Ten

"Get her! I shrieked. "Damn you, get her!"

For a fraction of a second, St. Peter and Cleopatra just stood there; but by the time I could get the words out of my mouth, they had recovered from their surprise, and both shot down into the depths after her. All three disappeared from sight in a flash.

As I waited the fourteen hours that the next three minutes took to go by, I was not helped by Mike's voice cursing and swearing in my earphones, "Why the hell you let her go out first when you might have known something like this would happen! I told you the goddamn rope wouldn't be any good! (He hadn't.) The trouble is that these goddamn women have to have their goddamn way all the time, and you gotta spend half your goddamn time rescuing them and the other half waiting for them to get their face on straight! God, how I hate women! Where are those bastards? If they don't bring her or her body back, I'll pull them apart bubble by bubble! You'd think they could have realized that if she wasn't like them they ought to be caref--where the hell are they? Don't you see them?"

"Will you shut up?"

"And why the hell aren't you doing something? She's your sister, in case you've forgotten!"

"Mike! Shut up!"

I'd never actually heard him rant before. He knew as well as I did that she'd lost her mass-reducer, and was accelerating down to the center of the planet; and even if I could reach her, she'd be so heavy there'd be no hope of my getting her back up with my reduced mass. The only chance she had of not being incinerated or crushed to death by the tremendous pressure down in those depths was that the Jovians could get to her before the pressure got too much for them, and that they'd be strong enough to swim back up with all that weight. So all I could do was stand there in the doorway of the airlock and wait--and pray.

Eventually, I thought I saw a speck below me, which turned out to be the three of them, quite close. Evidently, the hydrogen below was thick, and only seemed to be transparent. "They've got her!" I shouted to Mike.

"Is she alive?"

"I don't know yet. She doesn't look conscious."

They were carrying up a dead weight, and it was quite a struggle for both of them. When they came within earshot, I shouted, "Is she alive?" It was foolish to shout, since the only thing that happened was that my head rang inside my helmet, and the radio didn't produce--to them--any greater volume.

"Alive? What is that?" said Michele--or her voice, which might have been either St. Peter or Cleopatra. "I do not understand."

"Never mind," I said. "That is, okay. (That word they had learned.) Bring her here. That is, come with Michele here." It was a beautiful time to be struggling with a language barrier.

But they understood and brought her to the hatch of the airlock, and laid her on the floor. Immediately, the ship listed severely. "You go outside--there," I said. "We will come later. Now I must help Michele."

They left the airlock. I closed the outer door and said, "Mike, give me air in here. I'm going to look at her. She's still unconscious."

"Is the door closed?"

"I did it myself. Just get this water out and air in pronto."

As the little room was emptying, I was standing looking at Michele in her space suit, not daring to move to prevent sparks that would blow us up, with no way to find out if she was alive or not.

I consoled myself during this maddeningly slow process by thinking that if she were alive, this few minutes wouldn't make any difference; she'd probably recover. If the space suit were damaged by the pressure or a rupture, she'd be dead, and delay wouldn't matter.

It didn't help, of course.

At last, the liquid was out of the chamber, which meant that it was full of oxygen. I reached down carefully to pull off her glove and take her pulse, and felt her mass-reducer.

"Idiot! Nincompoop! Fool!" I said to myself. I had been so convinced that it had been knocked off that it hadn't even occurred to me to look for it. It twisted the dial in the direction of "lighter," and the ship righted itself. As quickly as I could, I got the suit off, and felt her pulse.

It was beating.

I was about to lift her back through the inner door into the ship, when she said faintly, "Paul?"

"Thank God!" I said.

"What happened?"

"St. Peter must have twisted your mass-reducer when he was examining you, and you fell."

"That's right." Her voice was stronger. "I remember. He had my wrist, and then all of a sudden, I felt heavy, and went down. I guess I fainted. Did you come down after me?"

"No, they did. Thank God they can swim so fast. You went down like lead. How do you feel?"

"I'm all right now. I'll have to go out and--"

"Oh, no, you don't. You're going to sit inside here until we're sure you're all right. We'll hook you up to the medical console and let earth decide if you can go out, or if we have to go back and have you looked after."

"Paul, you can't do that! Not now that we've found them. I'm perfectly all right.

"We'll know about that in an hour. Can you walk? No, never mind, I'll keep carrying you. You're light as a feather."

"I can walk."

"Forget it. It'll be a little awkward going through this door, but I'll manage. Look out for your foot there. Okay. Well, here she is, Mike." Mike was, of course, right there inside the door of the first stage.

"I'm okay, Mike," she said.

"Good," he said, and went back down.

"Wow!" she said, looking after him. "It's nice to be loved, isn't it? Listen, Paul; if I've got to be hooked up to that stupid machine, I'm going down now and get it over with. I am perfectly all right, but I can see why you don't want to take my word for it. No, don't bother to carry me; I can walk."

I followed her down, and as I did so, I noticed St. Peter, full of eyes, at one window, and Cleopatra at the other.

"She is alive," I said into the mike, and then Michele, who had to sit in her seat attached anyway to the "stupid machine," took over. Mike was over by the mass-reduction console doing something-or-other, not saying a word, and at the moment I was in no mood to engage in small talk with him.

"I am not hurt," she said, and one of them said, "Hurt? I do not understand."

There followed a tedious, lengthy explanation of what we meant, which involved things like tearing a piece of paper, bending wire, and so on, before they caught on. It was strange, because they were really slow in grasping this one concept.

Finally, St. Peter said, "Now understand I . . . I understand now. But did you . . . (he was searching for a way to say it) was it good to you me to hurt you?"

"Was it good for me for you to hurt me?" she said musingly. "Oh! I see. Did I want you to hurt me? No, of course not."

"I do not understand."

"It was an accident."

There followed another lesson, where Michele kept saying that sometimes you do things without wanting, and he seemed to understand, but kept interjecting "But hurt?" until finally Michele asked, "You mean you can't be hurt by accident?"

"Yes. Good! Can you?"

"Yes, of course."

"Like animals. We must have much . . . not do acts of hurting . . . acts of hurting?" he repeated and she nodded, which he knew how to interpret, "acts of hurting by accident."

"You have to be careful."

"To be careful is to think not to do acts of hurting?"

"Yes. Good."

"We must be careful with animals. And with you."

"Yes. But with you, you can't be hurt."

"We can be hurt, but only wanting."

"You're a strange people," she said. "Among us, it is possible very easily to be hurt."

"Do you also become . . . not moving, not seeing, not doing, as the animals do?"

"Do we die? Yes."

"What is not die? I understand die. What is the word that is not die?"

"Live. I live; I am alive."

"Ah. Live is verb. Alive is adjective. Die is verb. What is the adjective?" (She had taught them the names of the parts of speech.)

"Dead."

"Paul said you were still alive. So you could have been dead."

"Yes, he was afraid I had died. Do you people die?"

"Persons do not. I did not think that persons could die. Yet you are persons, because you talk and can understand. Among us, animals cannot understand, and only persons can understand."

"That is true among us also. But persons die among us. Do you live forever? Live and live and live?"

"Not as you see us, but we do live forever, yes. But I must talk about that when I have more words. Do you have an instrument, as we have, that makes words quickly, so that you could give me all your words, so that I could know them and how they greet each other?" It developed that what he meant by this was a dictionary and grammar.

"We have books, but they are different." She showed him one, and pointed out the words, holding them up to the window. It was look-say, but he caught on that it wasn't really a new language, but a different form of the language we were speaking. And he asked then if the sounds we made on the communicator were this kind of thing, and when we said Yes, but that the letters were arranged differently, he asked to hear it to see if he could understand.

"Paul," said Michele, "Why don't you ask Jonathan to see if somebody down there would read the dictionary to us? And an English grammar. We could have them listen to it, and he could hear the communicator while we're asking them. Tell him what you're saying."

"You mean you think they can break the code? And memorize the dictionary on one hearing."

"Why not? They haven't forgotten anything we've said so far."

"Brother!"

In any case, I began typing to Jonathan, assuring him once again that I wasn't crazy, that we were going to try an experiment in communication, and would he please find a dictionary and begin reading it to us, and send it by radio instead of laser, so our radio here could amplify it and output it to the Jovians.

This took a bit of explaining and discussion between Mike and me, but it seemed possible. St. Peter didn't seem to make much out of the conversation, whether because of the code or because of the many words he wouldn't know wasn't clear.

In any case, a half hour later, Jonathan's voice began reading a collegiate dictionary that they had there in the space center, and for the next three hours, the Jovians sat like eggs, listening. As it happened, we moved into our five-hour blackout at this point, and all we had arrived at was the letter E.

At the silence, we explained as well as we could what had happened, and they wondered if we could manage the process with more "celerity" the next time.

Our conversations at this point took a surprising and alarming turn. The Jovians suddenly were possessed of a vocabulary far surpassing our own in the A to E range, and were as ignorant as before in words beginning with the other letters of the alphabet. They naturally assumed, at first, that we knew all the words they had heard, and quickly learned that sometimes we were as at sea about what they were saying as they were when we used words outside their range.

For instance, when the discussion over the sudden silence from earth was over, St. Peter remarked to Michele--as near as I can recall, "I am ecstatic with beatitude that you are not delacerated in actuality because of your contretemps; it would have been calamitous to me to have been the author of a catastrophe."

Michele just managed to be able to say, "Why, thank you, St. Peter," before she broke down in peals of laughter.

"Have I exacerbated her distress?" said St. Peter, looking at me with fifteen eyes or so. (After a while, you caught on somehow to what these people were mainly looking at.)

"No," I answered, biting my lip and swallowing hard to keep a straight face. "She's doing what you do when you do this," and I moved my hand in an imitation of the backward somersault they made.

"Ah, she is amused! I am consoled. But why? Is my employment of your language erroneous?"

"No, not exactly," I answered. "But we actually use only a few of the words you're learning, and somehow, we put them together differently."

"I comprehend. There is an art to the employment of words; I assumed that when I became acquainted with so many words that seem to say the same thing. But this coarctation will soon be alleviated when we have the aid of other books in which you use words correctly. Erewhile, I hope it will not be egregiously burdensome to you to bear with our cumbersome babble. You do not have any difficulty understanding me?"

"No, you're perfectly clear."

"Admirable."

"But do you agree that it would be better if we heard the additional aspects of the dictionary before we displayed our abodes to you? It would be cunctatory, I admit, but if you are amenable, it would enable us to ascertain by comparison with the definitions which words are the common ones and effectuate a more elegant conversation; this dyslogia is annoying, and the delay would not be abhorrent, I hope."

"Certainly, St. Peter," I said.

"Then we will busy ourselves consolidating the acquisitions so far, if this is agreeable to you."

"by all means."

"What'd he say?" said Mike.

"I'm not sure, frankly, but I think he meant that they want to hear the rest of the dictionary so they'll be able to talk down to our level--and I gather he was apologizing for the delay before they take us to where they live."

"Man! From 'Me Tarzan, you Jane' to this in one easy lesson! So they've already figured out that we're just this side of idiots."

"It kind of looks like it, from their point of view."

"It's going to be a long stay. Somehow, I can't picture myself being condescended to by a blob of soap suds."

"You realize what he's saying, by the way," said Michele. "They're not only memorizing the dictionary on one hearing, they're checking the words with each other to see which are the usual ones and which aren't--probably they've figured out that the words used in the definitions are the ones everybody knows. Can you imagine having a mind like that?"

"I'm not a hundred per cent sure I'd want one," said Mike. "And certainly not if it meant having a body like that."

"Really, Mike!"

"Really yourself, and see how you like it."

"Paul, remember how Grampy used to listen to talking books when we were kids?"

"What about it?" I asked her.

"Remember how he used to turn up the speed on those old records so you could barely hear the words?"

"I think I see where you're headed."

"Right. Instead of having poor Jonathan read the dictionary, we can just ask him to go to the library and borrow the disk they've got the talking version on instead of ordering a printout, and then broadcast it to us at the highest speed they can stand. That may cut the time down a lot. And they probably won't be satisfied with just the dictionary; we could beam up our best literature, and they could learn all about our culture, and--"

"Good God, Michele!" broke in Mike. "It's going to be bad enough having them know a ton of words we don't, but for them to be able to teach us our own literature and history is too much!"

"What's wrong with it? If they can handle it?"

"I don't think I can handle it!"

"I agree with Michi," I said. "I don't see any problem."

"You wait till they start treating you like a four-year old."

"Well, so what?" said Michele. "We are four-year-olds in comparison to them. You can see that already."

"Anyway," I said, "They're very polite."

"That just makes it worse," he said.

"Well, even if it is humiliating, I think we should do it, if they want us to; it'd be a friendly gesture."

"Okay, go ahead and have your way. You always do. But I warned you."

So I told St. Peter what we were planning, and he was "enraptured," as he said, at the idea. "We had anticipated asking you," he remarked, "but were not certain of your acceptance of the design."

So we made our request to Jonathan as soon as we got back into communication again, and an hour later were informed that the only Talking Book dictionary the library had at the moment was the complete Oxford English Dictionary. "So they sent it over," he said; "It has the history of the usage of the words too, you know, and so it might be useful if they're as brilliant as you say they are. I'm going to start over again from the beginning on Fast Forward. Let me know if it's too fast."

Mike groaned, and said, "Oh well, what's a few thousand more words we've never heard of?"