Easy enough to carry out his plan to speak to the Pit Men, but what language did one use? Wilding tried slum Venusian, two Earth languages, a smattering of canal Martian dialects. He got nowhere. The Pit Man stayed put and bird-sounds sprayed from him. Wilding straddled the creature and spoke words in every language he knew. That was all.
A similar difficulty had baffled trained semantics men. Even the cipher experts, though admitting that the birdsong sounds seemed to have a musical or mathematical basis, could go no further. No dictionaries or word-books exist, and the language, if it were even a language, seemed not phonetic. No actual words had ever been distinguished, let alone their meanings.
Nor was the language the only mystery about the Pit Men. No anthropologist ever studied the race, catalogued its social patterns, recorded its history. The Pit Men were non-human, their origins lost in darkness beyond the dawn of time. In the chronicles of the early (Martian) spacemen, there is mention of a fungus-people inhabiting some of the larger asteroids, particularly the rogue asteroids and those with a high content of radioactive ores. First explorations by solar survey ships from Earth found the fungus life-forms existing much as they still do, inhabiting deep caves in the honey-combed interiors of some asteroids.
Practically nothing definite was ever learned about them. These mobile, intelligent fungus-growths clung to their impregnable isolation and lived among deposits of low grade radioactive ores, worthless to mine and difficult to transport. In murky, dim-lit caverns, they lived out their strange lives, eating if they eat, sleeping if they sleep, and worshipping gods as ancient and strange as themselves. At first contacts Pit Men proved friendly and harmless, if not molested—but deadly dangerous if aroused or mistreated.
But communication always stopped dead beyond a few meager words the more intelligent Pit Men deigned to learn and use.
Wilding got up, releasing the Pit Man. With a shudder, he helped the creature to the horny pads which passed for its feet. The thing retreated to the edge of the light cone and stood, half in shadows, trembling. Wilding took a long look at the goggling alien, then wished he had not.
It was a stubby, waddling horror of gray-green and fishbelly white, oddly manlike, even birdlike as legend specified, but with no resemblance to any particular bird life of the known worlds. The head was huge in proportion, round and smooth as a polished plastic ball. A long slender trunk or tentacle extended from the almost featureless face. Limbs were not arms, but something between wings and flippers. Folded membranes, like the gliding surfaces of flying squirrels connected the flipper-wings to the plump, obscene body. In texture, the skin was not slick, furry or feathered, but dusty, like the wings of a moth-miller.
The Pit Man trembled and waited, while Wilding's nerves shrank from remembrance of its foul contact.
Impatiently, with a recognition of futility, Wilding gestured for it to go. Without language, communication was impossible, and there was no hope of making a deal with the Pit Men. Birdmen or animals, plants or parasites, the things were too alien.