The Fury Out of Time (15 page)

When he could no longer contain his impatience, he strode over to the longbeards, tapped himself on the chest, and announced, “Major Bowden Karvel.”

The longbeards went into conference; the shortbeards were summoned one at a time for consultation. Then attendants appeared with more food, and the conference was forgotten in the orgy of lip-smacking and slurping that followed.

As soon as they finished, Karvel tried again. “Major Bowden Karvel,” he said, pointing to himself. Then he pointed at Bluebeard. “And you?”

Bluebeard convened another conference. Dejectedly Karvel retreated to the far side of the room and perched on the edge of a mushroom-shaped stool. “Haskins should have sent a linguist,” he muttered.

They were probably trying to find out where he came from, but even without the language barrier he could not have told them. Had he traveled in time, or space, or in some previously unknown dimension? He would not know until he found out where he was.

The flow of gibberish continued, interrupted at regular intervals by the mush break. Karvel developed a wholesome respect for his own stomach while watching the eating habits imposed by the lack of one: small quantities of fluid nourishment imbibed every half hour or so. It was no doubt fortunate that they had neither the appetite nor the capacity for solid food, because the only teeth in the room belonged to Karvel.

“Major Bowden Karvel,” he told them wearily. “I came in your spherical traveling device to ask you, please, don’t send us any more of them.”

They considered that unworthy of a conference, and assaulted him with more gibberish.

By the end of the day he was groggy with fatigue and ravenously hungry. He forced himself to drink four bowls of mush, an act that obviously astonished them. For an hour or so he felt satiated, and then he was hungry again.

They escorted him to a nearby room, also windowless and eight-sided, but much smaller and without furnishings of any kind. A door slid out of the wall to close noiselessly, and he was alone. He dropped his equipment, and sat down on the floor. After a day replete with incomprehensible sounds, the silence seemed blissful.

Suddenly it occurred to him that he was being left for the night. He went to the door, intending to knock on it, and it opened automatically. Two men with long orange beards were seated on stools in an alcove nearby.

“Look,” Karvel said to them companionably. “I don’t know if I’m an honored guest or a prisoner, but where I come from even a prisoner gets some kind of bed.”

They came readily when he motioned them into the room, and when he stretched out on the floor they understood at once. A sleight-of-hand gesture, and a bed folded out of the wall. It lay flat on the floor, a thick pad three feet longer than Karvel needed and narrower than he would have preferred, but it was a bed.

“Thank you,” Karvel said. “Now I ask you to kindly direct me to the nearest bathroom, and I’m darned if I’ll act that out for you.”

They bowed politely, and left. The bow was the only encouraging sign he could glean from the day’s frustrations. The gesture was obviously alien to them; they bowed because Karvel had bowed.

He studied the room. Narrow gratings at wall and ceiling levels provided ventilation. A recessed panel in each wall looked like a sliding door, and one of them opened for him to reveal a tiny bathroom. Its furnishings were exotic in design, but still vaguely recognizable. He told himself philosophically, “At least there’s one area where artistic fads will never triumph completely over function.” The bathtub was small in circumference and extremely deep. He would have enjoyed a vertical bath, but he couldn’t figure out how to turn on the water.

He returned to the other room, stripped off his outer garments, and stretched out on the bed. For a long time he watched the kaleidoscopic flow of color on the walls and ceiling. It waxed and waned continuously to form changing patterns and produce an effect of incessant movement. In a strange way it was restful, and soon he fell asleep.

He awoke abruptly, and scrambled to his feet in alarm. The walls were whispering gibberish at him. He went to the door, and looked out.

The orange beards regarded him inquiringly. “Do either of you talk in your sleep?” Karvel asked, and went back to bed.

He lay awake for a long time, listening to the whispered gibberish and worrying about many things. At that moment they might be preparing to launch his U.O. or another. He
had
to learn their language, or teach his language to them, and he did not know how to go about doing either.

Finally he slept again, and was awakened by the timorous touch of a hand on his arm. He looked up in bewilderment at the hairless, bearded head that bent over him.

“Good morning,” the head said.

“Good morning,” Karvel replied, and did not realize until he fumbled the pronunciation that he was speaking a strange language.

But the next words meant nothing at all as the other continued to speak, first with apparent enthusiasm, then with doubt, and finally with exasperation. Karvel deduced that he had been exposed to the language while he slept, that he had been expected to master it—and that the project fell just short of being a total failure.

He was aware of one small measure of improvement. The words no longer sounded like gibberish. They were merely unintelligible.

There followed a day when frustration piled on frustration with an inevitability that made Karvel think he had been entrapped in a badly written comic opera. His hosts stubbornly refused to believe that he could not understand them. They continued to toss words at him.

At intervals Karvel attempted to direct their efforts toward some kind of methodical instruction. He fingered the draping sleeve of one of their garments. “What’s this?” he asked.

They brought clothing for him.

He indicated the curved bowl that had contained his breakfast mush. “What’s this?”

They brought more food.

He walked; they took him to the platform at the top of the tower for exercise. He breathed; they brought in a wrinkled oldster with a flowing purple beard, who made like a doctor, performed some remote electronic listening to Karvel’s chest, and left medicine.

They did not repeat words. They made no attempt to identify objects. His quest for simple verbs missed the mark so consistently that he began to wonder if their language had any. They seemingly possessed no concept of teaching a language according to Karvel’s notion of how a language should be taught.

His neck became cramped from looking up at them. Whether he was standing or seated, they bent over him, orange beards dangling, with the smugly affected patience of adults lecturing a recalcitrant child. Their infernally incomprehensible words grated on his nerves. Their periodic slurping of mush disgusted him.

Long before midday he lost his temper. “What are you doing with the U.O.?” he roared at them.

They recoiled in consternation and returned him to his cubicle for a rest, which did nothing to improve his mental state. Solitary confinement served his purpose even less than did their babble of talk.

That night he received more lessons, or perhaps the same lessons. The sterile muttering of the walls blended grotesquely in his shapeless dreams with the haunting screams from the devastated city and Lieutenant Ostrander’s youthful laughter. The next day he fancied that he had a precarious grip on a word or two, but he could think of no adequate way to test his knowledge. Were they saying,
Here is your breakfast,
when they brought food? Or
Eat this quickly so we can get back to work?
Or
May your digestive efforts be bountiful?
Was it a blessing that they intoned with his first sip of mush, or pointed commentary on his table manners?

Whenever he lost his temper they banished him into isolation. They themselves seemed wholly devoid of strong feelings. Their emotional life, he thought, must be as bland as the mush that they fed to him.

On the third day the longbeards gave him a short-bearded tutor, probably because they considered the education of such an impossible student beneath them. The tutor looked to be little more than a child. He was only two or three inches taller than Karvel, with slender face and build and a high-pitched, almost feminine voice. His orange beard was no more than a rakish goatee, but his fingernails were fully as formidable as those of the longbeards.

He casually unfolded a stool from the wall of Karvel’s cubicle and sat down, and Karvel, irked with himself for his long hours of sitting on the floor, pointed and demanded to know what it was. The tutor spoke a word; Karvel repeated it, got the feeling of it firmly entwined in his tongue, and began to circle the room, mouthing the word and touching the walls at random. The tutor watched him in solemn incomprehension. Karvel began to shout the word angrily. Had these people no imagination whatsoever?

Abruptly the tutor arose and unfolded another stool. Karvel dropped onto it with a shout of triumph. He knew the approximate meaning of one word, and he kept repeating it until he had established that the room contained four stools, and he could produce them himself.

Next he mastered the bed, and then he wasted half an hour trying to distinguish between
head
and
face.

An attendant appeared with food. The tutor sipped his mush leisurely; Karvel downed his with an impatient gulp. When the tutor had finished they made a long, spiraling descent to ground level and walked out into a small, completely enclosed park. The glowing walls of the city towered above it, and it looked as incongruous as a garden at the bottom of an elevator shaft.

They strolled back and forth, Karvel still hobbling with the aid of his cane, and he learned words for
tree, grass,
and
flower.
The tutor seemed pleased; Karvel remained impatient. His only thought was to find out what had happened to the U.O., and he did not even have a word with which to begin a question.

That night Karvel’s sleep was flooded with words and meanings always just beyond his grasp. At long intervals came flashes of comprehension. “. . .grass. . .green.”
Color
of grass. . .green? Or,
the
color of grass
is
green? And how could he say, “What have they done with the thing I arrived in?” At his present rate of progress it would be a dozen years before he could translate
unidentified object. “. . .
grass. . .green.” Odd that they hadn’t given him a textbook. How could he go about asking for a book? “. . .
long
grass. . .green.” Or
tall
grass? But the thought—the
pictured
thought—came through clearly.

“Good morning,” Karvel said. “Share breakfast?”

“Share breakfast,” the tutor agreed.

An efficiency engineer had sneaked in and streamlined their language for them. Karvel had to think what he wanted to say in English, and mentally cross out superfluous words until the threadbare meaning spoke itself in translation. Surprise and suspense lurked in every phrase, because the concluding inflection could turn the meaning inside out.

But once he had mastered the basic essentials of grammar and acquired a smattering of vocabulary, the nightly lessons began to take hold with phenomenal effect.

They shared breakfast. They spoke of simple matters— the greeness of the short grass in the park, the tallness of the green trees in the park. Karvel found himself experiencing a hazy recollection of words he did not recall having heard before. He indicated that his health was good—it would have been better if he could have had some solid food, but he did not know how to say that—and that he would like more walking.

They returned to the park, and walked there. Karvel thought wistfully that a swim would give him the exercise he needed without placing undue strain on his knee. He mentioned a bath, a walking bath, an exercising bath, and made swimming motions.

The tutor understood at once. They left the park and followed a descending ramp, the tutor considerately shortening his stride to match Karvel’s limping pace. On a lower level they entered a large, domed room, where perhaps a dozen nude bathers were swimming about leisurely in a circular pool. The tutor led him to the recessed ledge where the bathers had left their clothing, doffed his simple two-piece garment matter-of-factly, and gave Karvel the greatest shock he had sustained since his arrival.

The tutor was a bald and bearded woman.

Then she removed the beard, and dove gracefully into the pool.

Karvel stared after her dumbly, and when he began to remove his own clothing he found himself afflicted with a quaking modesty. Beside those sleek, hairless bodies his would be as conspicuous as that of an ape in a nudist camp.

He was politely ignored until he paused at the side of the pool to remove his artificial leg.
That
produced a sensation. One of the swimmers hurriedly dressed and went off to inform various longbeards of the phenomenon. They crowded into the room, examined the leg almost awesomely, and discussed it with obvious puzzlement. Karvel enjoyed his swim almost unnoticed.