I shrugged. “Well, let them go overseas. I don’t think anyone else will be more successful extracting information from them than we were.”
Professor Trowson wriggled his short body up on a corner of his desk. He lifted a folder full of typewritten notes and grimaced as if his tongue were wrapped in wool.
“Four months of careful questioning,” he grumbled. “Four months of painstaking interrogation by trained sociologists using every free moment the aliens had, which admittedly wasn’t much. Four months of organized investigation, of careful data sifting.” He dropped the folder disgustedly to the desk and some of the pages splashed out. “And we know more about the social structure of Atlantis than Betelgeuse IX.”
We were in the wing of the Pentagon assigned to what the brass hats, in their own cute way, had christened Project Encyclopedia. I strolled across the large, sunny office and glanced at the very latest organizational wall chart. I pointed to a small rectangle labeled “Power Source Sub-Section” depending via a straight line from a larger rectangle marked “Alien Physical Science Inquiry Section.” In the small rectangle, very finely printed, were the names of an army major, a WAC corporal, and Drs. Lopez, Vinthe, and Mainzer.
“How’re they doing?” I asked.
“Not much better, I’m afraid.” Trowson turned away with a sigh from peering over my shoulder. “At least I deduce that from the unhappy way Mainzer bubbles into his soup spoon at lunch. Conversation between sub-sections originating in different offices on the departmental level is officially discouraged, you know. But I remember Mainzer from the university cafeteria. He bubbled into his soup the very same way when he was stuck on his solar refraction engine.”
“Think Andy and Dandy are afraid we’re too young to play with matches? Or maybe apelike creatures are too unpleasant-looking to be allowed to circulate in their refined and esthetic civilization?”
“I don’t know, Dick.” The prof ambled back to his desk and leafed irritably through his sociological notes. “If anything like that is true, why would they give us free run of their ship? Why would they reply so gravely and courteously to every question? If only their answers weren’t so vague in our terms! But they are such complex and artistically minded creatures, so chockful of poetic sentiment and good manners that it’s impossible to make mathematical or even verbal sense out of their vast and circumlocutory explanations. Sometimes, when I think of their highly polished manners and their seeming lack of interest in the structure of their society, when I put that together with their spaceship, which looks like one of those tiny jade carvings that took a lifetime to accomplish—”
He trailed off and began riffling the pages like a Mississippi steamboat gambler going over somebody else’s deck of cards.
“Isn’t it possible we just don’t have enough stuff as yet to understand them?”