Braganza sucked at a tooth and considered the wall behind Hebster. “And all this, you feel, wouldn’t apply to Kleimbocher?”
“No, not a philology professor. He has no interest, no intellectual roots in personal and group instability. Kleimbocher’s a comparative linguist—a technician, really—a specialist in basic communication. I’ve been out to the University and watched him work. His approach to the problem is entirely in terms of his subject—communicating with the Aliens instead of trying to understand them. There’s been entirely too much intricate speculation about Alien consciousness, sexual attitudes and social organization, about stuff from which we will derive no tangible and immediate good. Kleimbocher’s completely pragmatic.”
“All right. I follow you. Only he went Prime this morning.”
Hebster paused, a sentence dangling from his dropped jaw. “Professor Kleim-bocher? Rudolf Kleimbocher?” he asked idiotically. “But he was so close… he almost had it… an elementary signal dictionary… he was about to—”
“He did. About nine forty-five. He’d been up all night with a Primey one of the psych professors had managed to hypnotize and gone home unusually optimistic. In the middle of his first class this morning, he interrupted himself in a lecture on medieval Cyrillic to… to gabble-honk. He sneezed and wheezed at the students for about ten minutes in the usual Primey pattern of initial irritation, then, abruptly giving them up as hopeless, worthless idiots, he levitated himself in that eerie way they almost always do at first. Banged his head against the ceiling and knocked himself out. I don’t know what it was, fright, excitement, respect for the old boy perhaps, but the students neglected to tie him up before going for help. By the time they’d come back with the campus SIC man, Kleimbocher had revived and dissolved one wall of the Graduate School to get out. Here’s a snapshot of him about five hundred feet in the air, lying on his back with his arms crossed behind his head, skimming west at twenty miles an hour.”
Hebster studied the little paper rectangle with blinking eyes. “You radioed the air force to chase him, of course.”
“What’s the use? We’ve been through that enough times. He’d either increase his speed and generate a tornado, drop like a stone and get himself smeared all over the countryside, or materialize stuff like wet coffee grounds and gold ingots inside the jets of the pursuing plane. Nobody’s caught a Primey yet in the first flush of… whatever they do feel at first. And we might stand to lose anything from a fairly expensive hunk of aircraft, including pilot, to a couple of hundred acres of New Jersey topsoil.”
Hebster groaned. “But the eighteen years of research that he represented!”
“Yeah. That’s where we stand. Blind Alley umpteen hundred thousand or thereabouts. Whatever the figure is, it’s awfully close to the end. If you can’t crack the Alien on a straight linguistic basis, you can’t crack the Alien at all, period, end of paragraph. Our most powerful weapons affect them like bubble pipes, and our finest minds are good for nothing better than to serve them in low, fawning idiocy. But the Primeys are all that’s left. We might be able to talk sense to the Man if not the Master.”
“Except that Primeys, by definition, don’t talk sense.”