by Anthology
Homer Crawford said, "Dr. Smythe, the die is already cast. The question now becomes, will you join us?"
"Join you! Certainly not!"
Crawford said evenly, "Then I might suggest that, first, you will not be allowed to operate in my territory." He considered for a moment, grinning inwardly, but on the surface his expression serene. He added, "And second, that you will probably have difficulties procuring an exit visa from my domains."
"Exit visa! Are you jesting? See here, my good man, you realize I am a citizen of the United States of the Americas and--"
"A country," Homer yawned, "with which I have not as yet opened diplomatic relations, and hence has little representation in North Africa."
The doctor was bug-eying him. He began sputtering again. "This isn't funny. You're an American citizen yourself. And you, Miss Cunningham and--"
Isobel said sadly, "As a matter of fact, the last we heard, the State Department representative told us our passports were invalid."
Crawford leaned forward. "Look here, Doctor. You don't see eye to eye with us on matters socio-economic. However, as a medical man, I submit that joining my group ... ah, that is, until you can secure an exit visa from my authorities ... will give you an excellent opportunity to practice your science here in the Sahara under the wing of El Hassan. I'll assign a place for your trucks and tents. Please consider the question and let me have your answer at your leisure. Meanwhile, we will prepare a desert feast suitable to the high esteem in which we hold you."
* * * * *
They looked after the doctor, as he left, and Moroka chuckled. However, Isobel was watching Homer Crawford quizzically.
She said finally, "We rode over him a little in the roughshod manner, didn't we?"
Homer Crawford growled uncomfortably, "Particularly when we finally have our showdown with the Arab Legion, a medic will be priceless."
Isobel said softly, "And the end justifies the means--"
Homer shot a quick, impatient look at her. "The good doctor and his people are in the Sahara to work with the Tuareg and the Teda and the rest of the bedouin. Beyond that, he has the same dream we have--of developing this continent of our racial background."
"But he doesn't believe in your methods, Homer, and we're forcing him to follow El Hassan's road in spite of his beliefs."
Moroka had been peering at the two of them narrowly. "You don't make omelets without breaking eggs," he said, his voice on the overbearing side.
She spun on him. "But the omelets don't turn out so well if some of the eggs you use are rotten."
The South African's voice turned gentle. "Miss Cunningham," he said, "working in the field, like this, can have its rugged side for a young and delicate woman--"
"Delicate!" she snapped. "I'll have you know--"
"Hey, everybody, hold it," Cliff injected. "What goes on?"
Dave Moroka shrugged. "It just seems to me that Isobel might do better back in Dakar, or in New York with your friend Jake Armstrong. Somewhere where her sensibilities wouldn't be so bruised, and where her assets"--his eyes went up and down her lithe body--"could be put to better use."
Isobel's sepia face had gone a shade or more lighter. She said, very flatly, "My assets, Mr. Moroka, are in my head."
Homer Crawford said disgustedly, "O.K., O.K., let's all knock it off."
His eyes flicked back and forth between them, in definite command. "I don't want to hear any more in the way of personalities between you two."
Moroka shrugged again. "Yes, sir," he said without inflection.
Isobel turned away and took up some paperwork, without further words. She suppressed her feeling of seething indignation.
Homer Crawford, under his pressures, was changing. Possibly, she had told herself before, it was change for the better. The need was for a strong man, perhaps even a ruthless one.
The Homer Crawford she had first known was an easier going man than he who had snapped an abrupt order to her a moment ago. The Homer she had first known requested things of his teammates and friends. El Hassan had learned to command.
The Homer she had first known could never have ridden, roughshod, over the basically gentle Dr. Smythe.
The Homer she had first known, when the El Hassan scheme was still aborning, had thought of himself as a member of a team. He was quick to ask advice of all, and quick to take it if it had validity. Now Homer, as El Hassan, was depending less and less upon the opinions of those surrounding him, more and more upon his own decisions which he seemed to sometimes reach purely through intuition.
The El Hassan dream was still upon her, but, womanlike, she wondered if she liked the would-be tyrant of all North Africa as well as she had once liked the easy-going American idealist, Homer Crawford.
Jack and Jimmy Peters, the brothers from Trinidad, entered, the former carrying a couple of books.
They'd evidently failed to note the raised voices and wore their customary serious expressions. Jack looked at Homer and said, "Cu vi scias Esperanton?"
Homer Crawford's eyebrows went up but he said, "Jes, mi parolas Esperanto tre bona, mi pensas."
"Bona," Jack said, "Tre bona."
"Jes, estas bele," his brother said.
Moroka was scowling back and forth from one of them to the other. "I thought I had a fairly good working knowledge of the world's more common languages," he said, "but that goes by me. It sounds like a cross between Italian and pig-Latin."
Homer said to the Peters brothers, "Let's drop Esperanto so that Dave, Isobel and Cliff can follow us. We can give it a whirl later, if you'd like, just for the practice."
Isobel said slowly, "Mi parolas Esperanto, malgranda." Then in English, "I took it for kicks while I was still in school. Kind of rusty now, though."
"Esperanto?" Cliff said. "You mean that gobblydygook so-called international language?"
Jack Peters looked at him, serious faced as always. "What is wrong with an international language, Mr. Jackson?"
Cliff was taken aback. "Search me. But it doesn't seem to have proved very practical. It didn't catch on."
"Well, more than you might think," Isobel told him. "There are probably hundreds of thousands of persons in one part of the world or another who can get along in Esperanto."
Moroka said impatiently, "What're a few hundred thousands of people in a world population like ours? Cliff's right. It never took hold."
Homer said, "All right, Jack and Jimmy. You boys evidently have something on your minds. Let everybody sit down and listen to it."
* * * * *
Even before they got thoroughly settled, Jack Peters was launching into his pitch.
"We need an official language," he said. "The El Hassan movement has set as a goal the uniting of all North Africa. We might start here in the Sahara, but it's just a start. Ultimately, the idea is to reach from Morocco to Egypt and from the Mediterranean to ... to where? The Congo?"
"Actually, we've never set exact limits," Homer said.
"Ultimately all Africa," Dave Moroka muttered softly. He ignored the manner in which Isobel contemplated him from the side of her eyes.
"All right," the West Indian said. "There are more than seven hundred major languages, not counting dialects, in Africa. Sooner or later, we need an official language, what is it going to be?"
"Why one official language? Why not several?" Cliff scowled. "Say Arabic, here in this area. Swahili on the East coast. And, say, Songhoi along the Niger, and Wolof, the Senegalese lingua franca, and--"
"You see," Peters interrupted. "Already you have half a dozen and you haven't even got out of this immediate vicinity as yet. Let me develop my point."
Homer Crawford was becoming interested. "Go on, Jack," he said.
Jack Peters pointed a finger at him. "To be the hero-symbol we have in mind, El Hassan is going to have to be able to communicate with all of his people. He's not going to be able to speak Arabic to, say, a Masai in Kenya. They hate the Arabs. He's not going to be able to speak Swahili t
o a Moroccan, they've never heard of the language. He can't speak Tamaheq to the Imraguen, they're scared to death of the Tuareg."
Homer said thoughtfully, "A common language would be fine. It'd solve a lot of problems. But it doesn't seem to be in the cards. Why not adopt as our official language the one in which the most of our people will be able to communicate? Say, Arabic?"
Jack was shaking his head seriously. "And antagonize all the Arab hating Bantu in Africa? It's no go, Homer."
"Well, then, say French--or English."
"English is the most international language in the world," Moroka said. But his face was thoughtful, as those of the others were becoming.
The West Indian was beginning to make his points now. "No, any of the European languages are out. The white man has been repudiated. Adopting English, French, Spanish, Portuguese or Dutch, as our official language would antagonize whole sections of the continent."
"Why Esperanto?" Cliff scowled. "Why not, say, Nov-Esperanto, or Ido, or Interlingua?"
Jimmy Peters put in a word now. "Actually, any one of them would possibly do, but we have a head start with Esperanto. Some years ago both Jack and I became avid Esperantists, being naïve enough in those days to think an international language would ultimately solve all man's problems. And both Homer and Isobel seem to have a working knowledge of the language."
Homer said, "So have the other members of my former Reunited Nations team. That's where those books you found came from. Elmer, Bey, Kenny ... and Abe ... and I used to play around with it when we were out in the desert, just to kill time. We also used it as sort of a secret language when we wanted to communicate and didn't know if those around us might understand some English."
"I still don't get the picture," Cliff argued. "If we picked the most common half a dozen languages in the territory we cover, then millions of these people wouldn't have to study a second language. But if you adapt Esperanto as an official language then everybody is going to have to learn something new. And that's not going to be easy for our ninety-five per cent illiterate followers."
Isobel said thoughtfully, "Well, it's a darn sight easier to learn Esperanto than any other language we decided to make official."
"Why?" Cliff said argumentatively.
* * * * *
Jack Peters took over. "Because it's almost unbelievably easy to learn. English, by the way, is extremely difficult. For instance, spelling and pronunciation are absolutely phonetic in Esperanto and there are only five vowel sounds where most national languages have twenty or so. And each sound in the alphabet has one sound only and any sound is always rendered by the same letter."
Dave Moroka said, "Actually, I don't know anything at all about this Esperanto."
The West Indian took him in, with a dominating glance. "Take grammar and syntax which can take up volumes in other languages. Esperanto has exactly sixteen short rules. And take vocabularies. For instance, in English we often form the feminine of a noun by adding ess--actor-actress, tiger-tigress. But not always. We don't say bull-bulless or ghost-ghostess. In Esperanto you simply add the feminine ending to any noun--there's no exception to any rule."
Jack Peters was caught up in his subject. "Still comparing it to English, realize that spelling and pronunciation in English are highly irregular and one letter can have several different sounds, and one sound may be represented by different letters. And there are even silent letters which are written but not pronounced like the ugh in though. There are none of these irregularities in Esperanto. And the sounds are all sharp with none of such subtle differences as, say, bed/bad/bard/bawd, that sort of thing."
Jimmy Peters said, "The big item is that any averagely intelligent person can begin speaking Esperanto within a few hours. Within a week of even moderate study, say three or four hours a day, he's astonishingly fluent."
[Illustration]
Isobel said thoughtfully, "There'd be international advantages. It's always been a galling factor in Africans dealing with Europeans that they had to learn the European language involved. You couldn't expect your white man to learn kitchen kaffir, or Swahili, or whatever, not when you got on the diplomatic level."
Cliff Jackson was thinking out loud. "So far, El Hassan is an unknown. Rumor has it that he's everything from a renegade Egyptian, to an escaped Mau-Mau chief, to a Senegalese sergeant formerly in the French West African forces. But when he starts running into the press and they find that Homer and his closest associates all speak English, and most of them with an American accent, there's going to be some fat in the fire."
"And El Hassan will have lost some of his mysterious glamour," Homer added thoughtfully.
Even Moroka, the South African, was beginning to accept the idea. "If El Hassan, himself, refused in the presence of foreigners ever to speak anything but Esperanto, the aura of mystery would continue."
Jimmy Peters, elaborating and obviously pushing an opinion he and his brother had already discussed, said, "We make it a rule that every school, both locally taught and foreign, must teach Esperanto as a required subject. All El Hassan governmental affairs would be conducted in that language. Anybody at all trying to get anywhere in the new regime would have to learn the official inter-African tongue."
"Oh, brother," Cliff groaned, "that means me." He brightened. "We haven't any books or anything, as yet."
Isobel laughed at him. "I'll take on your studies, Cliff. We have a few books. Those that Homer and his team used to kill time with. And as soon as we're in a position to make requests for foreign aid of the great powers, Esperanto grammars, dictionaries and so forth can be high on the list."
With a sharp cry, almost a bark, a figure jumped into the entrance and with a bound into the center of the tent, sub-machinegun in hand. "All right, everybody. On your feet. The place is raided!"
Dave Moroka leaped to his feet, his hand tearing with blurring speed for his holstered hand gun. "Where's that bodyguard?" he yelled.
VII
"Hold it," Homer Crawford roared, jumping to his own feet and grabbing the South African in his arms. He glared at the newcomer. "Kenny, you idiot, you're lucky you don't have a couple of holes in you."
Kenny Ballalou, grinning widely, stared at Dave Moroka. "Jeepers," he said, "you got that gun out fast. Don't you ever stick 'em up when somebody has the drop on you?"
Dave Moroka relaxed, the side arm dropping back into its holster. Homer Crawford released him and the South African ran a hand over his mouth and shook his head ruefully at Kenny.
Isobel and Cliff crowded up, the one to kiss Kenny happily, the other to pound him on the back.
Homer made introductions to Dave Moroka and the Peters brothers.
"I've told you about Kenny," he wound it up. "I sent him over to the west to raise a harka of Nemadi to help in taking Tamanrasset." He joined Cliff Jackson in giving the smaller man an affectionate blow on the shoulder. "What luck did you have, Kenny?"
Kenny Ballalou rubbed himself ruefully. "If you two will stop beating, I'll tell you. I didn't recruit a single Nemadi."
Homer Crawford looked at him.
Kenny said to the tent at large. "Anybody got a drink around here? Good grief, have I been covering ground."
Isobel bustled off to a corner where she'd amassed most of their remaining European type supplies, but she kept her attention on him.
Dave Moroka said, his voice unbelieving, "You mean you haven't brought any assistance at all?"
Kenny grinned around at them. "I didn't say that. I said I didn't recruit any of the Nemadi. I never even got as far as their territory."
Homer Crawford sank back onto the small crate he'd been using as a chair before Kenny's precipitate entrance. "O.K.," he said, "stop dramatizing and let us know what happened."
Kenny spread his hands in a sweeping gesture. "The country's alive from here to Bidon Cinq and south to the Niger. Bourem and Gao have gone over to El Hassan and a column of followers was descending on Niamey. They should be there by now. I never got a
s far as Nemadi country. I could have recruited ten thousand fighting men, but I didn't know what we'd do with them in this country. So I weeded through everybody who volunteered and took only veterans. Men who'd formerly been in the French forces, or British, or whatever. Louis Wallington and his team were in Bourem when I got there and--"
"Who is Louis Wallington?" Jack Peters said.
Homer looked over at the Peters brothers and Dave Moroka. "Head of a six-man Sahara Development Project team like the one I used to head." His eyes went back to Kenny. "What about Louis?"
"He's come in with us. Didn't know how to get in touch, so he was working on his own. And Pierre Dupaine. Remember him, the fellow from Guadeloupe in the French West Indies, used to be an operative of the African Affairs sector of the French Community? Well, he and a half dozen of his colleagues have come in and were leading an expedition on Timbuktu. But Timbuktu had already joined up too, before they got there--"
"Wow," Homer said. "It's really spreading."
Cliff said, "Why isn't all this on the radio?"
Isobel had brought Kenny a couple of ounces of cognac from their meager supply. He knocked it back thankfully.
Kenny said to Cliff, "Things are moving too fast, and communications have gone to pot." He looked at Homer. "Have any of these journalists found you yet?"
"What journalists?"
Kenny laughed. "You'll find out. Half the newspapers, magazines, newsreels and TV outfits in the world are sending every man they can release into this area. They're going batty trying to find El Hassan. Man, do you realize the extent of the country your followers now dominate?"
Homer said blankly, "I hadn't thought of it. Besides, most of what you've been saying is news to us here. We've been keeping on the prod."
Kenny grinned widely. "Well, the nearest I can figure it, El Hassan is ruler of an area about the size of Mexico. At least it was yesterday. By today, you can probably tack on Texas."
Jimmy Peters, serious faced as usual, said, "Things are moving so fast, we're going to have to run to keep ahead of El Hassan's followers. One thing, Homer, we're going to have to have a press secretary."
"Elmer Allen was going to handle that, but he's still up north," Isobel said.