“Did you record that today?” asked Ohashi.
“Yes. It was using that odd illustration board with the moving pictures—weird flowers and weirder animals.”
“We’ve seen them,” muttered Zakheim.
“And those chopping movements of its hands,” said Francine. “The swaying body, the undulations, the facial contortions.” She shook her head. “It’s almost like a bizarre dance.”
“What are you driving at?” asked Ohashi.
“I’ve been wondering what would happen if we had a leading choreographer compose a dance to those sounds, and if we put it on for…”
“Faaa!” snorted Zakheim.
“All right,” said Francine. “But we should be using some kind of random stimulation pattern on these Galactics. Why don’t we bring in a nightclub singer? Or a circus barker? Or a magician? Or…”
“We tried a full-blown schizoid,” said Goré.
Zakheim grunted. “And you got exactly what such tactics deserve: Your schizoid sat there and played with his fingers for an hour!”
“The idea of using artists from the entertainment world intrigues me,” said Ohashi. “Some Noh dancers, perhaps.” He nodded. “I’d never thought about it. But art is, after all, a form of communication.”
“So is the croaking of a frog in a swamp,” said Zakheim.
“Did you ever hear about the Paradox Frog?” asked Francine.
“Is this one of your strange jokes?” asked Zakheim.
“Of course not. The Paradox Frog is a very real creature. It lives on the island of Trinidad. It’s a very small frog, but it has the opposable thumb on a five-fingered hand, and it…”
“Just like our visitors,” said Zakheim.
“Yes. And it uses its hand just like we do—to grasp things, to pick up food, to stuff its mouth, to…”
“To make bombs?” asked Zakheim.
Francine shrugged, turned away. She felt hurt.
“My people believe these Galactics are putting on an elaborate sham,” said Zakheim. “We think they are stalling while they secretly study us in preparation for invasion!”
Goré said: “So?” His narrow shoulders came up in a Gallic shrug that said as plainly as words: “Even if this is true, what is there for us to do?”
Francine turned to Ohashi. “What’s the favorite theory current with your team?” Her voice sounded bitter, but she was unable to soften the tone.
“We are working on the assumption that this is a language of one-syllable root, as in Chinese,” said Ohashi.
“But what of the vowel harmony?” protested Goré. “Surely that must mean the harmonious vowels are all in the same words.”
Ohashi adjusted the set of his glasses. “Who knows?” he asked. “Certainly, the back vowels and front vowels come together many times, but…” He shrugged, shook his head.
“What’s happening with the group that’s working on the historical analogy?” asked Goré. “You were going to find out, Ohashi.”
“They are working on the assumption that all primitive sounds are consonants with nonfixed vowels … foot-stampers for dancing, you know. Their current guess is that the Galactics are missionaries, their language a religious language.”
“What results?” asked Zakheim.
“None.”
Zakheim nodded. “To be expected.” He glanced at Francine. “I beg the forgiveness of the Mrs. Doctor Millar?”
She looked up, startled from a daydreaming speculation about the Galactic language and dancing. “Me? Good heavens, why?”
“I have been short-tempered today,” said Zakheim. He glanced at his wristwatch. “I’m very sorry. I’ve been worried about another appointment.”
He heaved his bulk out of the chair, took up his briefcase. “And it is time for me to be leaving. You forgive me?”
“Of course, Zak.”
His wide face split into a grin. “Good!”
Goré got to his feet. “I will walk a little way with you, Zak.”
Francine and Ohashi sat on for a moment after the others had gone.
“What good are we doing with these meetings?” she asked.
“Who knows how the important pieces of this puzzle will be fitted together?” asked Ohashi. “The point is: We are doing something different.”
She sighed. “I guess so.”
Ohashi took off his glasses, and it made him appear suddenly defenseless. “Did you know that Zak was recording our meeting?” he asked. He replaced the glasses.
Francine stared at him. “How do you know?”
Ohashi tapped his briefcase. “I have a device in here that reveals such things.”
She swallowed a brief surge of anger. “Well, is it really important, Hiko?”
“Perhaps not.” Ohashi took a deep, evenly controlled breath. “I did not tell you one other thing about the Buddhist monk.”
“Oh? What did you omit?”
“He predicts that we will fail—that the human race will be destroyed. He is very old and very cynical for a monk. He thinks it is a good thing that all human striving must eventually come to an end.”
Anger and a sudden resolve flamed in her. “I don’t care! I don’t care what anyone else thinks! I know that…” She allowed her voice to trail off, put her hands to her eyes.
“You have been very distracted today,” said Ohashi. “Did the talk about your late husband disturb you?”
“I know. I’m…” She swallowed, whispered: “I had a dream about Bob last night. We were dancing, and he was trying to tell me something about this problem, only I couldn’t hear him. Each time he started to speak the music got louder and drowned him out.”
Silence fell over the room. Presently, Ohashi said: “The unconscious mind takes strange ways sometimes to tell us the right answers. Perhaps we should investigate this idea of dancing.”
“Oh, Hiko! Would you help me?”
“I should consider it an honor to help you,” he said.
* * *
It was quiet in the semi-darkness of the projection room. Francine leaned her head against the back-rest of her chair, looked across at the stand light where Ohashi had been working. He had gone for the films on Oriental ritual dances that had just arrived from Los Angeles by plane. His coat was still draped across the back of his chair, his pipe still smoldered in the ashtray on the worktable. All around their two chairs were stacked the residue of four days’ almost continuous research: notebooks, film cans, boxes of photographs, reference books.
She thought about Hiko Ohashi: a strange man. He was fifty and didn’t look a day over thirty. He had grown children. His wife had died of cholera eight years ago. Francine wondered what it would be like married to an Oriental, and she found herself thinking that he wasn’t really Oriental with his Princeton education and Occidental ways. Then she realized that this attitude was a kind of white snobbery.
The door in the corner of the room opened softly. Ohashi came in, closed the door. “You awake?” he whispered.
She turned her head without lifting it from the chairback. “Yes.”
“I’d hoped you might fall asleep for a bit,” he said. “You looked so tired when I left.”
Francine glanced at her wristwatch. “It’s only three-thirty. What’s the day like?”
“Hot and windy.”
Ohashi busied himself inserting film into the projector at the rear of the room. Presently, he went to his chair, trailing the remote control cable for the projector.
“Ready?” he asked.
Francine reached for the low editing light beside her chair, and turned it on, focusing the narrow beam on a notebook in her lap. “Yes. Go ahead.”
“I feel that we’re making real progress,” said Ohashi. “It’s not clear yet, but the points of identity…”
“They’re exciting,” she said. “Let’s see what this one has to offer.”
Ohashi punched the button on the cable. A heavily robed Arab girl appeared on the screen, slapping a tambourine
. Her hair looked stiff, black and oily. A sooty line of kohl shaded each eye. Her brown dress swayed slightly as she tinkled the tambourine, then slapped it.
The cultured voice of the commentator came through the speaker beside the screen: “This is a young girl of Jebel Tobeyk. She is going to dance some very ancient steps that tell a story of battle. The camera is hidden in a truck, and she is unaware that this dance is being photographed.”
A reed flute joined the tambourine, and a twanging stringed instrument came in behind it. The girl turned slowly on one foot, the other raised with knee bent.
Francine watched in rapt silence. The dancing girl made short staccato hops, the tambourine jerking in front of her.
“It is reminiscent of some of the material on the Norse sagas,” said Ohashi. “Battle with swords. Note the thrust and parry.”
She nodded. “Yes.” The dance stamped onward, then: “Wait! Rerun that last section.”
Ohashi obeyed.
It started with a symbolic trek on camel-back: swaying, undulating. The dancing girl expressed longing for her warrior. How suggestive the motions of her hands along her hips, thought Francine. With a feeling of abrupt shock, she recalled seeing almost the exact gesture from one of the films of the Galactics. “There’s one!” she cried.
“The hands on the hips,” said Ohashi. “I was just about to stop the reel.” He shut off the film, searched through the notebooks around him until he found the correct reference.
“I think it was one of Zak’s films,” said Francine.
“Yes. Here it is.” Ohashi brought up a reel, looked at the scene identifications. He placed the film can on a large stack behind him, restarted the film of Oriental dances.
Three hours and ten minutes later they put the film back in its can.
“How many new comparisons do you make it?” asked Ohashi.
“Five,” she said. “That makes one hundred and six in all!” Francine leafed through her notes. “There was the motion of the hands on the hips. I call that one sensual pleasure.”
Ohashi lighted a pipe, spoke through a cloud of smoke. “The others: How have you labeled them?”
“Well, I’ve just put a note on the motions of one of the Galactics and then the commentator’s remarks from this dance film. Chopping motion of the hand ties to the end of Sobàya’s first dream: ‘Now, I awaken!’ Undulation of the body ties in with swaying of date palms in the desert wind. Stamping of the foot goes with Torak dismounting from his steed. Lifting hands, palms up—that goes with Ali offering his soul to God in prayer before battle.”
“Do you want to see this latest film from the ship?” asked Ohashi. He glanced at his wristwatch. “Or shall we get a bite to eat first?”
She waved a hand distractedly. “The film. I’m not hungry. The film.” She looked up. “I keep feeling that there’s something I should remember … something…” She shook her head.
“Think about it a few minutes,” said Ohashi. “I’m going to send out these other films to be cut and edited according to our selections. And I’ll have some sandwiches sent in while I’m at it.”
Francine rubbed at her forehead. “All right.”
Ohashi gathered up a stack of film cans, left the room. He knocked out his pipe on a “No Smoking” sign beside the door as he left.
“Consonants,” whispered Francine. “The ancient alphabets were almost exclusively made up of consonants. Vowels came later. They were the softeners, the swayers.” She chewed at her lower lip. “Language constricts the ways you can think.” She rubbed at her forehead. “Oh, if I only had Bob’s ability with languages!”
She tapped her fingers on the chair arm. “It has something to do with our emphasis on things rather than on people and the things people do. Every Indo-European language is the same on that score. If only…”
“Talking to yourself?” It was a masculine voice, startling her because she had not heard the door open.
Francine jerked upright, turned towards the door. Dr. Irving Langsmith, chief of the American Division of the Germanic-Root team, stood just inside, closing the door.
“Haven’t seen you for a couple of days,” he said. “We got your note that you were indisposed.” He looked around the room, then at the clutter on the floor beside the chairs.
Francine blushed.
Dr. Langsmith crossed to the chair Ohashi had occupied, sat down. He was a gray-haired runt of a man with a heavily seamed face, small features—a gnome figure with hard eyes. He had the reputation of an organizer and politician with more drive than genius. He pulled a stubby pipe from his pocket, lighted it.
“I probably should have cleared this through channels,” she said. “But I had visions of it getting bogged down in red tape, especially with Hiko … I mean, with another team represented in this project.”
“Quite all right,” said Langsmith. “We knew what you were up to within a couple of hours. Now, we want to know what you’ve discovered. Dr. Ohashi looked pretty excited when he left here a bit ago.”
Her eyes brightened. “I think we’re on to something,” she said. “We’ve compared the Galactics’ movements to known symbolism from primitive dances.”
Dr. Langsmith chuckled. “That’s very interesting, my dear, but surely you…”
“No, really!” she said. “We’ve found one hundred and six points of comparison, almost exact duplication of movements!”
“Dances? Are you trying to tell me that…”
“I know it sounds strange,” she said, “but we…”
“Even if you have found exact points of comparison, that means nothing,” said Langsmith. “These are aliens … from another world. You’ve no right to assume that their language development would follow the same pattern as ours has.”
“But they’re humanoid!” she said. “Don’t you believe that language started as the unconscious shaping of the speech organs to imitate bodily gestures?”
“It’s highly likely,” said Langsmith.
“We can make quite a few pretty safe assumptions about them,” she said. “For one thing, they apparently have a rather high standard of civilization to be able to construct—”
“Let’s not labor the obvious,” interrupted Langsmith, a little impatiently.
Francine studied the team chief a moment, said: “Did you ever hear how Marshal Foch planned his military campaigns?”
Langsmith puffed on his pipe, took it out of his mouth. “Uh … are you suggesting that a military…”
“He wrote out the elements of his problem on a sheet of paper,” said Francine. “At the top of the paper went the lowest common denominator. There, he wrote: ‘Problem—To beat the Germans.’ Quite simple. Quite obvious. But oddly enough ‘beating the enemy’ has frequently been overlooked by commanders who got too involved in complicated maneuvers.”
“Are you suggesting that the Galactics are enemies?”
She shook her head indignantly. “I am not! I’m suggesting that language is primarily an instinctive social reflex. The least common denominator of a social problem is a human being. One single human being. And here we are all involved with getting this thing into mathematical equations and neat word frequency primarily oral!”
“But you’ve been researching a visual…”
“Yes! But only as it modifies the sounds.” She leaned towards Langsmith. “Dr. Langsmith, I believe that this language is a flexional language with the flexional endings and root changes contained entirely in the bodily movements.”
“Hmmmmmmm.” Langsmith studied the smoke spiraling ceilingwards from his pipe. “Fascinating idea!”
“We can assume that this is a highly standardized language,” said Francine. “Basing the assumption on their high standard of civilization. The two usually go hand in hand.”
Langsmith nodded.
“Then the gestures, the sounds would tend to be ritual,” she said.
“Mmmmm-hmmmm.”
“Then … may we have the help to go into this ide
a the way it deserves?” she asked.
“I’ll take it up at the next top staff meeting,” said Langsmith. He got to his feet. “Don’t get your hopes up. This’ll have to be submitted to the electronic computers. It probably has been cross-checked and rejected in some other problem.”
She looked up at him, dismayed. “But … Dr. Langsmith … a computer’s no better than what’s put into it. I’m certain that we’re stepping out into a region here where we’ll have to build up a whole new approach to language.”
“Now, don’t you worry,” said Langsmith. He frowned. “No … don’t worry about this.”
“Shall we go ahead with what we’re doing then?” she asked. “I mean—do we have permission to?”
“Yes, yes … or course.” Langsmith wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “General Speidel has called a special meeting tomorrow morning. I’d like to have you attend. I’ll send somebody to pick you up.” He waved a hand at the litter around Francine. “Carry on, now.” There was a pathetic emptiness to the way he put his pipe in his mouth and left the room. Francine stared at the closed door.
She felt herself trembling, and recognized that she was deathly afraid. Why? she asked herself. What have I sensed to make me afraid?
Presently, Ohashi came in carrying a paper bag.
“Saw Langsmith going out,” he said. “What did he want?”
“He wanted to know what we’re doing.”
Ohashi paused before his chair. “Did you tell him?”
“Yes. I asked for help.” She shook her head. “He wouldn’t commit himself.”
“I brought ham sandwiches,” said Ohashi.
Francine’s chin lifted abruptly. “Defeated!” she said. “That’s it! He acted completed defeated!”
“What?”
“I’ve been trying to puzzle through the strange way Langsmith was acting. He just radiated defeat.”
Ohashi handed her a sandwich. “Better brace yourself for a shock,” he said. “I ran into Tsu Ong, liaison officer for our delegation … in the cafeteria.” The Japanese raised the sandwich sack over his chair, dropped it into the seat with a curious air of preciseness. “The Russians are pressing for a combined attack on the Galactic ship to wrest their secret from them by force.”
The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert Page 43
