David Brin - Just a Hint

It was exactly seven A.M. when Federman finished typing the last data entry. The small console flashed a confirmation and, several miles away, the central processor began correlating the results of the previous evening’s observation run.

Federman winced as he stretched in the swivel chair, his spine cracking. Age seemed to make every strain and pop a cruel reminder, as if decay were audibly calling out its territoriality.

The classical music station playing on his desktop radio began an update of the morning’s headlines.

The weather would be beautiful over most of the country. The chance of rain in the nearby area was less than twenty percent. The current probability estimate for the likelihood of nuclear war this year still hovered around twenty percent, also.

Liz Browning backed in, pushing the door open with one foot as she balanced a cardboard tray with coffee, doughnuts, and the morning newspaper.

“Good,” she said, laying her load down on his desk. “I knew you could finish without me. I don’t know how you stay up all night reducing data without getting hungry. I just had to get some food!”

As a matter of fact, Federman had started noticing a growling emptiness in his stomach almost the moment the last figure had been typed. If his graduate student had been glad to let him finish alone, he was just as happy she had brought back the goodies.

“It’s love, Liz. Anyone who stays up all night has to be in love… in this case with astronomy. Either that or he’s crazy or in the army.”

Elizabeth Browning grinned ironically, leaving crinkled smile lines around her eyes. Her straight brown hair was braided behind her back.

“Or it means he wants to beat Tidbinbilla into print with that new pulsar analysis. Come on, Sam. Outside it’s already a beautiful day. Let’s let some light in here.” She went to the window and pulled the heavy drapes aside. A bolt of brilliant sunshine came crackling in. She didn’t even wince as she leaned forward to open the window, but Federman covered his eyes.

“Cruel youth,” he moaned. “To bring these spotted hands and time-wracked limbs before the searching gaze of day.”

“Aw, come on, Sam. You and I both know there’s no such quotation. Why do you keep making up fake Shakespeare?”

“Perhaps I’m a poet at heart?”

“You’re a scoundrel and a rogue at heart. That’s why I’m so incredibly pleased with myself for latching onto you as a research advisor. Everybody else may be losing their grants as the military budget increases, but you know how to finagle enough funding to keep the radio astronomy program here going. My biggest hope is that I can learn your techniques.”

“You’ll never learn them as long as you fail to understand why I make up Bard-isms.” Federman smiled.

Liz pointed a finger at him, then thought better of it.

“Touché,” she said. “I’ll enroll in Lit. 106 next term. Okay? That is, if there’s still a world then.”

“Are we in a pessimistic mood today?”

Liz shrugged. “I shouldn’t be, I suppose. Every spring is seems there’s less smog and other pollution. Remember that eyesore wrecking yard on Highway Eight? Well, it’s gone now. They’ve put in a park.”

“So nu? Then what’s wrong?”

She threw the morning paper over to his side of the desk. “ That ’s what’s wrong! Just when we seem about to make peace with nature, they’re stepping along the edge of war! There were demonstrations on campus yesterday… neither side listening to the other, and neither side willing to concede a single point. I tell you, Sam, it’s all I can do to keep from hiding in my work and letting the world just go to hell on its own!”

Federman glanced at the paper, then looked up at his assistant. His expression was ironic.

“Liz, you know my feelings about this. Radio astronomy is not disconnected from the problems of war and peace on Earth. It may, indeed, be intimately involved in the solution.”

The sophont had no nose, but he did have a name. If one started there and kept listing his attributes one would find him quite a bit more human than not. The things his species had in common with the dominant race of Earth would have surprised them both almost as much as the differences, but the most important of each has already been mentioned.

He had no nose. His name was Fetham.

“No!” he cried out in the language of confrontation. He pounded a four-fingered fist on his desktop. “Are you mad? Mad! What do you mean, the funds are needed elsewhere? The legislature agreed by almost unanimous vote. Full, permanent, emergency funding!”

The smaller being with no nose was named Gathu. He held up his hand in a newly discovered version of the Gesture of Placation directed at the Optic Nerve.

“Please, Academician! Please remember that those votes were taken years ago. There is a new Assembly now. And since the public health situation has deteriorated…”

“The problem I am trying to solve!”

“…it has fallen on the leadership to seek out new sources of finance for medical research. Surely you know that we applaud your efforts. But it seemed more and more a shot in the dark.”

Fetham’s prehensile ears waved in agitation.

“Of course it’s a shot in the dark! But isn’t it worth it? There may be a race out there that has been through what we now face. With the entire world threatened, our very survival in question, shouldn’t we make an effort to contact them?”

The government representative nodded. “But you have another two years in your appropriation, have you not? And by husbanding your funds you might make them last longer.”

“Idiots!” Fetham hissed. “Why, the first beamed message will reach my first target star only this year! It will take more years for their reply to reach us, barring any delay in interpreting the message!”

“Are all governments as stupid as ours?”

Gathu stiffened. His ridge crest waved in suppressed irritation.

“You may, of course, emigrate to any other nation you wish, Academician. The international Concords give you the right to establish yourself as a citizen of any system of government found under our sun.”

“Shall I arrange to have the papers sent over? Perhaps you’ll have better luck…”

Gathu’s voice trailed off, for Fetham had raised his hands in the Gesture of Supreme Disgust and fled the room.

Federman stared at the ceiling while he tilted back in his swivel chair. “You know, someone once told me that the true definition of genius was the ability to suddenly see the obvious.”

Liz Browning stopped pacing long enough to pick up her coffee cup. The stained newspaper was open to a page of boldface headlines and photos of armed men.

“Do you mean that the answer may just be staring us in the face? Are you saying we’re stupid?”

“Not stupid. Obstinate, perhaps. We hold on to our basic assumptions tenaciously, even when they are about to kill us. It’s the way human beings work.

“For instance, did you know that for years Europeans thought tomatoes were poisonous? No one bothered to test the assumption.

“Even the most daring and open of us can’t question an assumption until he becomes aware of it! When everyone accepts a paradigm it never becomes a topic of conversation. There must be thousands, millions , of things like that which men and women never even notice because they don’t stand out from the background.”

Liz shook her head.

“You don’t have to belabor the point. Every sophomore has thought about that at one time or another. And it’s certainly happened that some genius has leapt out of the bathtub, screaming ‘Eureka!’ and gone on to tell everybody of the new way to do things.”