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Mollen's room had the same high ceiling but was easily four times as large
as the reception room. There was a floor-to-ceiling vision screen on the wall
to Jim's right. The other wall had a large painting which made no sense to Jim
but was probably something expensive for important visitors to notice.
Happily, however, the wall at the far end of the room, opposite the door by
which Jim had entered, was all one large window with heavy floor-to-ceiling
curtains drawn and tied back as far as they would go on either side, taking
away all of Jim's mild new claustrophobia. In between him and the window was a
lot of thick carpeting, overstuffed chairs, bookcases, a bar, and a large desk
a couple of meters before the window and facing the room's entrance, a desk
behind which Mollen sat in another overstuffed chair.
Mary was there, too, but she was in one of the chairs that was to the side
of, but beyond Mollen's desk, closer to the window. She was in civilian
clothes, wearing a gray-green dress, and her chair was so angled that she
looked out of the window. Her face was turned away so that Jim, after all
these days, could not see it. Mollen had swiveled his own chair around and was
talking to her as Jim entered. He swiveled back to face Jim; but Mary did not
turn.
"Sit down, sit down, Jim!" said Mollen. He waved Jim to a chair in front of
and facing the desk. Jim sat, frustrated to be forced into a position where
Mary's face was still hidden from him.
"Well," said Mollen, "you're looking well. I hope you're feeling as good."
"As holes go, I can't complain," said Jim.
Mollen laughed.
"Yes," he said, "I've read the results of your debriefings on the
mind-people. Sobers me up to realize all I am to them is a hole in the
continuum. Still, the human race has got on that way for millions of years, so
I suppose we'll continue to struggle along in the same fashion. You two did a
marvelous job out there. Better by a long shot than anything we expected. You
come back not only with new worlds for us and the means to a way of dealing
with the Laagi, but with news of another race yet, and a couple of Laagi
prisoners to work with."
"How're they doing?"
"Just fine," said Mollen. "We've got them in a separate building in pretty
much the same kind of set-up we had your ship and La Chasse Gallerie in Mary's
lab. We sweated a little over how to keep them fed. But we made a guess they
might be able to subsist on the same thing your little friend Squonk was fed
in that hospital. We built a special room around the entry port of their ship,
flooded it with the same sort of atmosphere that was in your ship, and left a
container with some of the original cubes you'd brought along for Squonk, plus
some we'd made up after analyzing one of the cubes."
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"You were able to duplicate them?" asked Jim.
"Oh, yes. Chemically, at least. Of course, God knows what our version tastes
like to a Laagi; but we knew the two in the ship were watching us outside
their hull with their ship's instruments; and, sure enough, after we'd left
them alone for a while with the extra room and the two containers of cubes,
one of them ventured out, picked up the container of original cubes, plus one
of the duplicates we'd made and took it all back inside. Evidently our version
went down all right; because they eventually came out, got the rest of our
cubes and ate them."
"Not a very happy life, being prisoners," said Jim. He looked over at the
back of Mary's head, but it did not move and she did not say a word.
"No. But then you can't expect it to be," answered Mollen. "We're making
good progress toward being able to talk with them, using that notion you
passed on in your debriefing, by the way, Jim. You know, the idea of one of us
with a picture box strapped to his chest showing the image of a Laagi; and
whoever it is speaks to a Laagi and the picture box translates his words into
the image in the box, making the body movements that translate his words."
"And you're close to this, already?" asked Jim.
"Close, no," answered Mollen. "I said it was a final goal, and it is. But
right now we're still working to really grasp that body language of theirs.
You've heard of the 'third language' technique?"
"No," said Jim.
"Essentially, it means that if you've got two people, neither of whom can
possibly ever speak the other's language, you invent a third language they can
both speak. It's an outgrowth of the invented languages we were teaching
chimpanzees and other animals as far back as the twentieth century, in order
to communicate with them. There was a sign language, and a language of symbols
different researchers used with different animals, and so forth.... Well,
that's what we're trying to develop to use with our two Laagi, a third
language."
"And it can be done?" Jim asked.
"It can be done if both sides have enough elements in common. For example,
as I say, it worked with chimpanzees and dogs and elephants and a few others,
but they've never been able to make it work with cetaceans like dolphins and
killer whales. Too different environmentally. We're just lucky that the
Laagi've developed a technological civilization not too different from ours.
We may not think the way they do, but we've got enough problems in common-like
how to get from one star system to another by spaceship."
"They're already talking about space flight with the Laagi?'
"Nowhere near that, yet, I'm afraid. First we had to build a sort of
Laagi-instrument, in line with your idea. The technicians came up with a
picture of a Laagi figure that could be made to make body movements the way
they do. The movements were made by punching specific keys on a keyboard below
the picture. Then we built a transparent section into the wall of the room
we'd added around the Laagi port; and set the instrument up outside the window
with a human operator seated at it, punching keys and making the figure move.
Meanwhile, we were trying to isolate from the pictures you'd brought back of
Laagi talking to each other at least a few body-movement words that our
prisoners would recognize as attempts by us to talk to them."
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"You're using pictures from whatever got stuck to Squonk's tentacle, I
suppose," said Jim. He glanced over at Mary. But she still had not moved. Her
face was still, hidden from where he sat, and there was no sign she was even
listening to the conversation.
"That's right," said Mollen, "we've got pictures of nearly every place you
went in that city. The first big step was breaking the arm and body movements
down into something roughly equivalent to action-units inside a given
three-dimensional space, action-units small enough so that we could be sure
each was all, or part of, no more than a single signal, you follow me?"
"No," said Jim.
"The point was to get down to the basic building blocks of their body
language. Where there were simultaneous movements of more than one part of the
body, that was taken into account, too, but one way or another, all recorded
body signals were listed and compared-thank God for thinking machines-then
handed back to us in order of frequency, related to the conditions and
situations under which they were being used, and so forth."
"I figured something like that would have to be done," said Jim. "It must
have been a big job."
"It was," said Mollen. "But, little by little, the technicians began to pile
up associations. You know-this movement goes with beginning to speak to
someone else, this one with ending a conversation with that person. This one
goes with greeting someone; this, with leaving an individual. Et cetera. And
from all this we put together what should have meant 'we want to talk to you.'
We gave the Laagi a screen and keyboard in their outside room hooked to the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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