Just Plain Weird (19 page)

         
Telling the story seemed to have drained him. He sat there limply at the opposite end of the sofa. He even looked as if he’d lost about twenty pounds, and crow’s feet showed beneath his eyes. He gave me a wry look now, and said, “Foolish old man, right? I think the same thing every time I see myself in the mirror.”

***********

For the next two weeks, I went to the Laughton’s house each afternoon. I’d sit on the sofa in the living room, and answer a set of questions Eliza’s father had prepared for the day, while he paced back and forth, occasionally stopping to jot down some notes on the yellow legal pad he carried with him. Slowly, day by day, the accumulated knowledge gathered would at long last unlock all the hidden secrets of the artifact, whose technical nature was so advanced as to be baffling.

         
During the next weeks, I learned quite a bit about Mr. Laughton. He was as simple in nature as he was common in appearance. He desperately longed to see his wife again; he was a very gentle man with the heart of a romantic. It wasn’t long before he insisted that I call him Doc, the way Eliza always did, and I felt that he was developing a genuine fondness for me-- he even once confided that he’d always wished for a son, but then made me promise never to tell Eliza, for he wasn’t sure how she would take it. Another important thing I learned about him as he asked his endless series of questions, and as he made his occasional cryptic notes, was that he had absolutely no clue what he was doing-- he was like a man trying to grip something but unable to do so because he had no hands. As far as archeology, he was fine, and could expound for hours on end the details of historically significant discoveries. But when it came to issues of high tech, it became clear that the man was utterly lost, not asking the right questions-- sometimes, even asking questions that weren’t remotely relevant.

         
We would take breaks, during which Eliza would bring me lunch or dinner. Unfortunately, she had to be barred from being present when he father questioned me, because, to be entirely truthful, she was very distracting and getting more so as time went by. It really wasn’t her fault, though; I simply couldn’t concentrate enough to answer Doc’s questions, if she were in the same room. My eye would always drift in her direction, and focus on her or on some part of her-- her hands or her neck or the backs or her knees, whatever-- and soon my mind would wander off into blissful areas where no thoughts were possible. Naturally she didn’t take this exclusion very well, becoming morose or sarcastic each and every time she had to leave Doc and me alone. I tried to convince her that it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing that I found her so distracting, but she remained skeptical, moody, even outright belligerent at times.

         
“Well, what was so darned distracting about me today?” she’d demanded, very defensive.

         
“Actually, your knees,” I’d say.

         
“My knees? What about my knees?”

         
“I don’t know-- they’re sort of-- cute.”

         
Here she’d looked down at her knees, which, in actual fact, were on the bony side and covered with old scars from when she’d fallen and hurt herself as a child.

         
“Cute? They’re hideous,” she’d say, and walk away seething, believing I was making fun of her.

         
Each passing day her attitude worsened, and even during those times-- after I’d finish a session with Doc-- when she and I would sit there munching on pizza and watching television, she remained so mad she refused to speak to me. Once, when I made some small attempt to elicit a truce, she narrowed her eyes and actually hissed at me, “I hate you. I utterly hate you,” after which she rose and fled from the living room to go upstairs and lock herself in her bedroom.

         
Then Doc, having caught her outbreak, came into the living room and sat with me on the sofa. When I looked at him, he just shrugged.

         
“I know she doesn’t mean it,” he said, “but beyond that I can’t say anything. When it comes to women, I’m fairly lost-- I’m not ashamed to admit. A man has to realize his limitations when it comes to comprehending females. If he doesn’t--well, that can lead into all kinds of trouble.”

         
From there we slipped into an uncomfortable talk during which he asked all kinds of questions about my family. It was strictly small talk, I understood that, but that didn’t make talking any easier. He showed only mild interest when I explained that my father was a traveling sales man. He wondered at the fact that I didn’t even know what my father sold-- which was true enough, as I’d never been interested enough to ask. He appeared more interested when I began to tell him about my brother and how he’d won an O. Henry award and all. Finally he started to ask about me, was I planning on going to college, what I was interested in…. To my embarrassment, I couldn’t answer very many of his questions. Truthfully, I had no plans-- never really considered any, beyond trying out for a couple teams after school began in the fall. After that, who knew?

         
“Well, maybe that’s not a bad idea,” he said. “Keeping your options open.”

         
After two weeks of questioning me about the artifact, Doc began to get frustrated. He had accumulated six full legal pads full of notes, but when he pored over them, trying to make sense of all the data, he found the artifact as mysterious as ever. It was as if each scrap of information was a puzzle piece, and none of the pieces fit together to form a picture.

    
 
   
With his head bowed to stare down at a page of notes, he’d nervously rub the top of his head until I was sure his bald spot was getting bigger by the day. He’d complain that this didn’t make any sense, or that that didn’t seem right. He’d go over questions he had asked me days before, and checked to see he had the right answers.

         
“Things just don’t add up,” he’d complain.

         
One day I suggested to him that maybe the problem was in the translation.

         
“What do you mean?” he asked.

         
“Well, first I’m receiving information telepathically, right? So many times, all I receive is ideas and impressions. I’m assuming that this is the way the artifact communicates with its own people, people who know how to interpret these ideas and impressions, and put them into their language. Then, too, I think there might be a big translation problem going from their language to English. For example, when you asked it about the temporal coordinates, you put down that it gave no answer. That’s true, but the feeling I had was the same feeling you get when you try to remember a word but can’t and it’s as though it’s stuck at the end of your tongue. So I take that to mean that it may not know what you’re talking about, but it may have an inkling that doesn’t quite make sense to it. So one problem may be the way it thinks. The other problem is definitely in its language. It doesn’t seem to have a word for ‘space’ or ‘time’ or ‘energy’ or ‘thought’, but looks at those things as if they were all the same thing. And for that they have one word, and the closest translation to that one word is ‘travel.’
  
You see the problem? We have ‘here’ and ‘there’, but they only have ‘here.’ When you ask about the artifact, it’s here. When you ask about the spaceship, it’s here. When you ask about its home planet, it’s here. To them it’s as though everything is at the same place and time. The same problem with ‘then’ and ‘now’; everything with them is ‘now.’ So how could you possibly get it to understand what you mean by temporal coordinates?”

         
Doc frowned, and it seemed the furrows in his forehead were getting deeper by the day.

         
“We have to rephrase the questions, then,” he finally concluded. “Try this. Bring up the view screen, and place an indicator on Batavia, and then ask it how to return there.”

         
When I did this, the artifact conveyed uncertainty to me-- again the same feeling of not being able to recall something.

         
“Sorry, Doc,” I said. “It just doesn’t understand. Either it has no word that’s the equal of ‘return,’ or it doesn’t understand why you’re asking the question because the way it looks at things you’re already there. Remember, it doesn’t seem to distinguish between past, present and future. If you’re there in the future-- well, you’re there; you don’t need to get there.”

         
“Well, try other words,” Doc suggested, starting to lose patience. “Try ‘again.’ Try ‘twice’ Try ‘revisit.’”

         
When I did this, the artifact shot a word into my mind, for which, apparently, there was no English translation. Oddly enough, it placed the word in my mind using our alphabet, as though it, too, were trying to communicate as desperately as we were, and might be phonically spelling the word, which was ‘destromalinacasil.’ A moment later, it relayed two other words: ‘kamalinacasil’ and ‘settomalinacasil.’ Each of these words I printed out for Doc to mull over.

         
It didn’t take long for him to throw up his hands in frustration.

         
“There has to be a better way to communicate,” he said, stalking around the room. “All right. Each of the words has a prefix-- at least that’s something recognizable. But there is no English word close to any of them…. Well, what about the base word, -malinacasil, is there an English word close to that?”

         
I thought the question, and the answer sprang into my head.

         
“Yeah,” I said. “It means ‘paradox.’”

         
“Paradox? So presumably they have three words that are variations of the word ‘paradox,’” he said, wondering, and then added, “Wait a minute. You mean they have three words for ‘paradox,’ and ‘space,’ ‘time,’ ‘energy,’ and ‘thought,’ are all represented by a single word? Does that make any sense?” he asked earnestly.

         
“To them, it must,” I noted.

         
“And that’s probably it,” he said. “The key to their language may be entirely in the way they think, the way they view things. They might have been humanoids-- and in many respects don’t sound very different from us-- but the way they reason-- that’s an entirely different matter. And language does develop over a long period of time according to reasoning and point of view.”

         
“Then I suppose if they have three words for ‘paradox’ then, maybe, they consider it a more important word.”

         
“Probably.”

         
“Then that’s why you couldn’t reset the temporal coordinates to return for your wife.”

         
“Is this you talking, or it?” he asked.

         
“I’m not sure,” I said. “Sometimes it all seems the same to me.” It was as if the artifact had been communicating to me on a subconscious level, our thoughts blending so perfectly I couldn’t tell where it stopped and I began. What I said next I said as though I’d learned it all years ago and in my mind, it was common knowledge. “The artifact has a failsafe system to prevent paradoxes. You must have set the temporal coordinates for a time that you and Eliza already occupied. You can’t be in two places at one time, you know? That would be a paradox, right? I’m not sure what would happen, but it can’t be anything good, or else whoever designed the system wouldn’t have made it that way.”

         
Doc considered all this, and then seemed pleasantly surprised.

         
“That means all we have to do is work around the paradox problem.”

         
“Yeah, Doc, that’s all,” I said wryly.

         
“Well, it’s something,” he said, shrugging. “It may not be impossible.”

         
“Is next to impossible that much better?”

         
“Hey, anything to hang your hope on is better than letting it lie on the floor.” The gloom of his attitude began to lift. He eyed me curiously, then. “It’s done something to you, hasn’t it?” he asked. “You certainly don’t seem like the simple quiet kid I met only a couple weeks ago.”