Дэймон Найт - Orbit 3

“Define a primal symbol,” Chalmers demanded.

“I can state one but not define it,” Svirsky said. “Space, time and the object. It’s triune, each member existing by virtue of the other two. It is the zygote of all language.”

“Then it’s a verbal symbol?”

“Yes. It is the cultural aspect or correlate of an immensely older neural symbol. The ontogeny of human language recapitulates the phylogeny of the vertebrate nervous system. Both make a model of the world, but language can bind time. If your enemy has no primal symbol, then your own becomes your most precious secret. I speak in riddles, my brothers.”

“You speak in metaphor and analogy. That’s more poetry than science,” Onderdonck sneered.

“And perhaps more truth than poetry,” Chalmers said thinly. “I’ll be honest, Gard. I fear your curiosity. Much as I dislike admitting it, I feel that some things are dangerous to know too soon. We need to keep firm hold of our world and wait the proper time.”

“Ed, you don’t mean to feed ’em that primal symbol?” McPherson asked anxiously.

“No, Ike. I wouldn’t know how, anyway.”

“You might trigger something, not meaning to or knowing, if you fumble around.”

“Precisely, Ike!” Chalmers said. “Vote with Webb and me to stop all this.”

“You promised me a week, people,” Gard pleaded. “Let me have the rest of it.”

He won a shaky victory. Onderdonck and Chalmers undertook to bring in the observation units and to dismantle and stow the flyer. Gard, McPherson and Minelli set to work on the cage.

The cage was the standard ten-foot cube of reenforced steel mesh. At one end problem boxes flanked a door with an observation unit above it. Sweating in the dim light of the further sun, the men baited the cage and charged one of the boxes with the small ground melons the Proteans ate avidly.

“I’ll set this box for a two-lever problem,” Gard said. “See, Ike, he’ll have to press them in the right sequence to make a melon roll out. He’ll do it by random action first, then get the idea. Then we’ll make it tougher, record times and trials and so on. I expect he’ll learn fast.”

They returned to the ship at Protean sunrise. McPherson fixed a late dinner and they ate it in the workroom watching the cage on the stereo screen. Minelli cleaned up the dishes and turned in, leaving Gard and McPherson alone. An hour later a male Protean entered the cage, showing no alarm when the door closed behind him.

“That son of a gun looks just like me,” McPherson complained. “I wish he was green or purple.”

“Watch him turn purple once he knows he’s trapped.”

The Protean ate three melons, fumbled at the sticks Gard had left in the cage, and shambled through its side. The steel mesh was intact.

“Let’s us turn purple,” McPherson said. “That ain’t possible.”

Then it hit them. They stared at each other, speechless, then back at the screen. A female Protean came in view. She approached obliquely and seemed to slide through the mesh. She ate two melons and left, as stupidly unaware as when she came. Gard cursed softly.

“Call Joe, Ike. Only Joe. I’ll brew some coffee.”

The three men sipped coffee and watched a Protean eat the last melon in the cage center. McPherson broke the silence.

“This is more’n I can take, Ed. Let’s dump it in their laps back on Earth. This calls for a full expedition.”

“No, Ike. They’d never get several hundred people away against the jinx, not even six men another time. We’re here on a fluke and it’s up to us or never.”

“You are the fluke, Ed,” Svirsky said. “Here’s a suggestion. Wind cable around that cage and send high frequency alternating current through it.”

“How could that—”

“A hunch, Ed. I’ve been wondering whether Proteans might not mix space and time into a world-structure different from our own in their neural model of reality. But so does AC mix them in a way strange to our neural model. Try it, Ed.”

“Let’s do it, Ike.”

Gard carried the heavy power pack, McPherson the cable and oscillator. They wound four turns around the cage, looping it over the door. Gard baited the cage with melons from the puzzle box and reset the door. Proteans shambled aimlessly near the cage when the Earthmen walked back sweating under the bright sun. When they entered the workroom the stereo showed a large male already trapped.

He ate the two bait melons leisurely, then walked to the side of the cage and recoiled. The three men watched as he tried again and again in what seemed a mounting excitement. He began howling and other Proteans answered and drifted toward the cage, only to recoil from its outside. They milled in a ragged circle, howling too.

“Well, they do have voices,” Gard commented.

“Your hunch paid off, Joe,” McPherson said. “We’ve got ’em by the tail now.”

Svirsky grunted. “So we have, Ike.”

It was just midnight, ship-time. By Protean sunset two hours later the captive became quiet in the cage center and those outside went away. McPherson and Svirsky turned in. Gard watched and thought.

Minelli came in just after six. Gard asked him to take the watch until Protean sunrise at nine. He said nothing about the earlier escapes.

“I expect Lord Proteus will stay quiet until sunrise. Then he’ll stir and be hungry and tell us how smart he is through that problem box,” he told Minelli.

Gard’s sleep was troubled with dreams. He woke to Minelli’s shaking and thought it was still a dream when the geologist said curtly, “Your man talked, Ed. He said ‘Open sesame.’ ”

“You don’t mean he got away?”

“You better come.” Minelli left.

All hands were standing before the stereo screen and all but Svirsky looked at Gard with narrowed eyes, then back to the screen in silence. Gard saw with relief that his Protean was still a captive, squatting and shuffling the sticks. Then, as he watched, a melon dropped through the side of the problem box. The Protean reached for it, began eating. The dispensing counter on the box registered zero.

“He does it by random action. Real random,” Pete Minelli said. He did not smile.

“This does it, you fool,” Onderdonck said thickly. “Now we’ll vote.”

“Ed, agree to lift out right now,” McPherson pleaded.

Gard declined. McPherson and Minelli voted with On-derdonck. The fat man, flushed with triumph, looked at Chalmers.

“I don’t know, Webb,” the biochemist said slowly. “It was bumping against something like this I was hoping to avoid, I think. But now maybe none of us are fit to go back to earth.”

“We can regain sanity,” Onderdonck urged. “Something shielded us from this until that brainsick fool—”

“We’ve got to make a token fight, now,” Chalmers interrupted. “I’ve seen it happen. Each in his own way, perhaps, we must make our fight here, get our teeth into this thing.”

“Gard, I feel almost a duty to kill you!” Onderdonck cried. “You loosen the bonds of Creation itself, you fool, you fool!” He looked apoplectic.

“Give me the rest of the ship-day,” Gard said. “I’m scared too, Onderdonck. We’ll lift out by six.”

Onderdonck and Minelli left the workroom. The four others watched the Protean repeat his performance seven more times and then rest, apparently sated. Gard and Chalmers cut the record-tape into the nine sequences and fed them through the pattern analyzer, first in parallel and then singly for correlation. The highest reading was point sixteen.

“That’s more random than pure chance,” Chalmers said. “That may give us a handhold.”