Native Tongue (31 page)

“Dolbe, you are clean out of your pitiful mind,” said Lanky Pugh. “And I believe I speak for all of us when I say that. Clear out of your pitiful mind and flying off into the never-nevers. You need total rewiring, Dolbe.”

“No, I don’t,” Dolbe insisted. “No.
You’re
wrong; I’m right.”

“Well, then, kindly explain to us in what way it ‘worked,’ Dolbe! We didn’t learn one effing thing about Beta-2. And look what happened to those tubies!”

“Precisely.”

“Oh for sweet Jesus SAKES!” Showard bellowed.

“No, wait a minute,” said Dolbe. “Try to control yourselves, and listen to what I have to say. It is true—we didn’t make any progress with the acquisition of Beta-2. But—and this is very, very important—we did make progress with the project itself, as
project. You don’t seem to remember, men—but those babies did
not
die. They did
not
go mad. They did
not
suffer. Nothing happened to them.”

“Naw. Except that we destroyed their minds.”

“Oh Showard, you’re worse than a woman with your damn sickening sentimentality! There is no reason whatsoever to believe that we destroyed their minds, or harmed their minds, or in any way interfered with their minds in a negative sense. None! You’ve seen their tests; their minds are perfectly normal.”

“Yeah? Then how come they don’t communicate, Dolbe? With their perfectly normal minds.”

“We don’t know that.”

“I thought the Lingoe explained it,” said Lanky. “I didn’t understand one damn thing he said, but I thought the rest of you did.”

“Never mind that,” said Dolbe impatiently. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t claim that the results of the experiments were perfect—only that they did, at last, show progress. Positive advancement. For the very first time, since the beginning of this project! Now I am not for one minute willing to just let that go down the drain here, no siree. I intend to
build
upon that progress—and I must say that it astonishes me that you men are not solidly behind me.”

“Dolbe, you’re such a shit,” said Brooks.

“Thank you. I’m very fond of you, too, I’m sure.”

Beau St. Clair glared at both of them and told them to for chrissakes cut it out, they had enough trouble.

“Let me see if I understand what you’re suggesting,” he said to Dolbe. “You want us to take the new volunteer infant that came in last night, right? And start it on the drugs we wiped out the tubies with? And then you want us to Interface it, whatever it turns into. Is that right, Dolbe?”

“I wouldn’t have added all the embellishments, Beau, but you have the general idea.”

“Aw, hell, Dolbe,” Beau moaned, wholly miserable, “you know what’s going to happen if we do that!”

“I don’t know anything of the kind,” Dolbe objected. “And neither do you. We have absolutely no way of knowing what will happen if that experiment is carried out with a normal human infant rather than a test-tube baby. And it was my understanding—in fact, I have referred to my notes on the meeting at which we discussed this originally, and my understanding is entirely accurate—it was my own understanding that the whole point of beginning with the tubies was so that when
we once again had a volunteered womb-infant we would have had sufficient experience with the hallucinogens to be reasonably certain of what we were doing.”

“He’s right,” said Lanky. “I hate to admit it, but he’s right. That
was
the idea.”

“Yeah, but that was before we saw what happened to the tubies!”

“By god, Showard, you’re going to make me angry if you keep on like that!” Dolbe declared. “I tell you
nothing
happened to the tubies. You can go over to the orphanage any time and see them—they’re doing just fine.”

“Are they communicating?”

“They’re eating. They’re sleeping. They’re healthy. They’re up walking around, playing.”

“Playing?”

“Well . . . doing things. They’re not hurt.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Be that as it may, Showard, it’s time to get on with this! We’ve got a healthy infant, a normal ordinary born-of-woman infant, and it’s only two weeks old. The mother died in a flyer accident, and the father’s young; he doesn’t want to be saddled with the kid and was glad to have us take it off his hands . . . he had plenty of places to put the ten thousand credits, like they always do. It’s an ideal situation,
if
we move on it; there hasn’t been time for the child’s perceptions to even thicken up, so to speak, much less harden. And I want to get right to it.”

“Great,” said Beau. “Just great.”

“I appreciate your enthusiasm, Beau.”

Dolbe looked down at a sheet of paper in front of him, his lips moving as he read it over, and then he looked at them again.

“I’ve spoken to the pediatricians,” he said. “We’ve discussed each of the previous experimental subjects. And we are agreed that the most satisfactory regime of drugs is the one used with #23—we’ll follow that one with the volunteer infant.”

“In what way was that the most satisfactory?” asked Beau curiously. “How the hell did they decide that? They all turned out the same way.”

Dolbe refused to discuss it, saying that it was irrelevant, and Brooks Showard declared that that had to mean they’d closed their eyes and stuck a number with a pin, and Dolbe sighed deeply. Sonorously. A good and weary man, overburdened by his incompetent subordinates.

“Gentlemen,” he said tightly, “whatever your personal feelings on this matter are, we have work to do. And we are keeping
the government waiting. I’ve already notified the lab, and the drugs are on their way—we’ll begin this afternoon.”

“What the devil’s the hurry, Dolbe?” Showard demanded. “I’d rather get drunk this afternoon, and start in the morning.”

“Sorry, Showard. We don’t know what the critical point is, and we aren’t going to take any chances. We’re very lucky to get a volunteer this young; let’s not waste any time. In fact, if you hadn’t been drunk last
night
, we would have started then.”

“You really think this is worth a try?” asked Lanky Pugh. Lanky didn’t care anything about babies or tubies either one, but he had a low tolerance for failure when he was involved in a project. Lanky was accustomed to clearing up other people’s failures, not making messes of his own. He was awfully tired of this whole damned thing.

“We know,” Dolbe said solemnly, clasping his hands in front of him, “that there is some crucial difference between the brain of the normal infant and the brain of the test-tube infant. It isn’t possible for us to determine exactly what that difference is, in physiological or neurological or even psychological terms—but the scientists are all in agreement that there
is
a difference and they are working to identify it. There is certainly the possibility that whatever it is, it has something to do with the language acquisition mechanism in the human child. That is, it may be
precisely
the difference that we need. And we will never find out unless we try.”

“Okay,” said Lanky. “You’re the boss.”

“Thank you, Pugh,” said Arnold Dolbe. “It’s a pleasure to know that somebody in this room remembers that.”

None of them, not in their wildest dreams, not in the depths of their most alcoholic delusions, had anticipated what did happen. They thought they had seen everything, but they were quite wrong.

The baby tolerated the regime of hallucinogens without incident. No side effects, no allergic reactions; it seemed perfectly contented. (It
still
seemed perfectly contented, for that matter, even now.) They had put it through the regime, patiently spending the full four weeks the doctors insisted on.

And then, in suspense once again in spite of themselves, they put it carefully into the Interface with the flickering (?) thing they called Beta-2.

And the flickering thing went mad this time. At least they assumed that must have been what happened. Showers of sparks (?) flew from one end of its half of the Interface to the other. The
air in the Interface took on a moiré pattern that none of them could look at. There were vibrations . . . not noises precisely but vibrations . . . thudding (?) around them. Things quivered and split off and flowed and flapped wildly. . . .

When it was over, not nearly quickly enough, the Alien was quite dead. So far as they, or the scientists, could tell. Which was just as well, since no one would have dared turn it loose and return it to where it had come from if it had survived. And there was only PanSig available for explaining to the rest of the Beta-2’s, back at the old plantation or whatever they lived on, what had happened to their dearly beloved departed.

Arnold Dolbe bitterly resented the fact that Thomas Chornyak had refused to take on the job of making that explanation, or even delegating it to some other member of the Lines. It seemed to Dolbe that that was inexcusable.

“Absolutely not,” the linguist had said. “You made this mess. We keep telling you, and you won’t listen, and so you keep making messes. You clean it up.”

“But we are not
good
at PanSig!”

“Nobody is good at PanSig,” snorted Thomas. “It’s not something that it’s possible to be good at. It’s a system of very crude and primitive signals for emergencies . . . and I suppose this is one of those. Jesus, what a mess.”

At such moments Dolbe wished he had followed the Pentagon’s advice and continued to let their “John Smith” types act as liaison between Government Work and Chornyak, instead of insisting that he be allowed to observe the project directly and talk with him and with the technicians without intermediary. He had hoped things would go better if they eliminated the middlemen. He had been wrong.

“Mr. Dolbe,” said the linguist, “you have scores of staffers from D.A.T. who are trained in PanSig. Find somebody with guts and let him get on with this. Putting it off won’t help matters . . . for all you know, that Alien was part of some kind of collective animal, or was completely telepathic. The rest of the Beta-2’s may already know that it’s dead.”

“We know that.”

“And you’re scared. That’s why you called me.”

“We called you because you’re an expert on such matters,” Dolbe replied with the stiffest of upper lips. “We aren’t scared.”

“Then you’re bigger fools than I thought,” said Thomas, walking out on them. “I’d be scared shitless in your place.”

Definitely, thought Dolbe, he should have let the old system
stand. Then it would have been one of the John Smiths who had to be humiliated like that, and not him.

And then the linguist had stuck his head back in the door and said, “Dolbe, I’ll make you the same offer I made last time. I’ll take that baby off your hands.”

“That won’t be necessary,” Dolbe whispered.

“No? Doesn’t it appear to be in the same condition the other eleven children were?”

“So far as we know.”

“Then let me have it—we might be able to help it.”

“It will go to the orphanage, as did the others,” Dolbe said, fighting to keep each word coming, something about the linguist’s face making him long to crawl on the floor on his belly and beg for mercy, “and it will receive the very finest care. You may be sure of that. You can’t have it.”

Chornyak had given him a look that Dolbe would remember forever; but he had not said another word, and that was the last they’d seen of him.

And now Dolbe was packing. He had never expected this, never thought the day would come when he’d have to pack his things and move out of this office. His
office
. His
lab
. His
project!
It tore him apart. It twisted him, right in the guts.

The orders from the Pentagon had been very unlike the usual government messages—you could understand this set without the slightest trouble. They said: TERMINATE PROJECT. Just that. No explanation. No account of what had happened when the D.A.T. staffer told the other Beta-2’s about the accident, in PanSig. No remarks of any kind. Just TERMINATE PROJECT. And their new division assignments, in a postscript.

It wasn’t fair. True, everything they’d done so far had failed. But they had
learned
things! What had happened to the idea of knowledge for the sake of knowledge? Truth for the sake of truth? They’d done a damn good job, considering the magnitude of the task and what they’d had to work with.

The other men had only laughed when he told them. Laughed! And Showard, curse him, had said, “How come new assignments, Dolbe?”

“Well, of course, we’d get new assignments.”

“I don’t see why,” Showard drawled. “Remember? It was crack Beta-2 or the world would end. Remember? The General himself told us so, him and his spaghetti and his blinding white
teeth and his cute little soldier suit. If the world is about to end, I’d rather get drunk. How about you, Beau? Lanky? Wouldn’t you rather get drunk?”

The only consolation in this move, thought Dolbe, who had never had even a fleeting interest in frontier colonies and wasn’t looking forward to living on the one they’d picked to transfer him to, was that he’d never have to see Showard or St. Clair or Lanky Pugh again. The Pentagon had scattered the four of them as widely as they could possibly be scattered, and Dolbe found it almost unbearable that Lanky Pugh was being allowed to stay here on Earth. New Zealand might not be Washington, or Paris, but at least it was civilized. So Pugh had a certain touch with computers . . . it was still unjust.