Work with the native moves on smoothly. He is showing a vast range of knowledge, surprising in one coming from such a primitive culture and a high range of inquisitiveness, Stark reports. Not only does the alien want to know more details about the expedition and its members, the motives of the Federation, but he seems to have an insatiable thirst for specifics, the specific benefits, that is, that membership in the Federation will grant the members of Folsom’s Planet. His demeanor is pleasant, his gross signs are well controlled: he evinces, Stark says, no haste whatsoever to return to his enclosure but indeed extends the sessions even longer than Nina or Stark or Closter are prepared to. His energy is inexhaustible. Folsom’s own visit to the section in which the native is being worked upon confirms Stark’s reports. To Folsom’s queries he turns a pure, blank, trusting gaze of infinite sweetness and tact, to Folsom’s brief inquiries the native responds in mono-syllables. He will soon be ready for more complex dialogues, Stark assures Folsom, he will soon be ready to return to his village and function as intermediary for the races as they fuse . . . in the meantime it is best not to demand more of the native, perhaps, than the native can truly give. Folsom is convinced that the work is going well. He is able, in terms of the native’s cooperation and intelligence, to measure for the first time the duration of the mission. Six months, perhaps seven at the utmost and he will be able to return home. That is bearable. He will bear it.
The rock remains where Folsom placed it upon his staggering return to the clearing some time back . . . nestling under a high tree, protected by gnarled, exposed roots and branches from the elements, sequestered in a pit of night so deep that only Folsom himself knowing the location, can find it. The others would need his help to locate the rock, would have to beg his assistance if they wished to commence their research . . . Thus it is with some embarrassment that Folsom must make an admission: none of them seem very interested in his discovery. In fact, since he brought it back, no one has made serious inquiries.
Oh, it is not as if his discovery was totally ignored. There was in fact a rather patronizing approval, much as if Folsom, being the only one of the four not equipped to deal with the native’s education, was entitled to some discovery of his own, some little contribution to the mission and they had greeted it then with little explosions of interest, Nina, in fact, clapping her hands.
“Oh that’s wonderful,” Nina had said when Folsom staggered into the encampment with it. “Look what Hans has found, he’s found a strange rock with cryptic writing on it!” and the others had nodded as if in agreement.
“We’ll have to take a look at that all right,” Stark had said. “It looks as if there are someveryimportantclues ,” and had run a finger across the raised writing slowly as if indulging Folsom, before pushing the rock away, suggesting that Folsom find a good place to put it so that very soon, when they had begun to establish communication with the community, they could get it and start to unearth what clues might be locked into the strange writing.
Feeling somewhat manipulated Folsom had hefted his rock and taken it out there: later, after he had placed it under the tree that feeling of insult had turned to one of heavy petulance. What right did they have to dismiss his discovery? and particularly after the trouble that he had gone to to bring it back to all of them. Who did they think they were? Somewhere in all of this was an obscure thought which buzzed in Folsom’s brain like an insect; but he could not swat and capture it without destroying something valuable within its head so he let it be. But he would pursue it. That insect would come to rest and then he would see its nature.
In the meantime, the rock rests in its place underneath the tree and except for sullen walks to it now and then to make sure that it was all right and that no member of the expedition or native was misappropriating what he had come to think of as his property. Folsom has put it very much out of his mind. He has as always his commander’s duties; he has as well the problem of a puzzling message from the Bureau which has come in recently and which he still cannot fully interpret. Folsom would like to think that the miracle of instantaneous transmission which the Bureau has devised would be put to better use than the conveyance of material such as this. One of the things about technology which dismays him the most, as a matter of fact, are the uses to which it is put; there is nothing wrong, intrinsically, with the fact of technology but it must have more application than to the endless trivialization of the universe . . . ah, well, Folsom will not continue on this line. CONTINUE AS PREVIOUS, Bureau had noted, the symbols on the tape as luminescent as those on the rock and just as menacing, not less so because they were comprehensible, AND THEN CHANGE METHODS TO TRANSLITERATIVE.
What are they talking about? What can this possibly mean? Folsom, puzzled, had brought the roll to Stark just as soon as it had been passed through the decoder, but Stark had had little to contribute to his puzzlement. Stark’s eyes had rolled back into his head in a peculiar and involuted fashion (Folsom was not sure that Stark and Closter were human; this might have been his basic difficulty with them).
He had said, “I don’t know what to say. We’ve got our own problems in the field, of course. Field research that is to say. We’re trying to establish a common lexicon.”
“That doesn’t help me,” Folsom had said, and shown him the message again, thrusting it under Stark’s eyes, rotating it before him. “You’re the linguist here. You’re supposed to be the communications expert. You tell me what they’re talking about.”
Stark shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said and then his features convulsed into something very close to a leer. “Why bother me with this? Nina’s a linguist too. Why don’t you ask her.”
“I thought I’d ask you,” Folsom said sullenly. “I’m the commander here and I have a right to ask anyone that I want, don’t I? Who are you to tell me who I can ask and who I can’t ask something like this.”
Stark shook his head, little lines of merriment concealed by the patterns of light of the fading sun, the breezes of the evening coming up to whip his face into a contrived solemnity.
“That’s perfectly true,” he said, “I don’t mean to question your authority or anything of that nature at all but aren’t you the one responsible for working with the Bureau? After all, you’re the commander and we’re the crew. It seems to me that it’s completely your responsibility.”
Well, Stark had been right of course. Itwas his responsibility, to decipher the messages from the Bureau and to deal with them in a fashion which would satisfy the policies and procedures of conquest while leaving the crew free to work on their own tasks of discovery. But that did not mean that Folsom felt himself any nearer a sense of discovery. He had decided to talk with Nina but she had been no more helpful than Stark, to say nothing of Closter with whom Folsom had lost all communication whatsoever.
“You know that I can’t be bothered with that,” she had said in a distracted fashion, wiping her hands across her forehead when he had summoned her from the enclosure. “I can’t be bothered with that now. We’re on the verge of approaching a full, cross-cultural index. Why worry about this anyway? Send them back a report; tell them that we’re working it out in field study.”
“But what does translative mean?” Folsom said, pointing with a heavy captain’s forefinger to the word on the transcript of the communication, “what do they mean by this?”
“Everything is relative,” Nina said. “It is all a question of context.”
“That’s good. Context is good, it’s important. But what is the context here?”
“I’m afraid that I can’t answer that for you,” Nina said, “it’s your problem. You’re responsible for dealing with the Bureau, none of us are. We’re only the crew,” and had turned then, impatient with him, to return to the experiments. They had been running the alien through their network sixteen to twenty hours at a stretch. Folsom could not comprehend their energy. How could they have devolved upon ignorance with such passion?
In that posture, Folsom thought, her frame tight, her body arched, her steps small but determined, in that posture it was hard to believe that Nina was his mate, the woman who had already consumated that relationship time and again with him on the floor of the planet, impossible to believe that this was indeed the woman who had gasped within his arms, convulsing slightly, churning out again and again the small motions of her passion: looking at her instead Folsom could feel an insufficiency which was akin to shame. He almost came after her to shriek about the rock and the strange writing on the rock . . . surely this would impress her, turn her clinical detachment to passion once again in the knowledge of what he, the captain, had risked to bring this back to her . . . but in the next moment Folsom’s shame iced into harder particles because he recalled that he had already told her about it, told her several times in fact and that this had made no impression whatsoever. Whatever had been gasped out was in the past. She was totally committed to her work.
Folsom knew insufficiency then. He knew it as he had never before in his life: standing on the planet which was his own, commanding the mission which was wholly within his responsibility he had nevertheless, felt—and he had never felt this way before so it was utterly identifiable—absolute impotent. It was unfair. It was unfair that they should have done this to him. They had sent him out to make contact with a stage three planet, administer the experiments which would result in confluence and the beginning of cultural interlock and he had done all of this, going beyond his normal duties to bring back a rock which for all he knew might unlock further and more terrible tales of this world . . . and yet at no level did the very members of his expedition seem to pay him the proper credence; furthermore the Bureau was now sending him incomprehensible messages.
Inflamed by his rage, made terrible by this sudden thrust of insight, Folsom strode to the communications equipment and without hesitating activated the beam that would put him into contact with Bureau located inconceivably billions of miles away. His fingers shook over the console as he contemplated the audacity of this gesture which he was contemplating, the sheer inversion as this gesture contradicted all which he had been trained to accept: the infallibility af the Bureau, their irretrievable right to set a course of conduct, their implacability and finality. Thinking of this brought back memories to Folsom of the training process for the expedition and with them a dash of tears: he had been in control then. The crew had been under his direction, they had been assigned to him for obedience, and no one would possibly have defied his word. It was only when they came upon the accursed surface of this planet, began this mission, that the difficulties had begun. Can the aliens themselves, then, in a sense be blamed? Certainly it is a line of reasoning which Folsom would like to pursue at some crazier time. He had no difficulties with the command until they landed upon this planet, the only new element injected into the situation had been the natives, therefore they and they alone must bear culpability for what has happened now.
Well, Folsom will think about it. He knew from the moment that the alien had been brought into their encampment that something was terribly wrong with this situation. He should have forbidden Closter. That is what he should have done all right. He should have refused Closter permission to bring the alien back. WHAT DOES TRANSLITERATIVE MEAN? he types with shaking fingers over the communicator grid. WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?
The machine swallows the message, sends it shrieking through the starpaths. Aware as he is of the vastnesses of space, Folsom nevertheless thinks of it as a cubicle, a lightless cubicle, dense and damp around him through which messages between himself and Bureau pass like notes given one another by adolescents clamped into a small place. He knows that he should not think so; he knows that he should be overtaken by the starry dimensions, the awful, imponderable dimensions of the universe and the journeys which men trace out in that vastness but he cannot, try as he might, generate a sense of wonder. Taken from the training quarters of the Bureau to the hold of the ship, taken from the hold of the ship to unconsciousness and then to the floor of Folsom’s Planet, Folsom thinks of his life, rather, as having been lived in a sequence of small rooms. For all the largeness of his mission, the potential of his search, it is clear to him that his motives would have been no more grandiose, his life no more different than if it had been lived in a three by five square. So even as the message goes tumbling end over end into the void controlled by the transmission, Folsom finds himself thinking of the compression rather than the dimensions of the situation, the perverse fact that for all the conceptualization of distances not only he but most people seem to live their lives within a series of small rooms. They will be able to bring that benefit to the natives of Folsom’s Planet as well. Take them from barbarism, place them in an enclosure surrounded by machines.
Folsom crouched within himself, waits. At this moment he knows the message has appeared on the Bureau transmitter: he has no idea as to the actual dimensions of the reception room or its population but he conceives of a tired clerk sitting before the transcriber, slowly tearing off his communication, passing it onto another clerk, then to yet another, a whole hierarchy of damp, sweaty clerks lined up by the receptor machinery, taking in the messages from a thousand planets, twelve hundred, whatever number (it is never less than a thousand) are under exploration at the present time; all of the clerks would be dispirited and weary but still able, and during their free time which is given them by the Bureau ten minutes on the hour to gather in the small recreation room, they would exchange desultory gossip about the latest happenings on the planets: fragments of scatology, little hints as to the quirks of the various commanders. The clerks are not well compensated but they are the lifeline of the Bureau, this is made quite clear to them (and to the commanders as well; respect is to be paid them at all times) and they are entitled to take a certain amount of pride in their position. First line of defense and so on. Folsom, looking at the communicator, thinks of his clerk now breathing slowly through his open mouth, small vapors condensing within and without him while taking the message over in a fast limp to the next line of authority who has a worse limp and difficulties with his eyesight. This, however, makes no difference. Folsom will have to wait.
He does so. There is nothing else to do. His presence is not needed with the native, not needed in the village, not even needed in the great ship which is self-sustaining, remote-controlled right through the airlocks when it is unoccupied. Folsom must admit this: he has no function. It is not the first time in his life that he has had this thought but never has it struck him so cruelly: there must be another way in which duties could be distributed. Why should the commander who is responsible for every facet of the voyage, why should the commander lose all his authority, become a subordinate figure precisely at the point when he should be most in control? It was unfair, Folsom thinks, for him to be placed upon this planet which bears his name (his own name!) only so that he could be a witness to the efforts of the crew. Something will have to be done about this. He will have to file a complaint. He definitely will have to make a report about this. Why has no one ever done it before?
The communicator begins to chatter. The sound is noisome, shocking, so neatly has Folsom been locked into the temple of his consciousness, his sullen retrospection. Paper begins to move out of the belt, the keys hammering and Folsom looks at it fascinated as if it might bear some revelation which would absolutely speak to his condition. TRANSLITERATIVE MEANS WERE DISCUSSED THROUGHOUT THE TRAINING PROCEDURE. IS SOMETHING SERIOUSLY WRONG WITH YOU?
Folsom looks at this. He scratches his head, thinking of the sallow clerk, energized by his task of reproof, typing this out. For the first time it occurs to Folsom that he might have misjudged the Bureau. It is not benign at all; to the contrary it seems to be irretrievable hostile. I DON’T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE TALKING ABOUT, he types out with a shaking forefinger. TRANSLITERATION WAS NEVER EXPLAINED.
The communicator swallows this up. Appalled, Folsom watches it disappear through the void. Appalled, through filmed eyes, he watches the communicator seem to become translucent before him. Appalled he waits for the response.
There is no way in which he can explain the feeling which he has, hard even to phrase it, but waiting, waiting there Folsom feels moving within him the clear dark intimation that an important part of his life is ending and another, no less important, but far more painful, is about to begin.
Simply stated, he has never comprehended the language. He sees that now.
And it is too late to learn.