The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert (59 page)

“Exactly!” said Speidel. He glanced sidelong at Langsmith. “She talks pretty level-headed, Smitty.”

“But I don't believe any of these things,” she said.

“What is it you believe?” asked Speidel.

“I believe they're just what they represent themselves to be—representatives of a powerful Galactic culture that is immeasurably superior to our own.”

“Powerful, all right!” It was a marine officer at the far end of the table. “The way they cleaned off Eniwetok and swept our satellites out of the skies!”

“Do you think there's a possibility they could be concealing their true motives?” asked Langsmith.

“A possibility, certainly.”

“Have you ever watched a confidence man in action?” asked Langsmith.

“I don't believe so. But you're not seriously suggesting that these…” She shook her head. “Impossible.”

“The
mark
seldom gets wise until it's too late,” said Langsmith.

She looked puzzled. “Mark?”

“The fellow the confidence men choose for a victim.” Langsmith relighted his pipe, extinguished the match by shaking it. “Dr. Millar, we have a very painful disclosure to make to you.”

She straightened, feeling a sudden icy chill in her veins at the stillness in the room.

“Your husband's death was not an accident,” said Langsmith.

She gasped, and turned deathly pale.

“In the six months before this spaceship landed, there were some twenty-eight mysterious deaths,” said Langsmith. “More than that, really, because innocent bystanders died, too. These accidents had a curious similarity: In each instance there was a fatality of a foremost expert in the field of language, cryptoanalysis, semantics…”

“The people who might have solved this problem died before the problem was even presented,” said Speidel. “Don't you think that's a curious coincidence?”

She was unable to speak.

“In one instance there was a survivor,” said Langsmith. “A British jet transport crashed off Ceylon, killing Dr. Ramphit U. The lone survivor, the co-pilot, said a brilliant beam of light came from the sky overhead and sliced off the port wing. Then it cut the cabin in half!”

Francine put a hand to her throat. Langsmith's cautious hand movements suddenly fascinated her.

“Twenty-eight air crashes?” she whispered.

“No. Two were auto crashes.” Langsmith puffed a cloud of smoke before his face.

Her throat felt sore. She swallowed, said: “But how can you be sure of that?”

“It's circumstantial evidence, yes,” said Speidel. He spoke with thin-lipped precision. “But there's more. For the past four months all astronomical activity of our nation has been focused on the near heavens, including the moon. Our attention was drawn to evidence of activity near the moon crater Theophilus. We have been able to make out the landing rockets of more than five hundred spacecraft!”

“What do you think of that?” asked Langsmith. He nodded behind his smokescreen.

She could only stare at him; her lips ashen.

“These
frogs
have massed an invasion fleet on the moon!” snapped Speidel. “It's obvious!”

They're lying to me!
she thought.
Why this elaborate pretense?
She shook her head, and something her husband had once said leapt unbidden into her mind:
“Language clutches at us with unseen fingers. It conditions us to the way others are thinking. Through language, we impose upon each other our ways of looking at things.”

Speidel leaned forward. “We have more than a hundred atomic warheads aimed at that moon-base! One of those warheads will do the job if it gets through!” He hammered a fist on the table. “But first we have to capture this ship here!”

Why are they telling me all this?
she asked herself. She drew in a ragged breath, said: “Are you sure you're right?”

“Of course we're sure!” Speidel leaned back, lowered his voice. “Why else would they insist we learn their language? The first thing a conqueror does is impose his language on his new slaves!”

“No … no, wait,” she said. “That only applies to recent history. You're getting language mixed up with patriotism because of our own imperial history. Bob always said that such misconceptions are a serious hindrance to sound historical scholarship.”

“We know what we're talking about, Dr. Millar,” said Speidel.

“You're suspicious of language because our imperialism went hand in hand with our language,” she said.

Speidel looked at Langsmith. “You talk to her.”

“If there actually were communication in the sounds these Galactics make, you know we'd have found it by now,” said Langsmith. “You know it!”

She spoke in sudden anger: “I don't know it! In fact, I feel that we're on the verge of solving their language with this new approach we've been working on.”

“Oh, come now!” said Speidel. “Do you mean that after our finest cryptographers have worked over this thing for seven months, you disagree with them entirely?”

“No, no, let her say her piece,” said Langsmith.

“We've tapped a new source of information in attacking this problem,” she said. “Primitive dances.”

“Dances?” Speidel looked shocked.

“Yes. I think the Galactics' gestures may be their adjectives and adverbs—the full emotional content of their language.”

“Emotion!” snapped Speidel. “Emotion isn't language!”

She repressed a surge of anger, said: “We're dealing with something completely outside our previous experience. We have to discard old ideas. We know that the habits of a native tongue set up a person's speaking responses. In fact you can define language as the system of habits you reveal when you speak.”

Speidel tapped his fingers on the table, stared at the door behind Francine.

She ignored his nervous distraction, said: “The Galactics use almost the full range of implosive and glottal stops with a wide selection of vowel sounds: fricatives, plosives, voiced and unvoiced. And we note an apparent lack of the usual interfering habits you find in normal speech.”

“This isn't normal speech!” blurted Speidel. “Those are nonsense sounds!” He shook his head. “Emotions!”

“All right,” she said. “Emotions! We're pretty certain that language begins with emotions—pure emotional actions. The baby pushes away the plate of unwanted food.”

“You're wasting our time!” barked Speidel.

“I didn't ask to come down here,” she said.

“Please.” Langsmith put a hand on Speidel's arm. “Let Dr. Millar have her say.”

“Emotion,” muttered Speidel.

“Every spoken language of earth has migrated away from emotion,” said Francine.

“Can you write an emotion on paper?” demanded Speidel.

“That does it,” she said. “That really tears it! You're blind! You say language has to be written down. That's part of the magic! Your mind is tied in little knots by academic tradition! Language, general, is primarily oral! People like you, though, want to make it into ritual noise!”

“I didn't come down here for an egg-head argument!” snapped Speidel.

“Let me handle this, please,” said Langsmith. He made a mollifying gesture toward Francine. “Please continue.”

She took a deep breath. “I'm sorry I snapped,” she said. She smiled. “I think we let emotion get the best of us.”

Speidel frowned.

“I was talking about language moving away from emotion,” she said. “Take Japanese, for example. Instead of saying, ‘Thank you' they say ‘Katajikenai'—‘I am insulted.' Or they say, ‘Kino doku' which means ‘This poisonous feeling!'” She held up her hands. “This is ritual exclusion of showing emotion. Our Indo-European languages—especially Anglo-Saxon tongues—are moving the same way. We seem to think that emotion isn't quite nice, that…”

“It tells you nothing!” barked Speidel.

She forced down the anger that threatened to overwhelm her. “If you can read the emotional signs,” she said, “they reveal if a speaker is telling the truth. That's all, general. They just tell you if you're getting at the truth. Any good psychologist knows this, general. Freud said it: ‘If you try to conceal your feelings, every pore oozes betrayal.' You seem to think that the opposite is true.”

“Emotions! Dancing!” Speidel pushed his chair back. “Smitty, I've had as much of this as I can take.”

“Just a minute,” said Langsmith. “Now, Dr. Millar, I wanted you to have your say because we've already considered these points. Long ago. You're interested in the gestures. You say this is a dance of emotions. Other experts say with equal emphasis that these gestures are ritual combat! Freud, indeed! They ooze betrayal. This chopping gesture they make with the right hand”—he chopped the air in illustration—“is identical to the karate or judo chop for breaking the human neck!”

Francine shook her head, put a hand to her throat. She was momentarily overcome by a feeling of uncertainty.

Langsmith said: “That outward thrust they make with one hand: That's the motion of a sword being shoved into an opponent! They ooze betrayal all right!”

She looked from Langsmith to Speidel, back to Langsmith. A man to her right cleared his throat.

Langsmith said: “I've just given you two examples. We have hundreds more. Every analysis we've made has come up with the same answer: treachery! The pattern's as old as time: Offer a reward; pretend friendship; get the innocent lamb's attention on your empty hand while you poise the axe in your other hand!”

Could I be wrong?
she wondered.
Have we been duped by these Galactics?
Her lips trembled. She fought to control them, whispered: “Why are you telling me these things?”

“Aren't you at all interested in revenge against the creatures who murdered your husband?” asked Speidel.

“I don't know that they murdered him!” She blinked back tears. “You're trying to confuse me!” And a favorite saying of her husband's came into her mind:
“A conference is a group of people making a difficult job out of what one person could do easily.”
The room suddenly seemed too close and oppressive.

“Why have I been dragged into this conference?” she demanded. “Why?”

“We were hoping you'd assist us in capturing that spaceship,” said Langsmith.

“Me? Assist you in…”

“Someone has to get a bomb past the force screens at the door—the ones that keep sand and dirt out of the ship. We've got to have a bomb inside.”

“But why me?”

“They're used to seeing you wheel in the master recorder on that cart,” said Langsmith. “We thought of putting a bomb in…”

“No!”

“This has gone far enough,” said Speidel. He took a deep breath, started to rise.

“Wait,” said Langsmith.

“She obviously has no feelings of patriotic responsibility,” said Speidel. “We're wasting our time.”

Langsmith said: “The Galactics are used to seeing her with that cart. If we change now, they're liable to become suspicious.”

“We'll set up some other plan, then,” said Speidel. “As far as I'm concerned, we can write off any possibility of further cooperation from her.”

“You're little boys playing a game,” said Francine. “This isn't an exclusive American problem. This is a human problem that involves every nation on Earth.”

“That ship is on United States soil,” said Speidel.

“Which happens to be on the only planet controlled by the human species,” she said. “We ought to be sharing everything with the other teams, pooling information and ideas to get at every scrap of knowledge.”

“We'd all like to be idealists,” said Speidel. “But there's no room for idealism where our survival is concerned. These
frogs
have full space travel, apparently between the stars—not just satellites and moon rockets. If we get their ship we can enforce peace on our own terms.”

“National survival,” she said. “But it's our survival as a species that's at stake!”

Speidel turned to Langsmith. “This is one of our more spectacular failures, Smitty. We'll have to put her under close surveillance.”

Langsmith puffed furiously on his pipe. A cloud of pale blue smoke screened his head. “I'm ashamed of you, Dr. Millar,” he said.

She jumped to her feet, allowing her anger full scope at last. “You must think I'm a rotten psychologist!” she snapped. “You've been lying to me since I set foot in here!” She shot a bitter glance at Speidel. “Your gestures gave you away! The noncommunicative emotional gestures, general!”

“What's she talking about?” demanded Speidel.

“You said different things with your mouths than you said with your bodies,” she explained. “That means you were lying to me—concealing something vital you didn't want me to know about.”

“She's insane!” barked Speidel.

“There wasn't any survivor of a plane crash in Ceylon,” she said. “There probably wasn't even the plane crash you described.”

Speidel froze to sudden stillness, spoke through thin lips: “Has there been a security leak? Good Lord!”

“Look at Dr. Langsmith there!” she said. “Hiding behind that pipe! And you, general: moving your mouth no more than absolutely necessary to speak—trying to hide your real feelings! Oozing betrayal!”

“Get her out of here!” barked Speidel.

“You're all logic and no intuition!” she shouted. “No understanding of feeling and art! Well, general: Go back to your computers, but remember this—you can't build a machine that thinks like a man! You can't feed emotion into an electronic computer and get back anything except numbers! Logic, to you, general!”