“Would I have come tearing over here this morning if I weren’t positive?” the man asked, clearly annoyed at the questions.
His annoyance was justified; Crab Lowbarr had plenty of junior staff he could have sent in his place if he’d thought he was only reporting a rumor. Heykus looked at him a moment longer, thinking hard, and then he made a swift decision. And did something that was so rare for him that Crab Lowbarr was shocked. Heykus sat down and sent for a half-bottle of good wine and two wine glasses.
When Crab had recovered from his astonishment, he mentioned that he hadn’t known Heykus drank. Politely. And his chief, who based the decision upon the fact that Jesus Himself had been quite willing to turn water into wine at the wedding in Cana—when He could just as easily have turned it into milk or apple juice or anything else whatsoever—said, “I don’t. But sometimes, for a very special and wonderful celebration, I have a glass of wine in joyful fellowship. Weddings . . . births of sons . . . that sort of thing.” He did not add that it was also a move that would give him precious time to think, before he had to do any more serious talking, and he sincerely hoped that would not occur to Crab as a possibility.
“And announcements that an ordinary human baby has learned an Alien language,” Lowbarr said cheerfully. “I agree. Joyful fellowship! Absolutely.”
“Weddings and births come along pretty often, but this has happened only once, and can never happen again. That makes it especially celebration-worthy.”
“Only once, yeah—only one time can be the first time. But it’s going to happen again plenty of times from now on,” Crab said.
“Are you sure of that?”
“Heykus, for god’s sake!” protested the other man. “So help me Niobe! What do I have to say to get you to quit with the are you sure and are you positive crap? The Lingoes have been telling us the truth all this time, damn their asses all the way to hell and back, and if I wasn’t one hundred and six percent sure of what I’m saying I would not be here. Now lay off with the dubious inquiries. Shit.”
“There really is no genetic difference between the babies of the Lines and other babies?”
Crab shook his head slowly from side to side, one hand laid melodramatically over his heart. “None. None. I’ve called enough of our scientists to run a damn conference, and they all tell me the same thing. They’ve known for years—‘many years’ is the way they put it—that any human kid can learn an Alien language in an Interface just the same as a child of the Lines.”
“But they didn’t feel it was necessary to tell us that? During these many years.”
“Ah . . .” Crab cleared his throat and looked carefully blank. “They tell me they were instructed to keep their radical opinions to themselves, Heykus, and they didn’t feel that it was advisable to argue.”
“Pentagon?”
“Yep.”
Heykus sighed, and took some more time making a note on his wrist computer; Crab would assume it was a reminder to call in some Pentagon flunkies and kick ass over this. He would have been very surprised to know that what Heykus had entered was the words to the first verse of “The Old Rugged Cross.” And then the wine came, and he stopped to pour it and to go through the ceremony of toasting the momentous occasion.
“To the youngster who has broken the monopoly of the Lines,” he said solemnly, raising his glass.
Lowbarr repeated that, and added “To the truth!” as his contribution. And although Heykus disliked doing so intensely, he had no choice but to join in.
“To the truth!” he echoed, and raised his glass once again, and drank, hoping he wouldn’t choke on the wine. It was awkward, drinking to the truth while you did your best to figure out a way to perpetuate what was so far as you knew the most elaborate lie the human race had ever been told. And when the toasts were safely over, he would have to relax and strive for small talk. Small talk that was in preparation for large talk, that he would have to do quickly, as soon as this man could decently be sent on about his business and Heykus could decide how the emergency should be handled.
“Well, now,” he began. “Now I’ve survived the shock, perhaps you could tell me one more time. With a little more detail.” He leaned back and gave Crab his most encouraging jovial smile.
“Heykus, there isn’t much more detail,” Crab answered. “There’s a wild-eyed eggdome at Massachusetts Multiversity named Macabee Dow. Powerful man—controls a hell of a lot of money, knows things nobody else understands but a lot of people need, that kind of thing. Shaves his head and stains it blue.”
“He does?”
“He does. A militant. You know. ‘You wanna hate an eggdome? Hate me, here’s my eggdome badge!’ Anyhow, when his first kid was born, this Dow character just haled himself over to Chornyak Household and talked them into Interfacing his kid along with theirs. He signed a hundred waivers of responsibility, of course, and I suppose it cost him both arms and a leg, but they went along with it. And now, Heykus, little Gabriel Macabee Dow is two years old plus a bit, and a native speaker of REMwhatsis. Same behavior as the linguist kids . . . tiny vocabulary, little baby sentences, you know the kind of thing, but the Chornyaks assure me it’s normal language acquisition. And that the Dow baby understands everything the AIRY says, sits around gabbling with the other kids in the Interface—the works. I went over and took a look at the setup for myself, and it’s as specified, Heykus.”
“How did this professor talk the Chornyaks into that?”
Crab rolled his eyes and shrugged his shoulders; Heykus found the man’s body language offensively excessive, but at least it wasn’t particularly subtle. Massive bewilderment, he was bodyparling, and now he was going to put words to the music. “Apparently it was no problem, and that baffles me. According to Jonathan Chornyak, Muckymuck of Muckymucks, the Lines have never had any objection to Interfacing kids from outside, so long as there was space available. He claims they’ve made the offer to share the Interface time and time again, direct to this department, and have always been turned down. Rudely, he says. He says they got tired of offering.”
“He’s probably correct,” Heykus said. “Relations between this department and the Lines have never been precisely cordial. I can imagine the dialogue. ‘Hey, wanna share our Interface?’ And one of our prize diplomatic types telling the man where he could take his offer and what ingenious things he could do with it when he got there.”
“I know.” They both knew, and had been caught in the middle many a time.
“How did Macabee Dow know it was such a simple matter, though?” Heykus asked. “The Lines have certainly not gone around making offers to the general public—they don’t have as much contact with the public in a year as you and I do in an ordinary morning.”
“Heykus, I don’t have any idea how Dow knew, and he isn’t telling. He just glares at me like I was the newest fungus and snorts like a horse and mutters stuff about pseudoscience and government claptrap and then claps his mouth shut and smirks at me.”
“Smirks at you? Why?” Heykus didn’t like the sound of this at all. Somebody was going to have to take a very careful look at Macabee Dow, and at how essential the continuation of his work was; and somebody was going to have to decide whether Macabee Dow wouldn’t serve his nation more effectively from a comfortable private room in a federal mental hospital with a Takeover Chip in his nostril and a layer of Thorazine added for insurance. “Why would he feel that it was appropriate to smirk at you?” he said again.
“Well, hell, Heykus, his kid is the very first kid ever, not from the Lines, to learn an Alien language. Sure he smirks about it! I’d smirk too, in his place.”
Heykus leaned his chin in his hand and closed his eyes, thinking long and hard, while Crab finished the excellent wine. What, precisely, was he going to do now? He hadn’t been expecting this, and there weren’t any contingency plans for it. He was furious with the Chornyaks for going ahead with it without notifying D.A.T., and he knew that was wasted anger, because there was nothin
g that would delight the Chornyaks more than knowing that they’d managed to upset Heykus Clete. And Crab Lowbarr was going to expect Heykus really to be feeling the satisfaction he’d been pretending to feel. His security clearance qualified him to know all about the government Interfacing experiments with nonhumanoid Alien languages—the standard classified information about the Government Work projects—but he’d go to his grave as ignorant of the problems of Alien superiority as a servomechanism supervisor. Unless this business with the Dow child had brought on catastrophe, and the whole thing was going to become public knowledge, in which case Crab Lowbarr would have to take his chances like everybody else.
But there was something very strange here, nagging at the back of his mind. Something that did not add up. This had been going on for almost two years, or a little more than two years, and not one hint had come his way? Not one memo? Macabee Dow undoubtedly had the kind of influence that would have kept his child’s private life out of the media until such time as he chose to have it there, but it was extraordinary that Heykus had not learned of it long ago. The only possible explanation of that information lag was that the men of the Lines, out of sheer mischief, had taken the kind of elaborate steps that would have been necessary to keep the Director of D.A.T. in the dark and save this little surprise for him. Only the linguists would have the skill, or the motivation, to lay down the kind of smokescreen required and maintain it this long.
“Is something wrong, Heykus?”
Lowbarr’s voice seemed to come from very far away, and Heykus heard it through a dull fury that he knew was not helping matters. Yes, something is wrong. In a just war, you take a life because it is necessary to do so, and taking Crab Lowbarr’s life—and Macabee Dow’s, and little Gabriel Dow’s—would have been quick and simple. But that wouldn’t have been enough. And even if Heykus felt that he was justified in ordering a “natural disaster” that would get rid of a large group, that group would have to include all of the linguists of Chornyak Household, just for starters. Women and children, as well as men. And even then, he would have to start looking for the loose ends. People Dow had mentioned the project to, casually, at parties. Their wives; their children. People those people had talked to about it, perhaps because they were disgusted that Dow would even consider doing anything so repulsive. And then there were the staff members here at D.A.T. who’d read whatever kind of disinformational items the linguists had sent along to screw the lid down on the story. And everybody they had talked to. . . . It was ridiculous. You’d have to wipe out the population of the Earth to get rid of all the potential loose ends! You might just as well tell the truth and let the population of the Earth do whatever it would do if it knew the facts!
“No, nothing’s wrong,” he said. “I’m just very surprised. And a little taken aback at the implications.”
“It’s an unexpected breakthrough, that’s for damn sure,” said Crab, comfortably. Just as if he were not sitting there with his survival being considered, pro and con, by Heykus Joshua Clete. Heykus thanked the Lord God Almighty, as he did time and again in the course of any working week, that telepathy was still not among the usual abilities of His children on this planet.
“But do you know what it means?” he asked Lowbarr. “It means that all we have to do in order to double, triple, quadruple, the number of interpreters we have is build Interfaces of our own and stock them with AIRYs and babies. It means we can step up the settlement of space—” He stopped, suddenly.
“What is it, Heykus? What the hell’s the matter?”
“It means the Soviets can do the same thing,” Heykus spat. “Doesn’t it? I don’t suppose it crossed anybody’s mind that this should be classified information.”
“It crossed my mind.” Lowbarr wasn’t pleased at the implication that he’d been careless. “But Macabee Dow didn’t choose to call me on this until after he’d held a press conference. I just barely managed to get over here and tell you before you saw it on the newspapes.”
“I see.”
“I told him what I thought, and he told me how little he cared. He also told me that this hadn’t been going on at the bottom of the sea, and if it was such a big deal somebody should have told him so sooner.”
Heykus nodded.
“Some kind of hanky-panky’s been going on, hasn’t it?”
“It doesn’t matter now,” Heykus told him firmly. “What does matter is for us to move on this. We can build Interfaces bigger and faster and better than the Russians can, and we’ll have to. We’ll have to do something about the number of AIRYs available to us, and that isn’t going to be easy. While the details are being worked out, there are things we have to do right now. I want work started on construction of Interfaces here in Washington—the technicians at Government Work will know how to proceed on that. I want liaison men calling at the houses of the Lines, to reserve every space available in their Interfaces for infants of our choice—infants chosen by me personally, from the families of our top personnel. I don’t want even one more such space to go to an academic with ambitions; they are all to go to our people. In fact, Crab, I don’t want that put off, I want it done immediately. I want liaison teams on their way by noon today. If this has been gossip around the Multiversity for the past two years, even just within a small circle of Dow’s friends, there are undoubtedly other academics who’ve just been waiting to be sure his child wouldn’t die or go mad or turn out not to be able to acquire the language. Now that they know there’s no risk, they’ll feel the same way we do—they’ll want the goodies for themselves. We can’t have that.”
“Heykus . . .” Crab spoke hesitantly, a puzzled scowl on his face. “Wait a minute.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Well, isn’t that up to the Lingoes? The Interfaces belong to them—it seems to me that who they share them with is not something we can decide.”
“They’ll cooperate,” Heykus said grimly. “You leave that part of it to me.”
“And how do you propose to—”
Heykus was suddenly weary, worn out with the sudden crisis and the multiple layers of deceptions, worn out with having to be polite to this man; at such times he understood very well how the good old-fashioned dictator must have enjoyed the privilege of just snapping his fingers and ordering the guards to take whoever it was away to the dungeons and throw away the keys.
“Lowbarr,” he said, trying not to let the adrenalin rebound show, “it doesn’t really matter whether I’m going to be able to convince them or not. The government still has to proceed as if we would be able to do so. Can’t you see that?” He didn’t wait for the answer; it wasn’t relevant. “How fast can you get this organized?”
Crab Lowbarr had begun making notes as soon as he realized that what he was hearing was direct orders and not simply conversation; he looked up from his wrist computer and asked, “With full authority from you, Heykus?”
“Whatever you need. Funds, people, anything.”
“Give me two hours—maybe a little less. I’ll get it going.”
“Good man.”
“Is that all?”
“No. It’s not. Next, I need a congressman with top security clearance over here. We’re going to need a modification of the child labor laws to let children outside the Lines work in the interpreting booths. That’s got to be worded extremely carefully; I want somebody good, and somebody effective. Somebody who’ll know how to tuck it away in an amendment to a big appropriation bill where nobody will notice it until we want it noticed.”
“Okay, Heykus. But that’s it.”
“I beg your pardon.”
Crab spread his hands wide and shook them at his superior, palms up and supplicating. “Look, there aren’t many of us around with the necessary clearances for all this, and we’re spread damn thin already. There are things we do that can’t just be dumped in the ON HOLD file. If you really want teams headed for the Lines in the next two hours, you’ve given me all I can handle. Let me get on this stu
ff, and then I’ll come back this afternoon for the additions to your list.”
Heykus nodded; it was annoying, but the man was correct, and it shouldn’t have been necessary for him to remind anybody.
“You’re right,” he said. “You go ahead and get matters underway. I need time to sit down and consider carefully each and every aspect of this development; I need time to set up appropriate strategies. I shouldn’t be going off half-cocked like this. Don’t come back later today, Crab; get the teams going, send me the congressman, and come back tomorrow afternoon. If anything comes up in the meantime that’s a genuine emergency, I’ll send for you.”
“All right.” Lowbarr stood up and stretched, groaning aloud. “Too much wine,” he said. “This is no time for me to be this relaxed.” He reached into his pocket, brought out a strip of Null-Alk capsules, and took two, while Heykus glared at this clear evidence of both dissipation and weakness. “How do you know, Heykus,” Crab chuckled, noting the expression on his face, “that I don’t carry these for the benefit of other people who lack my sterling character?”
Heykus didn’t stoop to answer that. He turned down the volume on the glare slightly, and nodded at Lowbarr as he snapped a mock salute and headed out through the desk exit and toward the office door.
“Crab?” he called after him. “Give me a call in about an hour and let me know how things are going!”
“Right!” the answer came back, and then the door hissed, irising open and then shut. Heykus wanted a good long look at the man on comscreen, to get a chance to study him more closely than was polite when face to face; even more, he wanted a chance to see the fiz-display data. He needed to know if Crab Lowbarr was under any stresses that the effects of the wine had canceled or dulled while he was here; he needed to know if any unusual pattern was going to show up when Heykus asked him a few questions about exactly when he had first learned that there was a baby not of the Lines in the Chornyak Interface. And of course, while he was waiting for Lowbarr’s call, he would get the man’s file from the computer and find out what sort of abrupt exit from this world would be most appropriate and believable, if it turned out to be necessary. It was a duty he found repugnant; it was also a duty he would not have even considered laying on the shoulders of anyone else.
The Judas Rose Page 19
