where—do—men—come—from? How'll I explain that? Here, gimme that notebook." And as the hours passed he gave T'kluggl a sketchy account of their adventures since awakening, using a mixture of words pictures, and gestures.

  T'kluggl was delighted when he saw that he had been understood. He called the other members of his committee into the cage, and translated the story to them as Bridger proceeded. So absorbed were both apes and humans in what they were doing that nobody noticed that the sun had set until the chemist's sketches were made illegible by the growing darkness.

  When T'kluggl appeared with his greeting the following morning, Bridger took him to task about their living conditions. Speaking slowly and distinctly, he said "T'kluggl, when can we men go out of the cage? We do not like the cage? We want our clothes, and a good place to sleep."

  The ape s
cratched his head. "Men go out of cadze, men lun fass," he observed. "Men lun 'way fah. G'llillas not like. G'llillas like men to see, len men talk, len wat men do."

  "The men will not run away. Gorillas have food. Men have no food. If gorillas give men food, men will not run."

  "Blidza flens to g'llillas. Men not Blidza flens to g'llillas? Men go out, fight g'llillas? Not—not—"

  "Sure?"

  "Yes, sool. G'llillas not sool. Blidza"—he thumbed through his notebook—"Blidza 'tellizent men. Men not Blidza 'tellizent?"

  Ruth Pierne spoke up unexpectedly: "K'thoolah blonjj thig ah fun?"

  T'kluggl jumped in astonishment, then burst into the anthropoid equivalent of a laugh: "Kee—kee—kee! Velly 'tellizent woo-man, Pee-en-nee! Len g'llilla talk by heah talk. S'e say: 'Wat faw, not tly len.' Nol light, but neah light. Light talk: 'Blong-uh k'thoolah thiggl fun?' Ass kwesson, put 'uh' with fest wed."

  "Yes, yes—but how about our clothes, and some beds?"

  "Men can have clothes. Wat is 'bid'?"

  "Place to sleep; here—I'll draw you a picture."

  Morelli spoke up. "What's all this argument about? I can only get what he says one tenth of the time, and if you two are going to start talking gorilla—"

  "Simple enough, Charley. T'kluggl said he thought I was intelligent, but what about the rest of the crowd? And then Ruth, in gorilla, said 'Why not try to find out?'—only she didn't get the grammar just right, and he corrected her. How'd you do it, Ruth?"

  "Oh, I just listened and memorized a few words that happened to fit in. I was pretty good in German at college."

  "My hat's off to you—only I haven't a hat. You're appointed to teach the rest of us gorilla as fast as you learn it. Now, T'kluggl, this is a bed."

  T'kluggl studied the sketch, which showed a man of about Packard's build sprawled on a shaky replica of an old-fashioned four-poster. "No have bed. G'llillas sleep sit, not sleep lie. But tly make beds. Men len g'llilla talk, g'llillas sool men flens; men not flens, men not go out."

  Bridger translated. "He says we can have our clothes, and he'll try to rustle up something we can use for beds, although they don't use any themselves. Meanwhile, if we'll learn their lingo they'll decide whether we're to be trusted to be turned loose."

  "What are they scared of?" Macdonald demanded "Afraid we'll tear 'em apart with our bare hands?"

  "No use getting sore, Mac. It's as if we'd captured bunch of talking grizzly bears, and they were trying to assure us that they were strict vegetarians and we needn't worry about what would happen if we let them out and invited them in for supper. They'd never seen anything like us before, and they don't know how far to trust us."

  The gorillas departed, and at sundown returned with a huge bundle of clothes and a number of large sponge-rubber pads, which made passably good surfaces for sleeping. "After sleeping on the ground, this feels like a feather bed," Marjorie Tremblay said.

  10

  ORIENTATION

  Ruth Pierne made the most rapid progress in the study of gorillaese; besides her natural linguistic ability, she was spurred by the responsibility of teaching the Others. Bridger, though no linguist, wrestled mightily with the ape tongue in an effort to cut down the girl's lead. He had a vague feeling that she was the one person whom he did not want to have any advantage over him.

  Between bites of breakfast one morning, Mildred Henry complained: "This life may be all right for you, Henley, but I'm getting fed up with it. Nothing to do all day but watch those damned monkeys go by and study their frightful language! We're not all professors and schoolteachers, you know."

  "Yeah," Zbradovski put in. "If something doesn't happen soon, I think we ought to try to escape. I've been figuring on something the last few days—I'll tell you later when we're alone. Here's the committee of alienists."

  T'kluggl had none of his teaching paraphernalia with him that morning. "Blidza," he greeted them in slow, careful gorillaese, "it is time that we began giving your people their freedom—a little at first, so that they will not abuse it. To begin, would you and Pyen-nay like to view our town?"

  Bridger's halting reply got stuck after three words, but the girl stepped into the breach and rattled off the equivalent of "I'm sure we should be delighted" without hesitation. As they trailed down the street after the gorillas, she spoke to the chemist in English: "Henley, we've got another problem. Two of them, in fact. We have a couple of little strangers on the way."

  "Strangers? Oh—I get it. Damn! I was afraid of that. Who and—ah—how?"

  "Elizabeth and Eleanor. You see, the girls have been coming to me with their troubles."

  "Who are the pappas?"

  "Elizabeth's is Dave Toomey. Dave wants to do the right thing, as the saying is, but he's a Catholic and he doesn't think it would be right without a priest. I tried to convince him that there just aren't any more priests, and we'll have to get along the best we can without them, but it still bothers him a lot. I left him trying to think the whole business out."

  "Dave Toomey trying to think anything through is something worth seeing! What about Eleanor?"

  "She's not so certain, but Ronnie Franchot seems to be the favorite. And now Ruby Stern is furious—it seems she had her eye on Ronnie, and she accuses Eleanor of unfair competition."

  "Well, we'll have to get 'em paired off somehow. Nelson's our magistrate—he probably knows the marriage service. After all, any laws that exist now we'll have to make for ourselves, unless we want to adopt the gorillas' code. Dammit—why can't they control themselves like civilized people?"

  Bridger missed the appraising look the girl gave him.

  T'kluggl ushered them into one of the wooden houses that lined the street. "This," he said, "is my house. This is my wife, P'plookhl. And these, darling, are the two intelligent human beings I was telling you about."

  Bridger and Ruth acknowledged the introduction with the formula they had been taught. There were no chairs in the room, but there were heaps of cushions around the walls, and several short-legged tables standing about eighteen inches from the floor. In one corner stood a wide, squat desk surmounted by a huge pile of papers.

  "T'kluggl," asked Bridger, "what are those papers? They remind me of papers that often covered a similar piece of furniture which I used in my former life. In my language they were called 'examination papers,' and no sooner would one lot be cleared away than another would take its place."

  "It is the same with these," the gorilla admitted. "I am a teacher of the young here in Dlldah—that is why I was appointed to investigate you people—and on these papers they have written out what they are supposed to have learned. Now, in your second sentence the proper word is 'glung,' not 'glong,' and . . ." T'kluggl methodically plodded through the rest of Bridger's grammatical sins.

  The chemist waited till he had finished, and then burst out: "But I was also a teacher of the young! So was Pierne here. And in my spare time I studied the workings of living things, to learn what they were made of. Those papers of yours are the same as the 'examinations' of which I spoke."

  It was T'kluggl's turn to be amazed. "This is a most remarkable event! I pursue the same study, and others related to it. I see that we shall have much to discuss about that former life of yours. But, my friend, do not become so excited, because when you do your grammar becomes so bad that I can scarcely understand you."

  Examining the topmost papers, Bridger discovered that the gorilla writing consisted of a lot of wiggly lines running from top to bottom of the sheets. More like a seismograph record than anything, he thought.

  "Whom do you teach?" he asked.

  "From the sixth to the twelfth year," T'kluggl explained, "but only certain subjects. These are my assistants—Kha Khahng, who teaches from birth to the sixth year, and Gzigg'lilth, who also teaches from the sixth to the twelfth. After the twelfth year, those who show the most promise go to the central school at Mm Uth, where our government is located."

  "Then this is not your main cent
er?"

  "No, Dlldah is the farthest east of all our settlements. This is Tsugg Oof, our foremost physician and an outstanding historian. He was sent from Mm Uth to investigate you as soon as we sent word of your discovery. He arrived but yesterday."

  "Then we haven't seen him before? To us you look too much alike to tell."

  T'kluggl found the idea amusing. "Kee-kee-kee!" he giggled. "Is that a fact? How strange—we experience the same difficulty with your people. For many days the only way I could distinguish you from the other males in your party was by your smaller size, and at first I could only tell that when several of you stood close together."

  Nice to be picked out by an ape as the runt of the litter, Bridger reflected. I wonder how much of this conversation Ruth is going to carry back to the other women. "It might be easier without this growth of hair on my face," he observed.

  "Perhaps. I am curious about this strange hair of yours, Blidza. Our archeologists have insisted that among your species it was the custom to pluck out all hair except that on the scalp. We knew of no reason for such behavior, except possibly to get rid of parasites. Now we find that the natural growth of hair seems to be confined to four limited areas. Is this a general characteristic of your species?"

  "Yes—some races have more and some less hair, but the one to which we belong was almost the hairiest of all. At the time when I lived, it was the custom to cut the hair on the lower part of the face close to the skin, and to cut the hair on the scalp to about the length of a finger. Among the men, that is—the women have no hair on their faces, and some of them allowed their scalp-hair to grow uncut. How much do you know about us, aside from what you have learned by studying our party?"

  "Very little," T'kluggl admitted, "except that your species was once very widespread and disappeared quite suddenly, shortly before our own kind began to develop greater cranial capacity. We have found a few skeletons, and many implements of stone and fired clay, as well as a few small objects of rare inactive metals which our archeologists and historians have concluded were ornaments. We supposed it possible that you had a knowledge of other metals, but such perishable substances would long since have disappeared."