Native Tongue

Chapter Twenty-five

It was Lanky Pugh’s personal opinion that this latest hooha from Government Work should have been located offplanet. Way offplanet. Preferably somewhere out behind the Extreme Moons.

But the Pentagon didn’t feel that way about it. In the first place, they assured him it was perfectly safe for G.W. to be right where it was. El Centro, California, wasn’t just a ghost town — it was a ghost location. Nobody, but nobody was ever going to drop by the godforsaken broiling spit in the middle of a giant rockpile that had once been a town called El Centro… in a time when you couldn’t be too particular about what square foot or two of this earth you stood on. That time was long gone, now.

The real reason, however, was that the scientists who were required for this project couldn’t be allowed to go offplanet. Some of them might have been willing to do without their labs and their creature comforts, but the government wanted them right there at hand. Right on tap, where you could pick up your comunit and give a call and say, “My God, Professor Blah, will you come take a look at this?” And Professor Blah could be right there, in about half an hour maximum. The Pentagon was almost violently against the idea of having any of their Professor Blahs more than a half hour out of range.

And so they were set up in an underground installation, all nicely cooled and decorated so you could hardly tell you weren’t at a motel, in the middle of effing nowhere. Lanky Pugh, and a whole platoon of servomechanisms, and the Professors. And what they had going this time surprised even Lanky, who had really believed — when they closed down Arnold Dolbe’s unit — that the U.S. Government had come to the end of its string regarding the Interfacing of human babies and nonhumanoid Aliens. The shutdown had been very convincing, and Lanky had approved of it with all his heart. He’d been glad the baby project was over, glad to see the discreet removal of the media notices calling for volunteer infants, and damn surprised when he found out that it was just one more song-and-dance to a federal tune.

Here they are, opened up with a brand new project, this one going on just below the surface of the ground for all the world to see, if the world cared to trek out to El Centro, California. This project’s Interface had cost the taxpayers a cool billion if it had cost them a nickel — you didn’t provide a shared environment for humans and whales in the middle of an effing desert for any kind of discount rate.

There was a turnstile, and a chipper little servomechanism sitting beside it to chirp at people. “Hello, folks! Welcome to the Cetacean Intersection! Please insert your credit card in the slot that you see outlined in red on the top of the turnstile, and step right through! Please follow the yellow line that you see straight ahead of you on the floor of the building! It will take you right to the Interface! Thank you, folks, and please come back and see us again.”

Nobody, to Lanky’s knowledge, had ever bothered to go through the turnstile and follow the yellow stripe and watch the solemn pair of small whales swimming in their half of a regulation Interface… a little oversized, but otherwise regulation… with an equally solemn tubie watching them through the barrier. There was nothing to see, nothing to hear, and nothing at all to experience that was worth the 135° hell of rocks and cracked earth and Nothing that stretched as far as you could see in every direction above the ground.

It was fancy, all right, and if anyone ever did come look at it it would probably impress the hell out of them. Lanky had to give the government credit; they’d spared no expense. There was even a very small automated souvenir shop, where you could buy a toy Interface to take home to the kids.

The real project, though, was two levels lower, encased in the same earthquake-proof concrete shell, but sunk deep into the bowels of the blasted earth. And what went on down there, far underneath the whales swimming round and round and round and the tubie watching, was something else altogether.

“Let’s just assume,” the Pentagon briefer had said, “that what the linguists tell us is true. Just for the sake of getting on with this. Let’s assume that the problem is simply that the human brain cannot tolerate sharing perceptions with a non-humanoid brain. We’ve had plenty of evidence that that’s true.”

“Yeah, we sure have,” Lanky had agreed. “Damn sure we have.”

“And then let’s just set aside the other matter. Let’s just ignore, for now, the fact that the linguists know a solution to the problem that they’re unwilling to let us in on. The hell with them, gentlemen! The government of the United States has for chrissakes got savvy enough, and technology enough, and everything else enough, to either figure out what it is that the linguists know or to find some other way around the problem.”

“Damn right,” said Lanky. “Way to tell ’em.”

“Now what it boils down to is this… what we need, men, is a brain that’s just a little bit less humanoid and just a little bit more Alien. A kind of bridge between the two, don’t you see?”

Lanky didn’t know whether he saw or not, but the professors had all seemed to follow what was going on without any difficulty. They trusted him with the computers; he trusted them with their tools. And it sounded just about as crazy, no more and no less so, than any of the rest of the G.W. projects.

The idea was to use genetic engineering, and the government’s overflowing tanks full of tubies, and gradually, one step at a time, alter the brains and the perception systems of the tubies to make them alien. Or Alien, as the case might be.

The Pentagon man had felt obliged to caution them.

“We can’t move fast,” he’d said. “We don’t dare move fast, because we don’t know exactly what it is that we’re after. But we have thousands of tubies for you gentlemen to work with, to modify in whatever way you care to — and if you run out, well, there’s plenty more where those came from. You just let us know what you need.”

The professors sat with microscopes and nearly invisible messes on slides and in Petri dishes, and they made their slow changes. Lanky didn’t know how they did that. Whether they poked the little embryos with the scientific equivalent of pins, or blasted them with lasers, or ran currents through them, or what. He most emphatically did not want to know. He knew enough about G.W. projects to last him all the rest of his life. He stayed carefully away from the profs, he ran the data they gave him without allowing any of it to register in his memory — that’s what you have computers for, so you don’t have to put stuff in your own memory — and that was all he did. Just doing his job, thank you very much.

He had asked one question. He had asked, “What are you going to call it?”

“Call what?”

“Well… you’re down here to fool around with the embryos till you get something we can Interface. Something that’s not quite human and not quite humanoid and not quite Alien either. I believe you’ll get it… don’t see why not. But what are you going to call it?”

“Mr. Pugh,” the eggdome had said, looking at him just exactly the way he looked at the stuff under his microscope, “please go away and let me work.”

All right. Lanky had gone away as requested. It didn’t hurt his feelings, being talked to like that. After what Lanky Pugh had been through, he didn’t have any feelings left to hurt. He gave the professor one wave to acknowledge the message and went on up to watch the whales swim around.

One of the things he planned to do, before he left this fancy hell, was figure out how to get into the Interface and go for a swim with those whales in that beautiful blue water. Round and round and round, in a lovely endless loop.