The Long Result (18 page)

I gave him a sour grin. ‘You have a damned good insight into our psychology, haven’t you?’ I said. ‘I wish I had some insight into yours. Frankly, I’ve been wondering how you feel about what Scarlatti did to you.’

‘Contemptuous,’ he answered. His soft mouth quirked into a smile, perched oddly at the bottom of his long blue nose. ‘That
is
offensive; unfortunately it’s the truth. I don’t,
however, bear any resentment against your species for what happened – you’re making a commendable effort to adjust to contact with other races, and an isolated incident is nothing to get annoyed about.’

He leaned dangerously forward on his stool, making a movement like a human stretching of cramped muscles. ‘When one is invulnerable, you know, one can afford to be detached about such things.’

I suggested we leave the table – that stretching indicated he found the stool imperfectly comfortable – and went to the player to select a music-tape. Half-way through the task, I decided I was merely stalling, and if he was in a direct mood I should take advantage of it.

I left the player alone and dropped into a chair facing him; he’d sat down on the floor.

‘This insight you have into the way our minds work … Is it because basically you think the same way as we do, or are you just magnificently good at empathizing with us?’

‘Well, well! I’ve been in and out of your research labs for several months since I came to Earth; before that I was under study at a survey mission at home – and this is the first time anyone asked me that question straight out.’ Again the smile touched his mouth. ‘Maybe your species prefers to form its own opinions. But I’ll give you mine for what it’s worth, though when you eventually reach a view of your own it’ll be more valid for your pattern of thinking.

‘Do our minds work like yours? Yes and no. There’s a difference, but it’s not so much qualitative as quantitative. Let me see if I can illustrate what I mean from your own history …’ He hesitated: the first time I’d known him to do so.

‘I believe this is an apt parallel,’ he resumed. ‘What distinguishes yourself from a non-technical savage of ten thousand years ago? Mainly a change of viewpoint. When a genius arose in a primitive society, the order of his thinking
produced the bow, the wheeled cart, the clay pot. Since then, though there’s been no substantial physical evolution, the perspectives have altered radically. Your savage observed that the arrow flew further than the spear; conclusion, it’s better for hunting. You, faced, with the same situation, might think about kinetics, the lever, the conservation of energy – abstracting to extremely wide general principles. Yet you’re both human beings, with the same mental endowment at birth. To use a metaphor, your mind has acquired a new dimension.

‘Add one further dimension, and you get something new again.’

‘You Regulans have that – extra dimension?’ I was on the edge of my chair with excitement; I was sure this was brand-new information, straightforward though it seemed.

Mane rippling, he shook his head. ‘I said the difference between our races was quantitative as yet. Only when we get to the next stage will we know what its nature is. We do, though, recognize that it exists.’

Groping, I said, ‘Like getting at chemistry from alchemy? You’ve had hints that show there’s an underlying general principle, but you haven’t figured out how to organise your experiments and define it precisely?’

‘Excellent! I wish I’d thought of that comparison myself. But before you ask me to explain what hints we’ve had, I’m afraid Anglic doesn’t contain the referents to convey them.’

I sat in silence for a long time. At last I said, ‘Why have you told me this, Anovel? I’m sure it’s something our survey mission have never picked up, and they’ve been at Regulus since before I was born.’

Anovel shrugged his massive main shoulders. ‘You avoid asking direct questions; you observe and interpret. This is because you are rightly afraid of knowledge you do not completely understand. But you carry that too far – you
also refuse to accept directions as to how that knowledge may be safely dealt with. A precaution, over-extended, becomes a superstition – doesn’t it?’

He rose in a single fluid motion and went to retrieve his platter and dish from the table. I jumped up in disappointment – I’d wanted to ask a thousand further questions, including the crucial one about why his species had no star-ships.

‘Must you go?’ I demanded.

‘I’ve given you plenty of food for thought already,’ he said dryly. ‘But don’t worry – I’ve enjoyed our time together and I hope very much that I may return the invitation.’

‘Yes, that would be wonderful,’ I agreed, mind racing.

‘Then come and call on me at the Ark when you get the chance. I’ve promised Inspector Klabund to remain in this neighbourhood while he completes his inquiry into the rocket crash – very gladly, since it means I have more time to wander about and get to know the people of Earth at first hand. And the sponsors of my zoo ship are being paid handsomely for the loss of my time, so they have no complaints.’

He put out his lower right hand, the delicate one, and I shook it warmly. For the first time I was conscious of an alien as a real person, and the feeling was strong enough to make me really like him. I wished everyone could get the chance of meeting Regulans privately – more privately even than by making them the centre of attention at a party. That ought to put an end to aberrations like the Stars Are For Man League!

Directly he’d gone, I crossed to the recorder and taped a summary of what he’d said. I planned to take that tape to the Bureau in the morning and send it without comment to Tinescu. I rather expected it would explode on his desk like a firecracker.

The phone went. I reached for the switch and Tinescu’s face appeared in the screen, wearing a grim expression. Maintaining a casual air, I said, ‘Morning, chief. You got the tape I sent up to you?’

‘I just played it. Now we have another problem on our hands.’

‘Which is-?’

‘Who the blazes is Anovel?’

I completely missed the point. Puzzled at how Tinescu could fail to recognize the name, I said, ‘Why, he’s the Regulan who was involved in the rocket crash and —’

‘Roald, for pity’s sake! Do you take me for a moron?’ He shoved back his lank hair with an impatient gesture. ‘What I mean is – what standing does he have? What authority?’

‘I don’t know that he has any at all,’ I said blankly.

‘How I wish I’d done what I wanted to do, and given you the option of crossing to alien contact or getting to hell out of the Bureau … Roald, is it conceivable that you don’t know what you’ve turned up?’ And without giving me the chance to speak, he plunged on. ‘No, of course it’s not – you must have realized, or you wouldn’t have sounded so damned smug on that tape! Let’s take it by slow degrees, and maybe you’ll catch on.’

He took a deep breath. ‘To begin with: what Anovel said sounded pretty simple, hm? So simple, it perhaps crossed your tiny little mind that the survey missions on Regulus Four ought to have worked it out long ago?’

‘Well, yes, it did occur—’

‘But
you took it for granted they’d fallen down the way the survey missions fell down at Starhome when they missed the design break-through in building the
Algenib.
Roald,
you can’t equate the two. On the one hand you have a planet of inscrutable aliens, intellectually and physically our unquestionable superiors even if they haven’t any starships of their own, who’ve never squawked at any proposition we put to them but have always kept us politely at a distance. On the other, you have a policy decision to conceal information on a specific subject. We can break down the Star-homers’ secrecy bit by bit, but we’ve always accepted that the Regulans would let us know only what we could deduce from our own observations. And now suddenly, for the first time that I can discover, a Regulan lets his mane down and tells a human being – not even somebody in alien contact, but a casual acquaintance – their own view of the psychology, their racial goals, the
lot.
Now do you see what I mean when I ask: who the hell is Anovel?’

I did. I was furious with myself for not taking the point earlier. I said, ‘You think he may be more than just a tourist using zoo ship facilities to visit Earth?’

‘More than just a tourist!’ Tinescu went scarlet, and for a second he was speechless with the sheer pressure of words claiming utterance. ‘Roald, if you’d ever had anything to do with Regulans you’d know that those people do nothing without a reason.
Nothing.
I don’t mean they’re cold and emotionless; simply that they are the nearest thing to a totally rational being we’ve ever come across. I’ve sent your tape around to Indowegiatuk – don’t blame me if she’s in your hair shortly. I’d follow it up myself if Torres’s programme wasn’t claiming the whole of my time, because you may take it from me that if Anovel spoke to you so freely he wasn’t just a private individual airing a private theory. Regulans don’t operate like that! ’

He glared at me accusingly. I said, ‘Well, I wasn’t trying to pump him exactly. I’d decided, long before we got on to that subject, that he’d let me know what he thought fit and nothing more.’

‘Blazes, if that’s what you can turn up without trying I don’t know what you’ve been doing since you joined the Bureau!’

Hastily, I switched to another tack. ‘Ah – you said something about Micky’s programme. How’s it coming on?’

‘If you hadn’t been entertaining our blue friend, you’d have seen the first fruits of it last night. We put out a major documentary on the
Algenib.
I borrowed a team of top goverment semanticists to weight the commentary for us, and Port Director Rattray somehow conned one of the Starhomer engineer officers into appearing, though we couldn’t make him talk very much. It was a howling success, by all accounts. Seems to have left the audience with a fine glow of vicarious pioneering spirit – sort of half wanting to go and congratulate the Starhomers on their magnificent achievements, half glad that they had to do the job and not us. If we can keep up the standard, we ought to soften our audience into accepting the pill underneath the sugar well within Torres’s twelve-month limit.’

He gave me a final scowl and cut the connexion.

I sat pondering what he’d said for several minutes. What
did
he think Anovel was? The Regulan counterpart of a survey mission, perhaps? I was perfectly prepared to believe they could rely on a single individual to do work for which we needed a team of dozens of specialists. But at his age – one-sixth of Regulan life-expectancy – he couldn’t be more than a student, surely!

On the other hand … how about our own prodigies? Micky Torres was little older than one-fifth of human life-expectancy, and he’d been one of our chief authorities on Starhomer social evolution since he graduated. He’d published
Stars Beckoned
at twenty-one; now he was
de facto
in charge of the biggest mass-education campaign we’d ever launched.

I decided that it would be illuminating to get Anovel and Micky together if the opportunity arose.

The phone went again, and it was Patricia. My heart gave a great leap of delight. She looked so delectable I wanted to climb down the phone and hug her. Then I noticed she was in outdoor kit and her expression was apologetic. My heart sank again.

‘Roald, my sweet, I have bad news. I must cry off our date tonight.’

‘For goodness’ sake, why? You were away yesterday, and—’

‘Darling, I can’t
help
it. I have to go out and shoot some trouble. The director at the spaceport – what’s his name? Rattee?’

‘Rattray.’

‘That’s him. We were scheduling major precipitation for this area tonight at about twenty, and we have a beautiful fat airstream loading up with moisture over the Pacific algae grounds.
Now
he comes through and says we mustn’t have rain over the port during the night – he has an ore-freighter limping in from the asteroids and they have to put it down as soon as possible because there’s someone on board with a skull-fracture. So we’ve got to go and spill several million tons of water ahead of schedule. If you’re going outdoors today I’d suggest you take a waterproof in case the clouds are still dripping when they get here.’

‘Won’t you be back by this evening, then?’

‘Absolutely no chance of my being home before the small hours.’

‘Couldn’t you at least –?’ I bit my lip, and had to laugh. ‘Now listen to me being jealous of
your
work! Let’s make it tomorrow night for sure, hm?’

‘It’s a date. Same time? Wonderful!’ She pursed her lips in a mock kiss and the screen went blank.

I’d barely had time to vent my annoyance in a few
well-chosen words and dip into the conveyor box for one of the waiting items when there was yet another call.

This time – as Tinescu had warned me – it was Indo-wegiatuk. She was the oldest of the so-called ‘assistants’ in the Bureau, but in her case the term was far more misleading than when it applied to Jacky or myself. In fact, she was a kind of deputy Chief of Bureau on the alien contact side. She was alleged to be over a hundred, but no one was certain; physically she could have been taken for seventy, and rumour said that all records of her birth-date had been systematically expunged so that she could evade the civil service regulations decreeing retirement age. Nobody wanted to lose her, and although she could have gone on to a post at a university rather than actually ceasing work for good, she preferred to stay with the Bureau.

‘Roald, my son,’ she began, ‘I was with the first survey mission at Regulus before you were born. I did twenty-four tours there, the first two as a junior and the last three as comptroller. Would you mind telling me by what
right
Anovel breaks this bit of news to you and not to someone who can tell gold from brass?’

She was hurt. She did a good job of covering it up, but I couldn’t mistake the bitterness in the words. I said, ‘I’m sorry, Indowegiatuk. It just came up in conversation.’

‘I see. And the purpose of having the conversation, I’m informed, was to find out whether Anovel was angry at what this copperbottomed maniac Scarlatti did to him. Is that right?’