Harlan Ellison: Troublemakers

“Six feet three inches,” he recited to the girl kneeling beside him. She made the notation on her pad, and he went on calling out characteristics of the soldier below. “Brown hair, clipped so short you can see the scalp. Brown...no, black eyes. Scars. Above the left eye, running down to center of left cheek; bridge of nose; three parallel scars on the right side of chin; tiny one over right eyebrow; last one I can see, runs from back of left ear, into hairline.

“He seems to be wearing an all-over, skintight suit something like, oh, I suppose it’s like a pair of what do you call those pajamas kids wear...the kind with the back door, the kind that enclosed the feet?”

The girl inserted softly, “You mean snuggies?”

The man nodded, slightly embarrassed for no good reason, continued, “Mmm. Yes, that’s right. Like those. The suit encloses his feet, seems to be joined to the cape, and comes up to his neck. Seems to be some sort of metallic cloth.

“Something else...may mean nothing at all, or on the other hand...” He pursed his lips for a moment, then described his observation carefully. “His head seems to be oddly shaped. The forehead is larger than most, seems to be pressing forward in front, as though he had been smacked hard and it was swelling. That seems to be everything.”

Sims settled back on his haunches, fished in his side pocket, and came up with a small pipe, which he cold-puffed in thought for a second. He rose slowly, still staring down through the floor window. He murmured something to himself, and when Soames asked what he had said, the special advisor repeated, “I think we’ve got something almost too hot to handle.”

Soames clucked knowingly, and gestured toward the window. “Have you been able to make out anything he’s said yet?”

Sills shook his head. “No. That’s why you’re here. It seems he’s saying the same thing, over and over, but it’s completely unintelligible. Doesn’t seem to be any recognizable language, or any dialect we’ve been able to pin down.”

“I’d like to take a try at him,” Soames said, smiling gently. It was the man’s nature that challenge brought satisfaction; solution brought unrest, eagerness for a new, more rugged problem.

Sills nodded agreement, but there was a tense, strained film over his eyes, in the set of his mouth. “Take it easy with him, Soames. I have a strong hunch this is something completely new, something we haven’t even begun to understand.”

Soames smiled again, this time indulgently. “Come, come, Mr. Sills. After all...he is only an alien of some sort...all we have to do is find out what country he’s from.”

“Have you heard him talk yet?”

Soames shook his head.

“Then don’t be too quick to think he’s just a foreigner. The word alien may be more correct than you think-only not in the way you think.”

A confused look spread across Soames’s face. He gave a slight shrug, as though he could not fathom what Lyle Sills meant...and was not particularly interested. He patted Sims reassuringly, which brought an expression of annoyance to the advisor’s face, and he clamped down on the pipestem harder.

They walked downstairs together; the secretary left them, to type her notes, and Sims let the philologist into the padded room, cautioning him to deal gently with the man. “Don’t forget,” Sims warned, “we’re not sure where he comes from, and sudden movements may make him jumpy. There’s a guard overhead, and there’ll be a man with me behind this door, but you never know.”

Soames looked startled. “You sound as though he’s an aborigine or something. With a suit like that, he must be very intelligent. You suspect something, don’t you?”

Sims made a neutral motion with his hands. “What I suspect is too nebulous to worry about now. Just take it easy...and above all, figure out what he’s saying, where he’s from.”

Sims had decided, long before, that it would be wisest to keep the power of the Brandelmeier to himself. But he was fairly certain it was not the work of a foreign power. The trial run on the test range had left him gasping, confused.

He opened the door, and Soames passed through, uneasily.

Sims caught a glimpse of the expression on the stranger’s face as the philologist entered. It was even more uneasy than Soames’s had been.

It looked to be a long wait.

Soames was white as paste. His face was drawn, and the complacent attitude he had shown since his arrival in Washington was shattered. He sat across from Sims, and asked him in a quavering voice for a cigarette. Sims fished around in his desk, came up with a crumpled pack and idly slid them across to Soames. The philologist took one, put it in his mouth, then, as though it had been totally forgotten in the space of a second, he removed it, held it while he spoke.

His tones were amazed. “Do you know what you’ve got up there in that cell?”

Sims said nothing, knowing what was to come would not startle him too much; he had expected something fantastic.

“That man...do you know where he...that soldier-and by God, Sims, that’s what he is- comes from, from-now you’re going to think I’m insane to believe it, but somehow I’m convinced-he comes from the future!”

Sims tightened his lips. Despite himself, he was shocked. He knew it was true. It had to be true, it was the only explanation that fit all the facts.

“What can you tell me?” he asked the philologist.

“Well, at first I tried solving the communications problem by asking him simple questions...pointing to myself and saying ‘Soames,’ pointing to him and looking quizzical, but all he’d keep saying was a string of gibberish. I tried for hours to equate his tones and phrases with all the dialects and subdialects of every language I’d ever known, but it was no use. He slurred too much. And then I finally figured it out. He had to write it out-which I couldn’t understand, of course, but it gave me a clue-and then I kept having him repeat it. Do you know what he’s speaking?”

Sims shook his head.

The linguist spoke softly. “He’s speaking English. It’s that simple. Just English.

“But an English that has been corrupted and run together, and so slurred, it’s incomprehensible. It must be the future trend of the language. Sort of an extrapolation of gutter English, just contracted to a fantastic extreme. At any rate, I got it out of him.”

Sims leaned forward, held his dead pipe tightly. “What?”

Soames read it off a sheet of paper:

“My name is Qarlo Clobregnny. Private. Six-five-one-oh-two-two-nine. “

Sims murmured in astonishment. “My God...name, rank and-”

Soames finished for him, “-and serial number. Yes, that’s all he’d give me for over three hours. Then I asked him a few innocuous questions, like where did he come from, and what was his impression of where he was now.”

The philologist waved a hand vaguely. “By that time, I had an idea what I was dealing with, though not where he had come from. But when he began telling me about the War, the War he was fighting when he showed up here, I knew immediately he was either from some other world-which is fantastic-or, or...well, I just don’t know!”

Sims nodded his head in understanding. “From when do you think he comes?”

Soames shrugged. “Can’t tell. He says the year he is in-doesn’t seem to realize he’s in the past-is K79. He doesn’t know when the other style of dating went out. As far as he knows, it’s been ‘K’ for a long time, though he’s heard stories about things that happened during a time they dated ‘GV: Meaningless, but I’d wager it’s more thousands of years than we can imagine.”