the Dark Light Years (17 page)

At least a chuckle of agreement might be inserted there.

Gleet continued his discourse, but the chime of a watch bell reminded him of the reason for his coming up to the Scanning Deck, and he moved away in the direction of the Navigation Bay. Lattimore turned to one of the deep oval ports, and gazed out through the hull of the ship while he listened to the comments of a group of three men behind him.

" 'Contribution to the future of mankind!' That I like!" one of them exclaimed, reading from the announcement.

"Yes, but you notice that after that appeal to your better nature, they cover themselves by offering you a pension for life," said one of his companions.

"It would have to be higher stakes than that to get me to maroon myself on an alien planet for five years," the third said.

"I'd chip in too, just to get rid of you," said the first Lattimore nodded to his ghostly reflection as the ancient form of badinage by insult ran its predictable course.
He often wondered at that accepted method of verbal assault which passed for wit; no doubt it was a way of sublimating a man's hatred for his fellows; what else could it be?
He was not at all perturbed at the comments passed on Mrs. Warhoon's notice; frigid she might be, but he thought she had a good idea there; because there were many varieties of men, her notice would eventually bear fruit.

He stared at the universe which the Gansas, in a
Buzzardian
way, was currently surrounding. Against a uterine blackness stood a number of close and fuzzy bars of light. It was like a drunken fly's close-up view of a comb, lacking definition and forming an affront to the optic nerve.

But, as the scientists pointed out, the human optic nerve was not adjusted to reality.
Because the true nature of the universe could only be glimpsed through the transponential equations, it followed that this fuzzy grill (which made one feel, come to think of it, like a minor crustacean with the baleen of a blue whale grinning down at one) was what the stars "really" looked like. Plato, reflected Lattimore, thou shouldst be living at this hour!
He swung away and contrived to turn his thoughts similarly away towards the thought of food.

Say what you liked, there was nothing like a good
synthetic
stew for calling armistice between a man and his universe.

"But, Mihaly," Enid Ainson was saying, "Mihaly, for years - since Bruce first introduced me to you, I've thought you were secretly attracted to me. I mean the way you looked at me. And when you consented to be Aylmer's godfather - I mean you've always led me to think. ..." She pressed her hands together. "And you were only amusing yourself....”

He was drawn up very formally, a cliff against the tide "of her pathos.

"Perhaps I have a naturally chivalrous attitude to ladies, Enid, but you have read too much into it. What can I do but thank you deeply for your flattering suggestion, but really....”

Suddenly she jerked her head up. She had eaten enough at the apple of humiliation; it was time to let anger have its turn. Imperiously she gestured at him.

"You need say no more. I will tell you only that the thought of you and your imagined fondness - how often I foolishly imagined that it was only your friendship with Bruce that kept you from making advances towards me! -your hollow fondness has been the only factor keeping me sane over these last few impossible years.”

"Come, I am certain you exaggerate -”

"I am talking! I see now that all your airs and graces, all this
phony
Hungarian glamour you put on, they ah* mean nothing. You are just a false front, Mihaly, a romantic who dislikes romances, a - a ladies' man who is afraid of ladies. Good-bye to you, Mihaly, and damn you! Through you I have lost both my husband and my son.”

The door slammed behind her.

They had been talking in the hall. Mihaly put his hands up to his burning cheeks. He was shaking. He averted his eyes from the sight of himself in the mirror.

The terrible thing was, that without having the least interest in Enid physically, he had admired her spirit and, knowing what a difficult man Bruce was behind the scenes, he had indeed encouraged her with warm glances and occasional pressures of the hand - purely to illustrate to her that someone was capable of seeing her virtues. Ah, beware, indeed beware of pity!

"Darling, has she gone?”

He heard the tiny summoning voice of his mistress from the living room. Doubtless she would have eavesdropped on the scene with Enid. Without eagerness, he went to hear what she had to say about it all. There was no doubt that the charming Ah Chi, after her painting holiday in the Persian Gulf or wherever she had been, would be horribly inquisitive over the whole incident.

It was only a watch after Bryant Lattimore had felt like a minor crustacean that Mrs. Warhoon got a
volunteer
. The discovery sent her in a flutter into the heart of the molybdenum crystal belt. Lattimore quickly took the chance to seize her by her fleshy upper arms.

"Steady now, Hilary! I hate to see a pretty
cosmoclectician
in a tizzy. So you wanted a volunteer, so you've got him; now go ahead and give him the pitch.”

Mrs. Warhoon freed herself, though not without getting appetizingly disarranged. What strong brutes men were! Heaven alone knew what this one would be like when he got metaphorically east of Suez at next planetfall. Well, at least a woman had her own
defenses
: she could always give in.

"This volunteer is rather special, Mr. Lattimore. Does the name Samuel Melmoth mean anything to you?”

"Not a thing. No, wait! Ye gods and little fishes! It's Ainson's son! You mean he's volunteered?”

"He has managed to make himself rather unpopular down on the messdeck, and in consequence feels rather anti-social. A friend of his called Quilter gave him a black eye.'1 "Quilter again, eh? Likely leader material there; I must speak to the captain about him.”

"I’d like you to come and stand by me while I brief this young Ainson, if you aren't too busy.”

"Hilary, I'd stand by you at any time.”

The Ur-Organic style (like all art movement labels, the name was inaccurate to the point of meaninglessness) had perpetrated a nasty whimsy in Mrs. Warhoon's office. She and Lattimore stepped into a popinjay's heart. Under a magnification of 200,000, the fibrous tissue ran and knotted in bas-relief over ceiling and floor as well as walls.
In the middle of it, lonely, green about one eye, sat Aylmer Ainson, his head indistinct against a galaxy of striated aortal muscle.
He stood when Mrs. Warhoon and Lattimore entered.

Poor little devil, thought Lattimore. The lady here is somewhat up a gum tree in concluding that it was any-thing so simple as a black eye that led this boy to want to maroon himself on a strange planet. His whole history -and his parents' history, and so their parents' history, and so back to those first deluded dimwits who decided that animal life wasn't good enough for them - everything has led to this act of his; the black eye was just a clincher. And who would say, who could be a fly-sized god and see it all, that the clincher was accidental? Maybe the poor kid had to provoke the assault to reassure himself that the outside world was the aggressor.

Somewhere, Lattimore thought (but with as much complacency as trepidation, as he realized) my upbringing took the wrong turning, or I would not diagnose so much meaning from the hangdog-proud way this kiddie stood up for us.

"
Sit down, Mr. Melmoth," Mrs. Warhoon said, in a pleasant voice Lattimore found unpleasant. "This is the Flight Advisor, Mr. Lattimore. He knows as well as any-one the communication problems you will be up against, and can give you pointers on the subject.”

"How do you do, sir," young Ainson said, smiling round his puffy eye.

"
Firstly, the larger programme," said Mrs. Warhoon, and chose a military phrase with winsome self-consciousness, "just to put you in the picture, as they say. When we come out of TP flight, we shall be in a star cluster that contains at least fifteen planets, of which six, to judge by a remote technivisual survey conducted by the Mariestopes, have Earth-type atmospheres.
Our aliens, as you know, were found beside a space vehicle - whether it belonged to them or to an allied species, we hope to deter-mine soon. But its suggests that we may find space flight established in this cluster. In that case we shall need to survey all inhabited planets. It was planned before we left Earth that on the first such planet we should deposit an unmanned observation post. Since then, however, I have had a further idea, which Captain Pestalozzi has agreed to let me carry out.

"
My idea is simply to leave a volunteer with the observation post Since we could furnish him with provisions and food synthesizers, and the natives, as we know by our captive specimens, will not be hostile, such a volunteer would be quite secure from danger.
As we now see, you have consented to be that volunteer.”

Safe in the blown-up popinjay heart, they all smiled at each other.

But does he detect, Lattimore asked himself, the lie in Mrs. Warhoon's words? Who knows yet what hells these rhinomen may create on their home ground, who knows if there isn't some man-devouring form of fanner who uses the rhinomen as greedily as we use the Improved Danish Landrace pig? And of course the old Lattimoronic
question
, who knows what hells this latter day Saint Anthony will create for himself in his alien wilderness? That ill wind cannot be sheltered from, but the others can.

"And, naturally, we will see you are well-armed," he said, aware by Mrs. Warhoon's glance that she saw the remark as a minor betrayal.

Compressing her lips, she turned back to Ainson.

"Now to what we expect you to do. We expect you to learn to communicate with the aliens.”

"But the experts couldn't do that on Earth. How do you expect me -”

"We shall train you, Mr. Melmoth. There are nine whole ship's days before we break out of TP, and much can be learnt in that time. On Earth, it may have been that an impossible task was attempted; on the aliens' home planet, when we can see them in their own context, the task will be much lighter. Indeed, the aliens should be very much more communicative in their own environment. We think that probably the wonders of Earth, the size of our starships, and so on, may have partly
paralyzed
their responses.

"As you may know, we had six alien bodies on which thorough dissections were performed. Our specimens were of different ages, some young, some old. From analysis of their bone tissue, we think they may attain ages of some hundreds of years; their insusceptibility to pain tends to support this theory.

If this is so, then it should follow that they would have protracted childhoods.

"Now I get to my next point. The learning time of any species is in its early days, its babydays, and wherever we go in the galaxy we can expect to find the same rule applying. Children on Earth who through some
misadventure
learn no language are at twelve or thirteen too old to learn one. This has been proved many times with babies, for instance, in India, who have been tended by monkeys or wolves. Once the time of childhood is past, they are past acquiring the gift of speech.

"So I have reasoned, Mr. Melmoth, that the only time that the aliens might be able to learn our tongue would be during their early years. It will be your job to live as close as you possibly can to one such infant alien.

"It may be - we don't deny it - that it will prove
impossible
to communicate with these creatures. But the proof must be conclusive. After we have left you, we shall go to investigate the other planets in the cluster; no doubt we shall capture a group of the aliens and take them back to Earth, or even establish a base on one of the other planets, but that will have to wait on local conditions. Meanwhile, you will be my Number One project.”

For a moment, Aylmer said nothing. He was thinking, in fact, about the winds of chance, and how wildly they blew. Only a brief while ago he was so stickily involved in the web of personal relationships formed by his father, his mother, his girl, and, to a lesser degree, his uncle Mihaly. Now that he was miraculously free, there was one question in particular he wanted to ask: "How long will you be leaving me on this planet?”

"Well, it will be for no longer than a year, that I promise," Mrs. Warhoon told him, and was relieved to see his frown dissolve. They all smiled at each other again, though both men looked ill at ease.

"How does all that sound to you?" Mrs. Warhoon asked Aylmer Ainson sympathetically.

For heck sake tell her that you realize you have stuck your neck out too far to stomach, thought Lattimore, toying with a metaphor he had mixed some days earlier.
Tell her that you can't afford to pay such a high price for the catharsis you need. Or look at me for assistance and I'll put in a word for you.

The boy did look at Lattimore, but there were pride and excitement rather than appeal in the glance.

Okay, Lattimore thought, so my diagnosis was a complete cock-up.
So he's a hero rather than a couch case. A man is his own responsibility.