The Best of Hal Clement

by Hal Clement

  Talker scratched the first impression on the ground—a perfectly recognizable word, “ship,” and looked up again. The man had disappeared. For an instant Talker was confused; then he heard various sounds from the gully, and crawled to the edge to look over. Kirk was below, raising his pole, which had been lying where he had left it, to the sill of the airlock. Still believing that Talker was able to write English, he had completely misinterpreted the gestures and writing, and supposed he was being requested to enter the craft.

  Talker had a feeling of helplessness, in the face of his troubles; then he pulled himself together, forcing himself to remember that his life, and the other lives on the ship, depended on his efforts. At least, he now knew the marks had a definite meaning, and he had learned the symbol for “ship.” It was, he tried to convince himself, a fair beginning.

  The man was crouching in the lock entrance—it was not high enough for him to stand—watching expectantly. Talker beckoned him back. If the man misunderstood his first attempt, now was the time to straighten it out. Kirk looked annoyed, though the aliens could not interpret the expression, slid down the pole, and scrambled back up the bank.

  Talker tried again, pointing this time to the early-afternoon sun, and writing the word when it formed in Kirk’s mind. The Earthman looked down at the result.

  “If that job were necessary, it would be hopeless, friend,” he said, “but it isn’t necessary. I can speak English, and read it, and write it, thank you. If you can’t talk, why don’t you just write out what you want me to know?”

  Not a word of this was understandable to Talker; in a rather hopeless fashion, he wrote the word or two which had been pictured clearly enough for him to catch, and succeeded in exasperating Kirk still further.

  The man certainly cannot be accused of stupidity; it was not his fault that he failed to experience a flash of insight that would give the clue to the alien’s meaning. The great majority of people would have done no better, except, perhaps, for some lucky chance. Human experience of thought transference is limited to the claims of “psychics” and to fantastic literature, except for a few scientific experiments of doubtful value; Kirk was not addicted to the reading of any of these products of mental aberration, and made no claim to be any sort of scientist. He had begun by jumping to a conclusion, and for some time it simply did not occur to him that the conclusion might be erroneous—the evidence had been quite convincing, to him, that Talker was acquainted with the English language. It followed that the mothlike one’s intentions, motivating all this gesticulation and writing, were to teach Kirk the same tongue: an idea so exactly opposite the true state of affairs as to be almost comical.

  Twice more Talker repeated his forlorn attempt to get his idea across to the other; twice Kirk repeated his expostulation, once going so far as to write it out on the ground, when it occurred to him that Talker might be deaf. The third time, the Earthling’s temper broke free of its moorings—almost. He was not accustomed to using profanity; his family, whose elder members had carefully controlled his upbringing, was almost puritanical in that respect, and habit got control of his reactions in time to prevent his speaking aloud the words in his mind. His reaction may be imagined when, without Kirk’s having uttered a sound, except for a strangled snort, Talker extended a forelimb and scratched a perfectly legible “damn” on the bare patch of ground.

  The word “insight” provides a psychologist with material for hours of talk. Its precise meaning cannot be given without tacit assumption of understanding of its nature; neither Kirk nor the narrator possesses that understanding. It is assumed that the readers have had experience of insight, and can understand the habit of cartoonists of symbolizing its presence by an incandescent bulb—whether this habit antedates or succeeds the coining of the phrase “to see light” is a purely academic question. All that matters to us is the fact that Kirk abruptly saw the light—dimly at first, and then, though it strained his credulity to the breaking point, with something like comprehension. Why that particular incident should have served to unlock the door we cannot say: certainly Talker’s knowledge of a bit of English profanity could have had many other explanations. Insight, as we have intimated, is a rather obscure process.

  For almost a full minute, Earthling and alien stared at each other, the former struggling with his own prejudices and the latter wondering what had happened—even he, unused to interpreting human attitudes, could perceive that Kirk was disturbed. Then the Earthman, with the seeds of truth rapidly maturing in his mind, deliberately visualized a simple design—a circle inscribed in a square. Talker promptly and accurately reproduced it on his improvised backboard. Kirk tried various letters of the English and Greek alphabets, and finally satisfied himself that Talker was actually obtaining the impressions directly from the thoughts. Talker, for his part, discovered that the visual impressions were almost as clear to him now as those of Boss, who had lost his patience and temper long before the Earthman, and had withdrawn by request. He was now sulking, once more squatting in the airlock.

  The auditory impressions and abstract thoughts were still a hopeless confusion, so far as Talker was concerned; he never did make a serious attempt to unravel them. Both he and Kirk were satisfied to have found a common ground for expression, and completely ignored lesser matters. Kirk seated himself on the ground beside Talker, and an intensive course in English was rapidly embarked upon.

  Not until the Sun was low did Kirk abandon the task, and then it was only because of hunger. Talker had already learned enough to understand the man’s declaration that he would return in the morning; and Kirk went back to his camp in the gathering dusk, to prepare a meal and obtain a few hours’ sleep—very few, as may well be imagined. He spent a good deal of the night awake in his blankets, staring up at the clear sky and wondering, at times aloud, from which of the thousands of points of light his new acquaintance had come. He was sufficiently adventurous by nature not to ask himself why they had come.

  * * *

  Talker watched the man disappear into the woods, and turned wearily toward the ship. He was overtired; the effects of the earlier dose of accelerine were beginning to abate, and he had a well-founded objection to taking more of the stuff than was necessary to keep him alive. With an effort, he flew the few yards between the bank and the airlock, settling heavily beside Boss. The sound of his wings woke the commander, who eagerly demanded a report on progress in communication. Talker obliged, somewhat shortly; his fatigue had brought him unusually close to anger.

  “I have made a beginning, in spite of your aid. How long it will take to set up working communication, I don’t know; but I will try to direct the conversations so that the ideas we need to impart are used. He will be back when the Sun rises again; in the meantime, I need sleep. Don’t disturb me until the native returns.”

  Boss was too elated at Talker’s news to take offense at his manner. He allowed the herald to depart to his own quarters, and went off himself to spread the news, after closing the outer airlock door. The second in command received the information with glee, and in short order the crew was in better spirits than it had enjoyed since landing on this unhealthy and uncomfortable planet. Even the inhabitants of the sick bay, now three in number since the decoy who had gone after Kirk had returned with a complete set of pulled wing ligaments, began to feel that they were suffering in a good cause, and ceased thinking uncomplimentary thoughts about their officers. The doctor, too, usually by far the most pessimistic member of the ship’s personnel, ceased making pointed remarks about “wasted effort” as he worked over his patients. Not one of them appreciated the very real difficulties that still lay ahead, before Talker would have any chance of making the human being understand their needs. None thought that anything more than the transmission of that knowledge would be necessary; and all, except Talker, regarded that matter as practically solved.

  The herald had a better appreciation of what lay before him, and was far from sure of his course of action. He had pr
omised Boss to arrange matters so that their needs would be among the first things to be transmitted to the Earthling; but he could not see how he was to fulfill the promise. Had it been merely a matter of keeping his word to the commander, Talker would not have been bothered in the least; he considered anything said to Boss was justified if it succeeded in silencing him. Unfortunately, Talker’s own future existence depended on his ability to carry out the terms of that promise. Even with his lack of experience in learning, or teaching, languages, it occurred to him that making advanced chemistry the subject of the lessons was bound to be rather awkward. One cannot point out atoms and molecules individually; it would be pure chance if the man recognized either diagrams or samples, since the latter would be of value only to a chemist with a laboratory, and the former might not—probably would not—conform to human theories of atomic formation. It did not occur to Talker that the ship’s pharmacist might be of help; he had been out of contact with his own class for so long that an unfortunate, but almost inevitable, sense of his own superiority had grown up within him. The rest of the crew, to him, were mere laborers; he had never talked with any of them as friend to friend; he had solved all his own problems since joining the crew, and would undoubtedly continue to do so unless and until something drastic forced him out of his rut. Be it said for him that he was not conceited in the ordinary sense of the word; the feeling of superiority was the result of class training; and the ignoring of others’ abilities was completely unconscious.

  * * *

  At the moment, Talker was not worrying about his course of action. He was sound asleep, crouched on the padding of the floor of his quarters. Boss, having made sure that his own contributions toward the present state of near-success were not being minimized in the rapidly spreading news, also retired. The second officer made sure that both airlocks were fast, and made his way to the long wardroom in the lower part of the ship. Most of the soldiers and several engineers were gathered there, discussing the day’s events and the chances of reaching their original planetary system—they no longer had “homes” since Boss had broken allegiance with his overlord. The officer’s presence did not interrupt the conversation; the Second was a member of the soldier class, and entered the discussion on an equal plane with the others.

  It is exceedingly doubtful if any of the crew had ever objected to Boss’ dereliction; the act had made little or no change in the course of their existence, and they cared little for whom they worked and fought. If anything, they preferred the new state of affairs, for the constant internecine warfare between the rulers of their home world resembled organized piracy more than anything else, and there was now no need to turn over most of the loot to their own overlord. Boss, of course, had acted almost on impulse, giving little or no thought to such matters as the problem of replenishing exhausted food and ammunition—he expected to supply those wants from his victims. Unfortunately, an unexpected encounter with a full-armed ship belonging to his erstwhile ruler had left him in no condition to fight anybody; after three or four attempts to bluff supplies from isolated stations in his own system, he had made matters a little too hot for himself and fled in the handiest direction, which happened to be straight away from four pursuing warships. Near the speed of light, his vessel became undetectable; and once out of his own system, he had not dared to stop until Sol was bright on his navigation plates. His reasons for landing on Earth have already been made clear. He had food in plenty, and his ship drew its power from stellar radiations; but not a locker on his ship contained a round of ammunition.

  If the discomfort of their environment had turned any of Boss’ crew against him, Talker’s recent efforts had brought them back. The second officer found himself in complete agreement with the crew—it was good to have a commander like Boss, to keep things under control! There passed a peaceful and happy evening on Boss’ vessel.

  Boss had found it almost impossible to set regular watches. No matter how often he relieved his men, the inactivity of the job promptly put the relief to sleep. The bodies of the crew, exhausted by the constant battle against Earth’s savage gravity, would give up and drop the individuals into a coma before they realized that the stimulant accelerine had worn off. The sleep was short, but apparently unavoidable; Talker, alone, had been able to force himself to more or less regular waking and sleeping hours, simply because he did practically no manual labor. For this reason, as soon as he was convinced that there was nothing in the neighborhood that constituted a menace to the ship itself, Boss ceased setting watches and merely closed the ports at night. There were enough differences in physique among the crew members to make it practically certain that someone would always be awake, day or night. The whole thing was horribly unmilitary by any standards, but it was typical of Boss’ line-of-least-resistance nature.

  * * *

  It chanced that Boss himself was asleep when Kirk showed up the next morning, and the ports were still sealed. The man threw a stone at the airlock door, and examined the ship more closely while he waited for something to happen. The sun had just cleared the trees and was shining directly on the bow of the vessel. This time, Kirk found that he could see a little through the control-room ports—a few glimpses of boards, covered with dials and levers, the latter oddly shaped to conform to the peculiar “hands” of the operators. He was not close enough to the ship to obtain a very wide vision angle through the ports, and he had to move around to see the various parts of the chamber. While he was thus improving his knowledge, his eye caught a flash of reflected sunlight from the beveled edge of the airlock door, and he turned to see who or what was emerging.

  The sound of the stone Kirk had thrown had echoed through the main corridor and reached the “ears” of a party of engineers in the wardroom below. These individuals had interrupted a form of amusement startlingly similar to contract bridge, in which they were engaged, and one had gone to inform Boss. The latter cursed him, told him to rouse Talker, and went back to sleep.

  It was Talker, therefore, followed by some of the more curious engineers, who emerged from the lock. Kirk was able to recognize the herald by his antennae, but could discern no difference between the other members of the group. The meeting adjourned, at Talker’s direction, to a spot in the gully, in front of the ship, which bore a large and exceptionally smooth area of sun-dried clay, and lessons began. Talker had brought the appropriate materials with him, and had planned to take notes in his own form of “writing”; but he delegated this task to a member of the audience, and gave his full attention to the delicate matter of guiding the choice of words in the proper direction.

  This task was no sinecure, since Talker was still extremely uncertain as to the precise nature of words. The meaning covered by a single word in English sometimes requires several in another language; the reverse is also true. Talker had learned the symbol that indicated the ship; he discovered later, to his confusion, that there exist such things as synonyms, other words that meant the same thing. He never did discover the variety of objects that could have been meant by “ship.” Kirk saw these sources of difficulty almost from the beginning, and went to considerable trouble to avoid them.

  Each written word, to Talker, was a complete unit; it is doubtful if he ever discovered that they were made of twenty-six simple marks, in various combinations. Obviously this fact complicated his task enormously, but there was nothing to be done about it. To explain the individual letters would have been tantamount to teaching the verbal language; and months, or even years, would have been necessary to teach Talker’s auditory organs to recognize the innumerable fine distinctions of pitch and overtone to be found in a single sentence.

  * * *

  The details of the weeks that were taken up in the learning would be of interest to psychologists and semanticists, but would extend the present narrative to an unjustifiable length. There were several short interruptions when Kirk had to forage for food, and once he was forced to absent himself for nearly a week, in order to turn in his parasite rep
ort at the nearest center of civilization. He told no one of his find in the forest, and returned there as quickly as he could. He found the aliens impatiently waiting for him, and the herald at once returned to the task. Kirk had long since perceived that some tremendous anxiety was behind Talker’s insistence, but no amount of effort served to make clear any details.

  September and Kirk’s patience were drawing to an end by the time that exchange of ideas had progressed to a point where it could be called conversation. Talker wrote with considerable facility, using a pencil and pages from Kirk’s notebooks; the man spoke aloud, since he had discovered that this apparently resulted in a sharper mental image of the words. To him, the herald’s need was less urgent than the satisfaction of his own curiosity; he asked, so far as Talker’s rapidly increasing vocabulary would permit, questions designed to fill that want. He learned something of the physical and sociological nature of the alien’s home world—not too much, for Talker had other ideas than the telling of his life story, and Boss became suspicious and almost aggressive when informed of the nature of the Earthman’s curiosity. He could conceive of only one use to which such information could possibly be turned.

  Kirk finally accepted the inevitable, and permitted Talker to run the conversation in his own fashion, hoping to get a few words of his own into the discussion when the herald’s “urgent business” was completed. Talker had kept the man ignorant of Boss’ attitude, justly fearing detrimental effects on Kirk’s willingness to cooperate.