Slave Ship

by Frederik Pohl

  The dog brightened and, with assurance, took several more steps. Click, click, click; and then the clicking stopped. The dog had veered away from the direction of the paper cup.

  Josip was beginning to get the hang of it. He lolled his tongue worriedly for only a second, then he tried another direction, at random. Silence. Then another, and this time it was straight for the cup. Click, click until the dog was standing right at the cup, touching it with his nose.

  It might have taken three or four minutes in all, .but, guided by Semyon's cricket noises, the dog unarguably did exactly what Semyon had promised. He pushed the cup, touched it with his paw, rolled it with his nose. Eventually he picked it up, and eventually he carried it to the wastebasket. Like Shannon's mechanical mouse, he made random motions until he found one that paid off (with a click); and continued with it purposefully until the pay-off stopped.

  It all went quite rapidly. The cup went into the waste-basket and Semyon came gleefully from behind the screen. "Ah, Logan?" he asked. "Training? Or language?"

  I was getting sleepy. I left him and looked in on the last stages of checking my digital computers.

  Well, I am no more stupid than most; but man's mind is divided into compartments, leakproof and thought-tight. I had been polite with Semyon, but I had not been convinced.

  Set aside the question of what it all had to do with the Navy or the Caodais—that was a separate problem. On its own merits, what Semyon was doing was interesting enough. And perhaps it was even important, in a way. But to call it language? Ridiculous. I had at least a nodding acquaintance with the theory of language. Language is a supple and evocative thing; how could you dignify a one-word vocabulary by that term? Imagine compressing information, any quantity whatsoever of information into a simple yes-and-no code.

  Thinking which, I checked the installation of my digital computers, capable of infinite subtle operations, packed with countless bits of knowledge and instruction. And all of it transcribed, summarized and digested into what the mathematicians call the binary system, and reproduced in the computers by the off-or-on status of electronic cells.

  III

  MAYBE I WAS STUPID. But you have to admit that the idea of binary language is hard to take.

  Animals, after all, are not electronic computers. They are flesh and blood like ourselves. I would have thought of talking to animals in a mathematical code about as soon as I would have thought of talking to my RAGNAROK in German. . . .

  And then I found out that, way back in the fifties, people had begun to do just that. I poked through the briefing documents in the project library until I found a resume of some trials that had taken place, long ago, in England, on a computer called APEXC—heaven knows why. They set the computer the problem of translating German into English; and the computer, no doubt, clicked and hummed and blew a couple of fuses, and then settled down to the job of squeezing the sense of one language into the forms of another.

  It didn't say just how well APEXC made out, but there were hints. In the first place, some mere human had to give APEXC a hand in the clinches—what they called post-editing, meaning the choice, from context, of several possible translations for a single word. But it worked.

  So I read farther—on animal communication, this time. I found Semyon's mother's "invention" in the literature—also way back in the early fifties. I found sample vocabularies for cow, for dog, for crow, even for rabbit and duck. Some of the "words" were kind of interesting. For crow, a B-natural whole note, two staccato A-sharp quarter notes and a scattering of grace notes. Translation: Beat it, there's an eagle coming. Crow was one of the simpler vocabularies, only about fifty identified words; but it was astonishing what corvus could convey to his friends with a few simple caws. And some of the beasts, nearly mute, got considerable meaning across without any sound at all.

  Take the Bombay duck's train-switching wiggle of the tail feathers, for instance. Translation: "I love you very much, honey, let's get married."

  I suspected, at about that point, that some of the early researchers were carried away by their senses of humor. "Language?" I complained to Semyon in our quarters, while I was reading the briefing books and he was playing something he called a balalaika, "How can they call that language? If my mouth waters, that means I want to eat, but is mouth-watering a word? It's only a reflex action, Semyon!"

  He didn't miss a chord. He fired at me: "Is better, Logan, that you consider the analogy of onomatopoeia!"

  Well, that stopped me—until I looked it up; and then it stopped me in a different way. Onomatopoeia: the formation of words from instinctive or mimetic sounds, thought by some to be the essential origin of all language.

  All right, grant Semyon's point. Assume that the supple English language was really nothing but a refined and codified collection of yelps and wheezes. Assume that animal grunts and posturings were language as well.

  What did all that have to do with me?

  Finding out took some time—and a lot of work, of which my own was about the smallest part. Remember Manhattan Project? It had a big, difficult, important job. The United States needed an isotope of radium—U235, as every schoolboy knows—and they needed lots of it. They even knew ways they might get it—had already got it, in fact, in microgram quantities. There was thermal diffusion—the endless flow of uranium salts through osmotic barriers. There was the mass spectrograph. There was the "breeder" reaction; and there were others. Manhattan Project had to make a decision.

  So they decided to do them all.

  That was the military mind at work, and who is to say they were wrong? Project Mako worked along the same lines. We had half a dozen paralleling projects going at once. Lineback's own group was tediously expanding their vocabulary of Cow. Semyon Timiyazev was bedeviling his little dogs with yes-no codes, persuading them to talk to him. A team of four full lieutenants was reading meaning into the elevation of a dog's tail, and translating it into flipper-positions for the seals they were given to work with. And more.

  And I, with a fifty-year-old WAVE, a Barnard graduate with a degree in statistical mathematics, to help me, was assigned the programming of a computer series that would make sense out of what they were doing.

  It wasn't easy. It was simple enough to assign conceptual values to the parts of language, and I couldn't complain about the equipment the Navy gave me. The basic unit was an old mercury-delay RAGNAROK; but some considerate genius in BuSup had added a self-checking circuit to flush triple voltage through the tubes to pick out the bad ones, between operations; so that the unit was pretty reliably good for 99-six-nines per cent effective operation. There were forty-eight memory tanks in the mercury-delay class, plus a batch of magnetic drums for instructions and a large electrostatic storage unit. With its card punch, reader and teleprinter, it pretty well filled my space. I looked at it and felt something like the midget who married the fat lady: It was a lot of computer to handle all by myself.

  But the hard part wasn't running the computer, it was making sense out of what came out.

  Semyon had told me so. He formed the habit of dropping in on me for a coffee break now and then. More now than then; I don't know if all Russians are the same way, and if they are it might account for the way they made out in the war, but he seemed to need his coffee break every hour on the hour. He said:

  "Is a question of vocabulary, Logan. RAGNAROK has not the vocabulary."

  I said stiffly, "A computer a quarter the size of RAGNAROK translated Russian back in the fifties."

  "Ah, Russian, you say," he said mildly. "It is the language of animals, you say?"

  "Oh, Semyon. I didn't mean—"

  "No, no, no, I do not mean I am insulted. I only ask, is Russian the language of animals? It is not, we will suppose. It is merely a human language."

  "Merely?"

  "Merely! Small vocabulary, you see. Not like animal, large."

  I stared at him. "If I understand what you're saying," I said, "which is unlikely, you're trying to t
ell me that animals have a bigger vocabulary than Russ—than people."

  "Exactly so, Logan." He nodded gravely. "Think! Is it engraved on your machine, that motto? 'Think.' Read the motto, Logan, and do as it says. Think, for example, if an animal possesses the capacity for abstract thought. He does not, you will say? Correct."

  "But that makes a smaller vocabulary, doesn't it?"

  "Ah." Semyon crossed his legs, sipped his coffee and got ready for a nice, long chat. He said professorially: "Be, for the moment, my little dog Josip, and think of how he thinks. Are you and I 'men', Logan, in Josip's eyes? Or is each of us a man, an individual—you, perhaps, 'man who sits and watches' and I 'man who makes clicking sounds and gives food'? It is the latter, you will see. For that is how nouns begin in speech, as proper nouns, not class-words but names for particular things. This is why, with Josip, I have followed in the great tradition of my mother and cut to the root. Two words! Just a single word and a silence which is—"

  "You told me," I said shortly. "Do you mean that to an animal each thing has its own individual word?"

  "I simplify," Semyon said sunnily. "But you grasp my meaning."

  I did; and I also grasped his arm and escorted him to the door. But it made the job look even harder than before.

  But things got done. Almost without knowing it, we were in full swing. The seeker groups fed me long lines of symbols, representing, they thought, the conceptual elements of the language of cows and seals, dogs and rabbits, cats and pigs. We got nowhere with the rabbits—too stupid; and the pigs were farm bred, too fat to do anything but eat. But with the other animals there was progress.

  The seekers watched the animals as Harun-al-Rashid did his harem favorites. They recorded every sound, photographed every movement. With chemical nostrils they examined the odors the animals gave off (someone had remembered that bees use odor to indicate sources of nectar); with a million dollars' worth of electronic equipment they palped the electromagnetic spectrum for signals that coarse human senses could not read.

  And they found things. Sound, scent, body posture, bodily functions: These were the elements of language.

  To whatever seemed to have meaning they assigned a symbol—even if the meaning itself was not clear. (Usually it wasn't.) Then they had a list of the essential parts of the animal vocabulary—lacking translations for the most part, but very nearly complete. And that was half their job.

  And the other half was to record, in infinite detail, everything the animals felt and saw and experienced: That was the list of referents for the "word" symbols.

  The two lists gave, first, the "words," second, the meanings.

  And then it was up to me and my WAVE to tape them, program them, and feed them to RAGNAROK, so that RAGNAROK's patient electronic mind could, from frequency and from context and from comparison with the known parts of other languages, match symbols with referents, and make for us a dictionary of Pig and Cat and Seal.

  I made the dictionary; but when I thought I could use it to win an argument with Semyon, I was out of my mind. He came wandering in one afternoon for coffee and found the first pages of a typed report summarizing what we had learned of Essential Cat.

  I tapped him on the shoulder, "It says 'Most Secret' at the top of the page," I reminded him.

  "Eh?" He looked at me absently. "Of course, Logan. Most interesting. I will return it in the morning."

  I stopped him as he was walking out the door and took it away from him. I said gently, "You'll probably get a copy, but not from me. Anyway, you won't enjoy it, because it makes a liar out of you."

  "Oh?" He twinkled at me. "Is difficult, Logan. How often can a maiden be betrayed? And what is this lie?"

  I hesitated, then showed him—after all, he'd already looked at it. "Cat," I said. "Look them over, Semyon. Fifty-eight symbols, that's all. Seven tail movements, three kinds of rictus, twenty-two noises—add them up. Fifty-eight; and you said the animal vocabulary would be larger than the human."

  "I did," he acknowledged. "And I still do. Fifty-eight symbols, but are they fifty-eight words? I think not. Call them phonemes, like the sounds of English. There are forty-some of those, I think? But put them together this way and that, and you have three, four, I do not know how many hundred thousand words." He sighed. "Do you see?"

  Oh, I saw. But I didn't believe him. But if Semyon hadn't convinced me with all of his logic, he had still accomplished something, for he got me interested in the work we were doing.

  Consider the jackdaw. Browsing among the reference materials in our library, while my overworked WAVE programmed like a mad thing, I found that there was a man named Konrad Lorenz who managed to talk Jackdaw back when Hitler ruled Germany. That was interesting. I hadn't thought of birds talking—the sailor's parrot, yes; but "parroting" had become a symbol of empty and uncomprehending making of sounds, and it was rather a surprise to find that Lorenz had managed to speak to jackdaws, to understand their mating terms and their rattling "Hey, rube!" warning call. Lorenz had learned how to call a greylag goose to him: "Rangangang-ang, rangangangang." And the same term in Mallard was: "Quahg, gegegegeg; quahg, gegegegeg!"

  I learned how to say "hello" in Chimpanzee, a sort of coughing "Oo-oo-oo!" And at last I learned what Semyon was talking about, when I discovered how the beaver's slapped tail on the water is colored by context, how the white-tail deer's lifted "flag" can signal either alarm or all-clear.

  But all the same, when he came in and found me in our room, surrounded with ancient texts, I told him: "You're wrong. The animal vocabularies are smaller than ours. They make one word do the work of many—but so do we.

  He sighed. "Khorashaw," he said. "That is to say, all right, never mind, I agree with you. It is the Russian for 'okay.' Have it your way. It is an argument, you must understand, which can be won by either side, and I do not wish to pursue it further."

  Because he'd lost, of course. It was disappointing to have him give in so easily. I suppose I looked a little irritated, because he said anxiously: "You are not angry, Logan? It is a foolish argument if it angers friends. We shall not be angry, shall we?"

  I looked at him, as friendly and as wistful as his own little dog, and there was only one answer.

  I glanced at the book in my lap and I said: "Hok hug-hug, hag kuag, guaggak."

  He stared at me.

  "That," I explained, "is Gibbon for Khorashaw."

  IV

  IT WAS black night. The stars were bright outside our window; and the Project Mako alarm bell was ringing General Quarters.

  Semyon snored, sputtered, choked and sat up. I jumped out of my own bed, slammed down the shades, slapped on the light. It was the first GQ I had heard since I left Spruance, but the old habits didn't die. General Quarters meant get to your combat stations now. I was in my pants and on my way out the door before the springs on my bed stopped vibrating, and Semyon was only a yard behind me. The only thing was, what combat stations?

  But we did what came naturally, and I suppose it was the right thing to do. We found ourselves out in the corridor, along with every other officer in the BOQ, Semyon, buttoning his shirt, bawled over the noise: "What is, Logan? Can it be that the Orientals have attacked?"

  There was a rattle from the loud-hailer before I could answer, and Kedrick's tinny voice came over it, blaring: "All officers to the wardroom, on the double! All officers to the wardroom! On the double!"

  We swept into the wardroom like the Golden Horde through Russia—and just about as unkempt. The mess attendants showed up, blinking and rubbing their eyes; Kedrick, standing on a table with a strange Army major next to him, snapped: "Coffee, you men! On the double! We're pulling out of here in twenty minutes."

  As the mess attendants were disappearing, Kedrick shrilled: "Shut up, everybody! Keep it down! The Cow-dyes are busting out of the stockade and we're going to shove 'em pack in. Major Lansing will explain."

  The exec bobbed his plump chin at the strange Army officer, who growled: "Now you know as m
uch as I do, except for details. I'm security officer at Eighth Group, up the beach; about an hour ago there was some ship-to-shore shelling, mostly flares and noisemakers; and then the damn Cow-dyes began boiling up. They swamped the guards, took our headquarters building, knocked out our radio, and kept on going. I've got six personnel-carrying copters outside—" I recognized then the fluttering rumble that had been subconsciously bothering me "—and you're the nearest effectives." He glanced at us wryly, but let it go at that. "Your commander is already on his way there; Lieutenant Kedrick and I will command two columns to relieve the guards. If there are any guards left to relieve by the time we get there." He moved aside as the mess men came in with the first pots of coffee. "I'm sorry," he added, "to be going out of channels this way, but war is hell." He glanced at his watch. "We're taking off in five minutes. You want coffee, drink it. You want more clothes, go get them. Weapons will be issued at the copters."

  And that was that. It was like being in the Navy again.

  Semyon, sleepy-eyed and wobbly, shouldered his way to me. "Ah, Logan!" he exulted. "We shoot some Orientals, I imagine. It will give me pleasure. Only"—he looked oddly shy—"a favor, Logan?"

  I burned my lips on the coffee. I managed to say, "What favor?"

  "Josip. Fortune knows what your Bureau of Supply will do with him if I do not return; I do not suppose that a dog is a standard article to be furnished to ships and shore installations. Will you—"

  I stared at him. "Sure," I said weakly.

  It was just cracking daylight as we came fluttering down into the mangroves. There was no sign of the ship-to-shore firing the major had talked about, but out over the pearl-skied Atlantic I could see the lights of hunter copters stabbing at the waves; if there were Caodai vessels out there, they would be wisest not to surface. It would be a while before marine vessels with any range could reach the scene; but the copters were there, and I imagined I could see the skittering hydrofoils on the surface, "Ssst!" said Semyon sharply as we banked and dipped. "Over there, Logan! Like beetles in barn dung!"