Smith stepped into view and said blankly, “I don’t understand.”
“Miss Schlupe comes with us. Her suitcase is in Nashville and her beer is in New York. A deplorable state of affairs. Get her to both places, so we can leave.”
Smith stoically turned toward the transmitter.
Chapter 4
They lost track of time.
Day and night were meaningless in the unending light of the softly glowing walls that enclosed them. Hours became a dubious subdivision of a temporal reference that no longer existed. Their watches ran down and were packed away.
They slept when tired. They ate perfunctorily when hungry from an enormous stock of canned goods that Smith had brought from Earth.
They studied.
Smith, displaying qualities that would have made him a creditable success as Simon Legree in a small-time stage production, tirelessly kept them at their lessons. He lashed them with words when they faltered, and, on the rare occasions when they pleased him, damned them with faint praise. (“You learn well—but so slowly!”)
First they learned a basic interstellar language that Smith called, in all seriousness, small-talk. It was so wonderfully concise, so amazingly logical, that they would have mastered its rudiments in a sitting had it not been for the pronunciation, which was fraught with fiendish traps for the human vocal apparatus.
They quickly achieved a measure of fluency in small-talk, though they continued to massacre its pronunciation. Then Smith introduced large-talk, and the words they already knew were revealed to them as abbreviated clues to an incredibly rich, dazzling vast panorama of expression.
They arrived—somewhere—and transmitted from the spaceship to a sealed suite of rooms in Smith’s Certification Group Headquarters. They studied. They learned to talk, read, and write large-talk. They learned a supplementary universal alphabet whose characters turned out to be numbers, allegedly capable of arrangement in combinations that could depict the sounds of any of the uncounted spoken languages of the galaxy. There was also a universal touch alphabet, for species of intelligent life incapable of phonation, and special modifications for species with sundry other handicaps. Darzek found himself gloomily contemplating the problem of communicating with a species that possessed no senses whatsoever.
“I know of none,” Smith said, with a slight gurgle that Darzek had begun to suspect was a laugh. “But anything is possible. It takes all kinds to make a galaxy.”
“I believe you,” Darzek said fervently.
Smith was one of them. He had shed his epidermis as soon as they shed Earth’s Solar System, and he appeared vaguely human in the way a human might look after he’d been run over by a steamroller: flattened out. Immensely broad when viewed from the front, but unbelievably thin in profile. His face was caved in, its features weirdly inverted. The enormous eyes were widely separated and almost on a line with the single, gaping nostril. The mouth was a puckered gash in the chin, the neck a slender pipe. There were no ears or hair. The flesh was of a distinctive hue that Miss Schlupe at once labeled oxygen-starvation blue.
“If he wants to remove that epidermis, too, it’s all right with me,” she had confided to Darzek.
Smith added absently, “There are even species that have rather involved communication systems based upon odors, but no one has ever been able to reduce these to symbols.”
“Thank God!” Darzek exclaimed.
“You must have a fair mastery of large-talk, and if you remain long on a world you may want to learn the local languages, assuming that you are physiologically capable of doing so. You needn’t worry about the more complicated forms of communication, but you should know about them. For example, a strange male who approaches and touches a female on your world would be guilty of criminal misconduct. In interstellar society the action would be recognized as a search for someone with an understanding of touch speech.”
“There’d be the same understanding on Earth,” Darzek said, “but the woman probably wouldn’t like what was being said.”
“I mention this so that if it should happen to Miss Schlupe she would not react in the accepted manner of your Earth women.”
Miss Schlupe blinked innocently. “I’d take it as a compliment—on Earth or anywhere else.”
“If all we need to know is large-talk, let’s get on with it,” Darzek said.
“Large-talk,” Smith agreed gloomily. “And manners and customs and finance and business and practical technology and—and the Council of Supreme is becoming impatient. There is so little time, and you learn so slowly.”
Finally there was a brief farewell ceremony with Smith, and Darzek and Miss Schlupe drank a toast with the last of Miss Schlupe’s rhubarb beer, which Smith refused to touch. They stepped through a special transmitter hookup to a passenger compartment of a commercial space liner. With that step they crossed their Rubicon. They knew, now, that they could not turn back. They did not even know how to get back.
While Miss Schlupe curiously explored the compartment’s five compact rooms, Darzek opened his suitcase and took out a thick throw rug. He carefully arranged it in front of the transmitter.
“What’s it for?” Miss Schlupe asked.
“It’s a little thing I rigged up before I left. I got to thinking about the implications of life in a transmitter-orientated society, and I decided that I didn’t like some of them. Step on it.”
Miss Schlupe did so and leaped off hurriedly when a buzzer rasped.
“I couldn’t sleep if I thought anyone or anything could step into my room without knocking,” Darzek said.
“Is that possible?”
“It shouldn’t be, but I’m taking no chances.”
“What if they jump over it?”
“A person sneaking into a room is more likely to tiptoe than to jump.”
Miss Schlupe winced as a thump sounded over their heads and the compartment shuddered. “What was that?”
“Probably they’re loading another compartment. These spaceships are hollow hulks, except for their operation and service sections. The transmitter eliminates the need for corridors and stairs and elevators and such paraphernalia. Passenger compartments are taken aboard as they are engaged, and hooked up to power and ventilation connections. They load freight compartments the same way. We may have tons of freight above us, but that doesn’t matter in weightless space—and a spaceship never ventures where there’s significant gravity. We can be buried in the tail of the ship and still be only a step from the passenger lounge by transmitter.”
“How long does it take them to get us out of here if the transmitter doesn’t work?”
Darzek shook his head and dropped onto a chair. It gently shifted to accommodate him, thrust up a protrusion to support his back, spread out to provide a footrest. “Lovely,” he murmured. “I wonder if they call it ‘Interspacial Modern.’”
Every piece of furniture looked like a monstrous hassock, and certainly contained enough electronic gadgetry to stock a TV repair shop. The chairs could accommodate the posterior or anterior contours of any conceivable life form, at any desired height, and were probably adjustable in ways a human wouldn’t think either necessary or possible. The larger cylinders served as tables or desks, and kept records, recorded financial transactions, sent and received anything from a message to a full-course meal. Darzek would not have been surprised to learn that in private homes they also did the laundry and cared for the children.
Miss Schlupe seated herself beside him. “I miss my rocking chair,” she grumbled.
They followed the routine they had become inured to: they studied. Occasionally they practiced ordering food with the service transmitter, but they took