The Judas Rose (34 page)

There was a muggy silence, with the eggdomes scowling and fidgeting and looking disgusted, but the other men present were used to that, and not bothered by it. One characteristic found in ninety-nine of one hundred eggdomes was an absolute inability to stay silent for more than about sixty seconds if their scientific field was the subject of discussion. The three in Room 09-A did not fall into the exceptional one percent; they all erupted into confused protest simultaneously.

“
Please
, gentlemen!”

The general's voice was the standard military voice of high rank, and it shut the eggdomes up again. In the hush, he said, “One at a
time
, if you don't mind! I want your answers, one at a time, and I want them right now!”

He got them; in sequence, tight-lipped.

“There is no logical reason to believe that the Aliens either are or are not whales.”

“There is no way to determine at this time whether they are or are not whales.”

“We have no evidence, nor have we any basis for conjecture, as to whether they are or are not whales.”

The general snorted and admonished them not to try that crap with him. “It walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck, that's reason to believe that it
is
a duck!” he said emphatically.

“An
Earth
duck!” pleaded Bydore. “Only an Earth duck, General. If two creatures of a single planet strongly resemble each other physically, then
maybe
there is a relationship. But stop and think, General. Just for a moment. Think about the Emperor penguin—it resembles,
very
strongly, a small portly human male in evening clothes.”

The General suspected that he was being made fun of; his brows locked over the jut of his nose, and his next question came snapping out, ratatat. “And how, precisely, would you proceed to find out if the penguin was in fact a new variety of human male, of small size? If you didn't already know, that is?”

“You'd do tests,” said the eggdome reluctantly, seeing where they were headed.

“You couldn't just conclude, because the penguin has webbed feet and is three feet tall, and the human being has unwebbed feet and is much bigger, that they are different species?”

“No.”

“Then,” the general summed up, “you cannot just conclude—because the Aliens have shells and the Terran whales don't have shells—that they are different species. Using the term
species
loosely, of course.”

“General—”

“No further discussion is required,” the general announced. He stood up, put both hands behind his back, and shifted to parade rest. “The department has decided to test this physical resemblance and is sending the necessary animals. We
will
proceed with the tests. When and if we have evidence that the AIRYs are not whales, we'll stop the tests. You
will
direct your attention, as Paul White has requested, to the simple question of whether we have all the necessary equipment, supplies, and personnel.”

“
But, General—
”

If the general had given Paul any opening at all, he would have found a way to let the eggdomes talk; he could tell that
something else was wrong. If it had been only the scientific question of whales-or-not-whales, they would have stated their objections, heard them called garbage by the nonscientists, and retired into dignified contemptuous silence. They wouldn't be going “But, General,” the way they were doing now. They wouldn't have stooped to bicker with nonscientists. But General Charing had been annoyed, he'd felt that his authority was being challenged and his competency ridiculed, and he wasn't going to stand for it; he'd made his speech and he intended to entertain no rebuttals. Paul noted the strategic error, and would include it in his report when he got back to D.A.T., but he stayed out of it now. He was the messenger here, no more; it was not his place to get involved in inhouse politics at the project.

“Well?” demanded the general. “Has anything been overlooked, or not?”

“Probably not,” Professor Bydore answered icily. “We won't be able to determine that until we've put this absurd project into operation. And I want it a matter of record that we're opposed to it.”

“Noted.” The general's intonation carried the same weight of ice. “I will then direct Mr. White to report that all appears adequate, and to indicate that if there turn out to be missing items the department will be promptly so advised.” He looked at Paul, then, and asked, “When should we expect the animals to arrive?”

“Failing a specific order to the contrary,” Paul told him, “within the next two hours. Perhaps you might want to get started making preparations.”

The general abandoned parade rest and assumed some version of alert for action. “Certainly,” he agreed. “At once. Gentlemen?” And then he was gone, presumably off to find the Cetacean Head Keeper, or whatever it was he had on tap of that kind. He did not bother trying to disguise the eagerness with which he was leaving.

When they were alone, Paul White leaned forward with his elbows on the table, and spoke very gravely and carefully. “All right, Professors. What's the real problem here?”

“I should think it would be obvious,” said Bydore.

“No, Professor, it's not a bit obvious. But I'm willing to be told.”

“At least you could see that there
was
a problem—unlike our military friend.”

“The general is trained to command soldiers, chimps, and
military robots; the commanding of scientists was not part of his curriculum at the Academy. Be reasonable. How good do you think you three would be at coordinating a laser attack?”

“Then what the bloody hell is he
doing
here?”

“All operations at this level having military implications or national security implications
must
be administered by individuals with high military rank and the necessary security clearances,” Paul recited, straight from the manual with very few modifications.

“It makes no sense.”

“Not scientifically, perhaps. Administratively, it makes excellent sense. Now please, instead of attempting to reform the Department of Analysis & Translation, tell me what it is that is so obvious and let me get on back to Washington. I may even be able to do something useful.”

The eggdome nodded slowly. “All right,” he said. “
This
is what is obvious. The human beings of Earth, as of this date, are not capable of communicating with the cetaceans of Earth. Suppose the Aliens that the military is pleased to assume are whales—no matter what they really are—do interact with the animals you're sending, in such a fashion that the end result is a Terran whale that has acquired an Alien language. So what?”

“So,” said Paul, “then we have to Interface some human babies with that whale, so that we can get access to the new language. An extra step, that's all.”

“Mr. White—that's what we've been trying to do here for decades.”

“What?”

“What do you think is going
on
up on the first floor of this installation, damn it?”

The eggdome was actually bellowing at him. Paul felt a vague alarm; eggdomes bellow at one another, but they do not bellow at the ignorant layman. It seemed improper, and undignified, to Paul.

“First floor?” he echoed, playing for time. What had he missed on the first floor?

“That's an
Interface
up there, man, with a couple of whales on one side and a human infant on the other. For god's sake!”

“But that's just for show, Professor,” Paul stammered. “I mean, it's just a cover for the real work done here. It's not—”

“
Listen
, White!” Professor Bydore slammed both hands on the table, and Paul stopped talking, astonished. “That is a
real
Interface! It contains
real
whales, and
real
babies! And that is all there is in
any
Interfacing!”

“Now, Professor—” Paul began, but the man only threw up his hands, shouted that he gave up, and implored heaven to be his witness that the level of stupidity he faced was more than any human being should be expected to tolerate in one lifetime. Paul was astounded; he'd heard plenty of jokes about eggdome tantrums, he even had a few in his own repertoire, but this was the first time in his life that he'd actually
seen
such a display. In his personal experience the academics and scientists were slow-moving lethargic creatures given to grunts and mumbling; he'd had no idea that one could behave with so much passion.

The computer whiz put in an oar, then; whether out of sympathy for Paul, or some personal motive, nobody would ever know. He had all the dates and names and places right on the tip of his tongue. It was an impressive performance, making Paul wonder obscenely about Interfacing humans and computers. The end result was not ambiguous—many experiments had been tried with human/whale Interfacing, and every last one had failed.

“Why?” Paul asked. “Do they know why? Some of those were done a long time ago—don't we know a lot more about it now?”

“Mr. White,” said another of the professors, “we don't know one thing more about Interfacing than we knew by the end of the first year that it was done. That's how long it took to find out everything we know. Oh, we know more about the engineering—it doesn't take us as long to get the right mix for the atmosphere the Alien breathes, we have better barriers between the Alien's quarters and the area where the human infants are placed, that kind of thing. But the basic process is exactly what it always was. You put a human infant on one side of the barrier, you put a cooperative Alien or two on the other side, and you let them spend a few hours a day together interacting for four or five years; the result is a human infant that is a native speaker of the Alien language. But the important word here, the crucial word, is
cooperative. The Terran whales won't cooperate.
”

Paul was intent now—this was important. “Are you serious?” he asked. “Can you say something like that and not be . . . what's the word . . . anthropomorphizing?”

“I can,” the man answered. “In every experiment that has been tried, the whales have simply done a Ghandi. They don't object, they don't charge the barrier, they don't turn belly up and die, they don't refuse to eat . . . they give us no trouble. But so long as a human infant is on the other side of the Interface partition, the whales do not make a single sound. Nor, so far as we can tell, do they make any movements—any body language—other
than what is necessary to their survival. They just wait until somebody removes the infant and then they resume normal behavior. This has been true for all types and varieties of whales studied. Why else do you think that after all these years we are still without any results to report from upstairs?”

“Well, I'll be damned,” breathed Paul, leaning back in his chair. He ought to have known about this; he ought to have been briefed on it. Even if it was only a cover operation, it had clear—and as the eggdomes said, obvious—bearing on the current project. They'd had no business sending him here to collect egg on his face, half-briefed, and somebody was going to be sorry, once he got back to D.A.T. and found out where the information gap was originating.

Bydore spoke up, calm now after his outburst. “There's no possible way to misunderstand the message, Mr. White,” he said. “A long time ago, we called in a linguist to observe and comment, a man from the Lines. And he gave us a solemn translation, which I now quote: ‘The whales say, “
We won't play your silly game.
” ' And that was that.”

“I see; thank you.” Paul sat there, thinking, and then he decided to cut his losses, because pretending wasn't going to work with these men. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I think I finally understand what you're telling me. I apologize for having arrived here so badly prepared, and for having been so goddam slow after you began helping me out. I understand the problem you face now—I
do understand
. But I am going to ask you to do me, and the department, a favor. I am going to ask you to go ahead with this project, in spite of the difficulties you have been kind enough to make clear to me, while I explore ways of dealing with the whales' determination not to help.”

“We can't communicate with the whales,” the professor objected. “How are you going to ‘explore' anything, as you put it, when they won't have anything to do with us?”

Paul smiled, and began gathering his files together. “We
have
communicated with them,” he pointed out. “The message was completely unambiguous, and—as you of course were demonstrating—we didn't need a linguist to tell us what it was.”

“A refusal to cooperate does not constitute language,” said the scientist. “An earthworm digging desperately to escape the light you shine on it is not communicating.”

“Tropism,” Paul said, guessing. It was close enough. “The whales' behavior is not like that. And I've seen human beings do precisely what you describe the whales doing.
That
, gentlemen, we know how to deal with.”

Bydore closed his eyes. “Vee half vayss,” he murmured, “uff making zem talk.”