by James Blish
With a mixture of politeness and alarm, Valkol left him. It was none too soon. He had a bad taste in his mouth which had nothing to do with his ordeals . . . and, though nobody knew better than he how empty all vengeance is, an inexpungeable memory of Jillith.
Maybe, he thought, "Justice is Love," after all—not a matter of style but of spirit. He had expected all these questions to vanish when the antidote took full hold, wiped into the past with the personalities who had done what they had done, but they would not vanish; they were himself.
He had won, but obviously he would never be of use to High Earth again.
In a way, this suited him. A man did not need the transduction serum to be divided against himself; he still had many guilts to accept, and not much left of a lifetime to do it in.
While he was waiting, perhaps he could learn to play the sareh.
The poem which served as a springboard for this story is cited in the text, but someone with a taste for cryptanalysis might like to puzzle out the "synthetic language" used by Hrestce (whose name is a part of the code). Clue: It came 100 percent off a theater marquee in Brooklyn, and it is not a foreign language—just English with some letters missing.
WRITING OF THE RAT
They had strapped the Enemy to a chair, which in John Jahnke's opinion was neither necessary nor smart, but Jahnke was only a captain (Field rank). Ugly the squat, grey-furred, sharp-toothed creatures were, certainly; and their thick bodies, well over six feet tall, were frighteningly strong. But they were also proud and intelligent. They never ran amok in a hopeless situation; that would be beneath their dignity.
The irons were going to make questioning the creature a good deal more difficult than it would have been other-wise—and that would have been difficult enough. But Jahnke was only a Field officer, and, what was worse, invalided home. Here it could hardly matter that he knew the Enemy better than any other human being alive. His opinions would be weighed against the fact that he had been invalided home from a Field where there were no battles. And the two years of captivity? A rest cure, the Home officers called them.
"Where did you take him?" he asked Major Matthews. "Off a planet of 31 Cygni," Matthews growled, loosening his tie. "Whopping sun, a hundred fifty times as big as Sol, six hundred fifty light-years from here. All alone there in a ship no bigger than a beer can."
"A scout?"
"What else? All right, he's ready." Matthews looked at the two hard-faced enlisted men behind the Enemy's chair. One of them grinned slightly. "Ask him where he's from."
The grey creature turned fiat, steady eyes on Jahnke, obviously already aware that he was the interpreter. Sweating, Jahnke put the question.
"Hnimesacpeo," the Enemy said.
"So far so good," Jahnke murmured. "Hnimesacpeo tce rebo?"
"Tca."
"Well?" Matthews said.
"That's the big province in the northern hemisphere of Vega III. Thus far he's willing to be reasonable."
"The hell with that. We already knew he was Vegan. Where's his station?"
Whether or not the Enemy was Vegan was unknown, and might never be known. But there was no point in arguing that with Matthews; he already thought he knew. After a moment's struggle with the language, Jahnke tried: "Sftir etminbi rokolny?"
"R-daee 'blk."
"Either he doesn't understand me," Jahnke said resignedly, "or he won't talk while he's in the chair. He says, 'I just told you.'"
"Try again."
"Dirafy edic," Jahnke said. "Stfir etminbu rakolna?" "Hnimesacpeo." The creature's eyes blinked, once. "Ta hter o alkbëe."
"It's no good," Jahnke said. "He's giving me the same answer, hut this time in the pejorative form—the one they use for draft animals and children. It might go better if you'd let him out of those irons."
Matthews laughed shortly. "Tell him to open up or expect trouble," he said. "The irons are only the beginning, if he's going to be stubborn."
"Sir, if you insist upon this course of action, I will appeal against it. It won't work, and it's counter to policy. We know from long experience Outside that—"
"Never mind about Outside; you're on Earth now," Matthews said harshly. "Tell him what I said."
Worse and worse. Jahnke put the message as gently as he could.
The Enemy blinked. "Sehe et broe in icen."
"Well?" Matthews said.
"He says you couldn't run a maze with your shoes off," Jahnke said, with a certain grim relish. The phrase was the worst insult, but Matthews wouldn't know that; the literal translation could mean little to him.
Nevertheless, Matthews had brains enough to know when he was being defied. He flushed slowly. "All right," he told the toughs. "Start on him, and don't start slow."
Jahnke was abruptly wishing that he hadn't translated the insult at all, but the outcome would probably have been the same in the long run. "Sir," he said, his voice ragged, "I request your permission to leave."
"Don't be stupid. D'you think we're doing this for fun?" Since this was exactly what Jahnke thought, he was glad that the question was rhetorical. "Who'll translate when he does talk, if you're not here?"
"He won't talk."
"Yes, he will," Matthews said with relish. "And you can tell him why."
After a moment, Jahnke said stonily: "Ocro hli antsoutinys, fuso tizen et tobëe."
It was a complex message, and Jahnke was none too sure that he had got it right. The Enemy merely nodded once and looked away. There was no way of telling whether he had failed to understand, had understood and was trying to avoid betraying Jahnke, or was merely indifferent. He said: "Seace tce ctisbe." The phrase was formal; it might mean "thank you," but then again it might mean half a hundred equally common expressions, including "hello," "good-bye," and "time for lunch."
"Does he understand?" Matthews demanded.
"I think he does," Jahnke said. "You'll be destroying him for nothing, Major."
The prediction paid off perfectly. Two hours later, the grey creature looked at Matthews out of his remaining, lidless eye, said clearly, "Sehe et broe in icen," and died. He had said nothing else, though he had cried out often.
Somehow, that possible word of thanks he had given Jahnke made it worse, not better.
Jahnke went back to his quarters on shaky legs, to compose a letter of protest. He gave it up after the first paragraph. There was nobody to write to. While he had been Outside, he could have appealed to the Chief of Intelligence Operations (Field), who had been his friend as well as his immediate superior. But now he was in Novoel Washingtongrad where the CIO(F) in his remote flagship swung less weight than Home officers as far down the chain of command as Major Matthews.
It hadn't always been like that. After the discovery of the Enemy, the Field officers had commanded as much instant respect at home as Field officers always had; they were in the position of danger. But as it gradually became clear that there was going to be no war, that the Field officers were bringing home puzzles instead of victories, that the danger Outside was that of precipitating a battle rather than fighting one, the pendulum swung. Now Field officers treated the Enemy with respect, and were despised for it—while the Home officers itched for the chance to show that they weren't soft on the Enemy.
Matthews had had his chance, and would be itching for another.
Jahnke put down his pen and stared at the wall, feeling more than a little sick.
The grey creatures were, as it had turned out, everywhere. When the first interstellar ship had arrived in the Alpha Centauri system, there they were, running the two fertile planets from vast stony cities by means of an elaborate priesthood. The relatively infertile fourth planet they had organized as a tight autarchy of technicians, dominating a high-energy economy of scarcity. They had garrisoned several utterly barren Centaurian planets for what was vaguely called "reasons of policy," meaning that nobody knew why they had.
That had been only a foretaste. They were everywhere. No habit
able planet was without them, no matter how you stretched the definition of "habitable." Their most magnificent achievement was Vega III, an Earthlike world twice the diameter of Earth and at least a century in advance of Earth technologies. But they were found, too, on the major satellite of 61 Cygni C, a "grey ghost" of a star almost small enough to be a gas-giant planet, where they lived tribal lives as cramped and penurious as those of ancient Lapland—and had the Ragnarok-like mythology to go with it.
No one could even guess how long they had known interstellar flight, or where they had come from. The hypothesis that they had originally been Vegans was shaky, based solely on the fact that Vega III was their most highly developed planet yet discovered. As for facts that argued in the opposite direction, there were more than enough, from Jahnke's point of view.
They had, for instance, a common spoken language, but every one of their civilizations had a different written language, usually irreconcilable with all the others—pictograms, phonetic systems, ideograms, hieratic short-hands, inflectional systems, tone-modulated systems, positional systems—the works. The spoken language was so complex that not even Jahnke could speak it above the primer level, for it was based on phoneme placement inside the word; in short, it was totally synthetic, derived from the Enemy's vast knowledge of information theory, and could be matched up in part to any written language imaginable. Thus, there was no way to tell which written language—which always abstracts from speech, and introduces new elements which have nothing to do with speech—might have been the original.
And how can you be sure you know where the Enemy's home planet is, Jahnke brooded, when you can see him still actively exploring and taking over one new system after another, for no other visible reason other than sheer acquisitiveness? How can you tell how long that process has been going on, when no new penetration of human beings to more distant reaches of the galaxy fails to find the grey creatures established on two or three promising planets, and nosing in on half a dozen additional cinder blocks which have nothing to recommend them but the fact that they are large enough to land upon?
"They're nothing but rats," Colonel Singh, the CIO (F ), had once told Jahnke, in an excess of disgust unusual for him. "The whole damned galaxy must be overrun with them. They couldn't have evolved any civilization we ever found them in."
"They're intelligent," Jahnke had protested. "Nobody's yet measured how intelligent they are."
"Sure," Singh had said. "I'll give them that. They're more than intelligent; they're brilliant. Nevertheless, they didn't evolve any of 'their' civilizations, John. They couldn't have, because they—the civilizations—are too diversified. The Enemy maintains all of them with equal thoroughness, and equal indifference. If we could just explore some of those planets, I'll bet we'd find the bones of the original owners. How does that poem of Sand-burg's go?"
His brow furrowed a moment over this apparent irrelevancy, and he quoted:
And the wind shifts
and the dust on a doorsill shifts
and even the writing of the rat footprints
tells us nothing, nothing at all
about the greatest city, the greatest nation
where the strong men listened
and the women warbled: Nothing like us ever was.
"That's how it is," Singh added gloomily. "All these grey rats are doing is picking everybody else's cupboards. They're very good at that. They may well be picking ours before long."
That was the second theory; on the whole, it was the most popular one now. It was the theory under which a man like Matthews could torture to death a creature nine times as intelligent as he was, and with a code of customs and a set of moral standards which made Matthews look like a bushman, on the grounds that the Enemy were merely loathsome scavengers, fit only to sick cats on.
Despite his respect for Piara Singh, Jahnke could find little good to say for the rat theory, either. Both theories pointed, in the end, toward a common military goal—that of finding the Enemy's home planet and destroying it. If Vega III was the Enemy's home, then at least there was a target. If the Enemy were spreading from some other heartland, then the target still remained to be found.
But what good was that? It was military nonsense. The Enemy outnumbered humanity by millions to one. On the highly developed planets like Vega III, the Enemy commanded weapons compared to which humanity's best were only torches to be waved in the face of the inevitable night.
The first moment of open warfare would be the end of humanity.
So far, the grey creatures and humanity were not at war. But the time of the explosion was drawing closer. Jahnke did not really think that the Enemy could be still in ignorance of Earth's practice of picking up its lone scouts for questioning; the Enemy's resources were too great. It was his private theory, shared by Piara Singh, that the Enemy was content to let its scouts be questioned, as long as they were set free unharmed afterwards. After all, the Enemy had once picked up Jahnke under the same circumstances and for the same purpose; it was for that reason that he knew their language better than any other human being; he had lived among them for two years.
But if Matthews' Inquisition methods represented a new and general policy toward these occasional captives, the Enemy would not let that policy go unprotested. The grey creatures were very proud. Jahnke knew that, for they had expected no less pride of him.
And what would happen when one of the Enemy's scouts came nosing acquisitively, at long last, into the Solar system of Earth—even around so cold, dark and useless a world as the satellite of Proserpine, far beyond Pluto? Earth had no use for that rockball, but it would never let the "rats" have it, all the same. Of course, thus far the grey tide had spared the Sol system, but that couldn't last forever. The grey tide had, after all, spared nothing else.
The phone rang insistently, jarring Jahnke out of his bitter reverie. He picked it up.
"Captain Jahnke? One moment, please. Colonel Singh calling."
Jahnke clung to the phone in a state of numb shock, uncertain whether to be delighted or appalled. What could Piara Singh be doing here, out of the high, free emptiness of Outside? Had he been invalided home again, too, or had some failure—
"John? How are you! This is Singh. I called the moment I got in."
"Hello, Colonel, I'm astonished, and pleased. But what—"
"I know what you're thinking," the CIO (F) said rapidly. His voice was high with suppressed eagerness; Jahnke had never heard him sound so young before. "I'm home on my own initiative, on special orders I wormed out of old Wu himself. I brought a prisoner with me—and John, listen, he's the most important prisoner we've ever taken. He told me his name."
"No! They never do. It's against the rules."
"But he did," Singh said, almost bubbling. "It's Hrestce, and in the language it means 'compromise,' isn't that right? I think he was deliberately sent to us with a message. That's why I came home. The key to the whole problem seems to be in his hands, and he obviously wants to talk. I have to have you to listen to him and tell me what it means."
Jahnke's heart tried to rise and sink at the same time, enclosing his whole chest in an awful vise of apprehension. "All right," he said faintly. "Did you notify CIO? Here in Novoe Washingtongrad, I mean?"
"Oh, of course," Singh said. His enthusiasm seemed to be about to burst the telephone handset—and small wonder, after all the setbacks which had made up his career Outside. "They recognized how important this is right away. They've assigned their best interrogation man to me, a Major Matthews. I don't doubt that he's good, but we'll need you first. If you can get here for a preliminary talk with Hrestce—"
"I can get there," Jahnke said tensely. "But don't let anyone else talk to him before I do. This Matthews is dangerous. If he calls before I arrive, stall him. Where are you calling from?"
"At home, on the Kattegat," Singh said. "I have three weeks' leave. You know the place, don't you? You can reach it in an hour, if you can c
atch a rocket right away. I can keep Hrestce in my jurisdiction for you that long easily. Nobody but you and the CIO knows he's here."
"Don't even let CIO to him until I get there. I'll see you in an hour."
"Right, John. Good-bye."
"Seace tce ctisbe."
"Yes—how does it go? Tca."
"Tce; tca."
Trembling with excitement and urgency, Jahnke got the rest of his mussed uniform off, clambered into mufti, and packed his equipment: a tape recorder, two dictionaries compiled by himself, a set of frequency tables for the Enemy language which he had not yet completed, and a toothbrush. At the last moment, he remembered to take his officer's I.D. card, and money to buy his rocket ticket. Now. All ready.
He opened the door to go out.
Matthews was there. His feet were wide apart, his hands locked behind his back, his brow thrust forward. He looked like a lowering, small-scale copy of the Colossus of Rhodes.
"Morning, Captain Jahnke," Matthews said, with a slight and nasty smile. "Going somewhere? The Kattegat, maybe?"
The soldiers behind Matthews, those same two wooden-faced toughs, helped him wait for Jahnke's answer.
After a moment of sickening doubt, Jahnke went back into his quarters, into the kitchen, out of Matthews' sight. He found the bottle of cloudy ammonia his batman used for scrubbing his floors, and shook it until it was full of foam. Then he went back into the front room and threw the bottle as hard as he could into the corridor. It seemed to explode like a bomb.
He had to kick one soldier who made it through the fumes into the front room; but he got away over the man's body, his eyes streaming. Now all he had to do was to make it to Singh before Matthews did.
It would be a near thing. Temporarily, at least, time was on his side, Jahnke was pretty sure. Piara Singh's Kattegat home was a retreat, quite possibly unlisted among the addresses the government had for him; Jahnke had learned of it only through a few moments of nostalgia in which the colonel had indulged over a drink. If so, Matthews would have a difficult time searching the shores of the strait for it, and might think only very belatedly of looking in the wildest part of Jutland.