Slave Ship (19 page)

But it was, all the same. So I found out—more than a week later, when they dared take the needles out; when they had stopped enough of the pain and patched enough of the ruin around my head and neck, and began to think I might yet live—the only man in all the world who had survived not a single attack of whatever-it-was, but two.

And Elsie was there.

We didn't talk for a while; and then we talked. The war was over; I had after all got through, and so had Nina—before she died. It was good that we both made it, for they would scarcely have believed one. But you do not lie through ESP, and two of us could hardly be mistaken.

So they had stopped the bombs, and the satellites hung silent in the sky. And the Caodais and we had begun to compare notes and to look for answers. Volunteers had offered themselves as sacrifice—some had died, sitting in darkened rooms with opened photographic shutters waiting to catch the track of whatever came flashing in as they esped; a few coughing their lungs out in improvised cloud chambers; a great many were surrounded by infinite varieties of scientific equipment that tasted and measured and felt.

After a day I was well enough to walk about. The grafts from the skin bank were healing, and the damage to the nervous system was slight. And I had a visitor. I was in a naval hospital outside of what had been New Washington, and there Nguyen had flown to sign the Bethesda Compact. And he came to see me and to say, "Thank you."

That was the greatest shock of all. "For what?" I demanded.

Nguyen laughed silently. "We are in your debt, my Lieutenant," he said. "We have learned to get along together, the Caodai and the West, and that is good. And even more, through your work with the dogs and monkeys and seals, we have learned to get along with our animals. And only just in time, my Lieutenant. Only just in time."

He was in earnest. "In time for what?" I asked.

He said: "What you call the Glotch. It wasn't our weapon or yours. In fact, you see, it was not a weapon at all. Today the news is made: It is life."

I stared. "
Life
?"

He nodded heavily. "Living things. Telepathic. Tiny. Below the threshold of visibility. They seek to communicate when they sense the subtle esper flow; and because their structure and ours cannot exist together—they die. And perhaps that could be borne, but we die too. As you know."

"Life!" I breathed. "How on earth—"

"Ah, no!" he cried. "Not on earth at all. Mars? I don't know—but not on earth, that is sure. And that is why we were only just in time. For now that we have learned to get along with each other—we start, this second, to learn to get along with Them. They have been attracted from outside, the scientists think, by our esping and our bombs. I doubt they will ever leave us alone again."

"Mars!" I breathed. It was fantastic.

And also, of course, wrong—but how thoroughly wrong we did not discover for some months after, until Venus once more swam into close approach to the earth.

But that's another story.

A NOTE ABOUT THIS BOOK

IT IS NOT the business of a science-fiction writer to record matters of contemporary fact or scientific truths which have already been discovered. It is his business to take what is already known and, by extrapolating from it, draw as plausibly detailed a portrait as he can manage of what tomorrow's scientists may learn . . . and of what the human race in its day-to-day life may make of it all.

Since not all of
Slave
Ship
'
s
scientific elements are "extrapolations," it seems worthwhile to set down a rough guide to which is which. To the best of the author's knowledge, no human being since Dr. Doolittle has been able to conduct a conversation on any abstract subject with any creature or thing other than another human being. However, animal languages do exist—not merely among the geniuses of the animal kingdom such as primates and dogs, but as far down among the phyla as one cares to go. The question, of course, turns upon the definition of the term "language." Bees have been clearly demonstrated to communicate with sets of signals, for example, If one allows only a "spoken" language, we turn to the frog, perhaps the lowest animal to have a voice at all: A species of frog from Santo Domingo owns at least one "word," a sort of pig-squeal alarm cry utterly different from its normal barking sound.

Progressing to higher orders, Dr. Konrad V. Lorenz is perfectly able to communicate, on such matters as would interest them, with jackdaws, with mallards and with greylag geese, among others. His command of the Jackdaw language, for example, includes such subtleties as the two forms of the verb "to fly"—
Kia
, to fly away;
Kiaw
, to fly back home. Other persons, working with other birds, have achieved successes of their own. Ernest Thompson Seton recorded a long list of "words" in Crow; a scientist prepared a seven word "dictionary" of Rooster; etc.

When we come to the mammals, we might expect to find considerable increases both in the number of "words" and in the sophistication with which they are used. We will not be disappointed. It is hard to imagine a man who has lived for any length of time in intimate contact with a dog, for instance, who will deny that his dog has sought communication with him and sometimes attained it. It is true that domesticated animals (particularly when they are so thoroughly domesticated as the dog) are a special case—it is as though an American child were brought up in Babylon; he would undoubtedly learn to communicate, but it would be in Babylonian terms and not in the language he had been born to. It is worth observing that at least one dog—his name was Fellow, and he was an honored guest at Columbia University in New York—had a vocabulary in English of
four
hundred
words, which he recognized regardless of who spoke them. But we must strike Dog from our list as, at best, a sort of
beche-la-mer
or pidgin, thoroughly contaminated with Human.

Cat might be purer—and some fifteen words of Cat have been identified, along with some six words of Horse and a few each of Elephant and Pig. But the linguists of the animal kingdom, at least in their own and native tongues, are the primates. The gibbon, the gorilla and the orangutan have notable vocabularies; and the chimpanzee, best studied of primates short of man, not only has a vocabulary of some thirty-two distinct words, according to Blanche Learned, but may have a unique claim to linguistic fame. A philologist named George Schwidetzky believes he has found traces of Chimpanzee loan-words in ancient Chinese ("ngak"), in a South African Bushman dialect (a tongue click), and even in modern German! (The German word, "geck," derived from Chimpanzee "gack.")

One definition of Man calls him "the tool-using animal"—yet elephants crop tree branches to swat flies, spider monkeys construct vine ladders for their young, and there is some plausible evidence that the polar bear hunts sleeping walruses with the aid of that primitive tool, the missile, in the form of a hurled chunk of ice. Another definition identifies. Man as "the linguistic animal"—but even the few remarks above will indicate that that claim is far less than unique.

Perhaps there is room for a third definition of Man, not much better than the other two, but very likely not much worse: Man, the snobbish animal . . . who clings to evolution's ladder one rung higher than the brutes beneath and saws away, saws away at the ladder beneath in an attempt to sever the connection between himself and the soulless, speechless, brainless Beast . . . that does not, in fact, exist.