The Judas Rose (49 page)

“Maybe!” put in the general, desperately.

“Maybe? Why maybe?”

“According to the eggdomes, maybe the linguists are wrong in thinking Earth whales aren't human. Or something like that. I don't understand it completely, except that they do not find the
idea that these whales have a language something to be happy about. Maybe the Terran whales,
and
the Alien ones, are really some kind of humanoid.”

“And we've just drawn our lines in the wrong places,” summarized Tatum Pugh disgustedly. “That's stupid. That's just whatever-you-call-it. That ism. The one about man being superior to everything else. Species-ism or whatever it is.”

“You think that can safely be ignored, do you, Pugh?” asked Heykus.

“Damn right. Our eggdomes have been underground too long.”

“Then I'll ignore it. That leave us back at point three—we have now acquired the first nonhumanoid Alien language.
Except
—and this is point four—except that we don't have any access to that language because we don't happen to speak
Whale!
Is that right, General? Have I phrased that right?”

“Yes, and—”

“FIVE!” Heykus thundered. “And this is the most outrageous item on the list, General! Five: you were warned about this a year ago.
A year ago
. And in all that time, you never saw fit to pass the warning along to me.”

Blank Military Face. Stiff upper lip, rigid jaw.

“That's essentially correct,” the general replied, “but it's not exactly the way I see it.”

“I'll bet it's not! How
do
you see it, Stuart?”

“In the first place, I thought they were wrong. I told you that. That was my own judgment, based on the data I had. And I saw no point in passing on erroneous information to you.”

“That's in the first place. What else?”

“In the second place, I assumed you already knew about it.”

“
What?
” Even for Stu Charing, this was a little much. “You assumed what?”

“Paul White knew about it,” said the general, getting stiffer and stiffer with every word. “He's your own liaison man. You sent him out to tell us about the project at the very beginning, Heykus. I assumed he'd told you.”

“And I just mysteriously had never mentioned it.”

“I assumed that you agreed with me in my opinion that the eggdomes were mistaken, Heykus. I assumed you had noted the report from White, had decided it was ridiculous for the eggdomes to come to the conclusions they'd come to, and had put it out of your mind. As I would have done, in your place.”

Heykus got up from the chair, turned his back to the General and walked over to look out the window. It was pretty out there. Groves of evergreens. Slabs of wood for steppingstones . . .
steppingslabs. Whatever. Carpet of needles, piled thick, but not a one out of place. Babbling brook, with
real
steppingstones. Little clumps of columbines, here and there. It was absolutely the splendid handiwork of the Almighty, and it was a consolation to have it to contrast with the pitiful example presented by Stu Charing.

If
the poor slow sonofabee was telling the truth about all his assumptions—and he probably was—he'd gone wrong in what was for him the classic fashion. Among all the other things that he had assumed, he had assumed that Paul White had gone on back to Washington and reported in the usual way, and
he had not checked that out
. It being a small detail. In fact, White had never made it back to Washington. An intercept courier had caught up with him over Little Rock, Arkansas and handed him emergency orders for an entirely separate trouble-shooting mission way to hell and gone out past the commercial routes, on the planet aptly named Sorry Prospect. Where White still was. Still patiently slogging away at a mess that was just his kind of thing, and no doubt doing a fine job of it.

“You know where Paul White is right now, General?” he asked casually, not turning around, keeping his eyes on the wonders of the carefully-assembled woodland glade beyond the window.

“Of course not. Why should I?”

Heykus told him.

“He never got back to you? Not at all? Well. . . . Heykus, his report should have reached you all the same.”

“It reached me. White is reliable. Always. But he wouldn't have put your scientists' speculations about this matter in a routine report, Stu, even if it was coded. It was the kind of thing he would have told me only in person, under strictest security.”

“Well, hell
fire
, man!” the general blustered. “
That's
no excuse. Why didn't he
make sure
somebody had told you?”

Pugh's voice sounded as old and weary as Heykus felt. “Because,” he drawled, “in view of the fact that at least three senior scientists at El Centro knew about it, and had protested to White in the strongest terms, and would
absolutely
have gone straight to their chief—that's you, General—and told him, probably three or four times a week, it never crossed White's mind that Director Clete would have to rely on his report to get the information.”

Heykus turned around, then, and leaned against the window, with both hands splayed and braced on the broad wooden sill. “And I've seen you twice during this past year, Stu,” he said softly. “Once at a Christmas party. Once for lowgrav tennis.
And neither time,
neither time
, did you see fit to mention this. Or ask me what I'd thought of White's report. Or anything of that kind.”

“There were people around,” protested the general. “It wasn't safe.”

“It wasn't safe to ask me what I'd thought of Paul White's last routine report.”

“No, it wasn't. Not in my judgment. Somebody might have made something out of it.”

Tatum Pugh snickered, and the general glared at him, and he snickered again.

“Ah, sweet suffering saints, Stuart,” mourned Heykus. “
What
am I supposed to do with this mess?”

“I don't know,” said Charing. “I really don't know.”

“What made you decide to tell me now?”

“This was different.”

“In what way?”

“I had new information. I had the actual report, from the eggdomes, stating the conclusions they had reached. And I had not seen Paul White or anybody else, in the interim, who might have passed it on to you. It therefore became my duty to report to you myself. In person.”

“You'd just gone on hoping, all this time, that your staff—your scientific staff, Stuart, who you persist in calling ‘eggdomes' as if you were a recruit fresh off the boonies rocket—you'd just gone on hoping they would be wrong.”

“Yes. I don't think that was unreasonable. They were wrong when they informed me that the physical resemblance between the Earth whales and the Aliens was only a coincidence. They talked about it being like the resemblance between a penguin and a short man in evening clothes. They talked about golfballs looking like eggs, for chrissakes. They were wrong, and we were right. Why shouldn't they have been wrong about the rest of it?”

There were a number of things that Heykus might have said to him if Pugh hadn't been there.
I always knew you had a blind spot that made you overlook small things that turn out to be important, Stuart, but until this moment I never thought you were actually stupid. Now you have changed my mind
. He did not choose to say that, or any of the other remarks along that same line that occurred to him, in front of Tatum Pugh. Not so much because Pugh might have wondered why he'd left a stupid man in charge of the Cetacean Project; often the very best place for a stupid man was the “in charge” position, leaving people who knew what they were doing free to do it, while he spun his
wheels. But he could not afford to encourage the sort of disrespect for authority that he already saw in Tatum Pugh's face.

“Dear Lord,” said Heykus fervently, and he meant no disrespect for
his
superior. He went back over to the table, dialed for coffee, and watched the gravytrain float over. Meticulously, tenderly, as he would have cared for a badly flawed child, he poured coffee for General Stuart Charing, and handed it to him. He took his own cup, black and strong, as he preferred it, and he let Tatum Pugh fend for himself. The silence thickened round the table; and in that silence, Heykus stirred his coffee with a spoon. There was nothing in it to stir, but he stirred it nonetheless. It filled the silence, while he thought about what he would say next.

“Stuart,” he began, finally, “I'm afraid there's a piece of the problem that you didn't look at from precisely the right angle. You see, this was always a no-win situation. Right from the beginning. Paul White wouldn't have realized that—he hasn't had that much experience, and he doesn't believe in making that kind of judgment in any case—but you ought to have known.”

A line of beads of sweat stood out across the general's upper lip, and he sputtered at Heykus; what the sputter meant was impossible to determine.

“If the scientists were right, and the little whale did
not
acquire the Alien language,” Heykus said, keeping his voice casual, “we lost. We'd wasted time and resources and a lot of money. If, on the other hand, the little whale
did
acquire the Alien language, we still lost—because we can't communicate with whales, right? They told you this, at the very beginning. They came to you, in a group, and they explained that all attempts to Interface whales with humans had been failures. Without exception. And they told you that they, and the men of the Lines, were quite certain that this was deliberate on the whales' part—and would not change.”

The general cleared his throat and raised his hand in the gesture that means wait-a-minute-there's-something-I-want-to-add-right-here, and Heykus stopped for him.

“Well, you see, Heykus, that's just the point. Now, it seemed to me—I mean, I have been there, all these years, while those whales up on the first floor were in the Interface with tubies, and I have
seen
that nothing whatsoever was happening. I
knew
about that. It was just a cover, anyway, and nobody cared. But it seemed to me that this was a whole new ball game, Heykus. It seemed to me that the whales of Earth might well feel that now there was a
reason
to communicate with us. They might want to
share
with us this entirely new set of circumstances.”

Heykus and the computer whiz exchanged glances, and Tatum Pugh shook his head sadly; and Heykus shouldered the burden and went on speaking in the same compassionate tender mode he had been using before the general pranced through the linguistic environment stark naked in that awful fashion, with his thoughts hanging out.

“This one little whale,” Heykus mused, “this infant whale, alone of all its kind, and with no other whale for company but its mother. It might know all the past history of human/cetacean Interfacing. And it might decide, on the basis of its ample knowledge, that the time had come to . . . to what, Stuart? What did you think it was going to do, demand to be put in the first floor Interface so it could teach the current tubie? Or was it going to rely on its mother to make that demand? Or what?”

“When you put it that way,” said the general slowly, “it does sound a little unlikely.”

“
Does
it?”

“But I wasn't thinking of it that way.”

Heykus wasn't angry with Stu Charing any longer. Anger was an emotion that he reserved for his peers, for equals, for those who were equipped to defend themselves as rational adult males. This man wasn't stupid. This man was mentally defective. He had been under stress too long, had suffered the humiliation of too many failures for which it was clear that he had been the cause; he had broken under the weight of it. He should not have been in charge of
any
thing—he should have been in a sheltered environment where he could have been looked after. And he wasn't angry with Tatum Pugh, because he knew about really good computer people; they reported trouble with computers. Period. Human being trouble was not their province. “I don't do humans,” they'd tell you if you asked. The better the computer man, the more that was going to be true. But the anger Heykus felt toward his subordinates in D.A.T. was a mighty anger. They should have spotted General Charing as a man who—however capable he had been before—was now as useless as a chocolate computer chip. They were there so that he, Heykus, would not have to worry about pathetic creatures like Stuart Charing. He recognized in his anger a core of passion that would not do; if it was still there by the time he got back to Washington he would spend an hour on his knees in prayer before he called in any of the upper level men who ought to have alerted him to Charing's breakdown. Anger was permitted to him, but vengeance was the Lord's; he would pray for the breadth of spirit to remember that.

“Heykus?” Charing's voice was trembling now.

“Yes, Stuart?”

“What's the next step? Do we negotiate with the whales now, or what?”

“How would you suggest we do that, General?”

“I don't know.” Charing swallowed hard. “But there has to be a way. Heykus, it's intolerable that there's a nonhumanoid language that's been cracked by a Terran, and we can't get at it. It won't be easy to live with that, Heykus.”