Slave Ship (3 page)

I offered him his choice, but he insisted on not disturbing my arrangements. "Both of them are splendid," he declared judiciously, and then he smiled. It was a good smile; with it he came to rigid attention. "Timiyazev, Semyon Ilyitch," he proclaimed. "Please to call me Semyon."

I helped him unpack, and we made ourselves acquainted. He knew more about Project Mako than I had before the briefing; but nothing that was very informative. He had been thoroughly briefed by his Government-in-exile at their tiny legation in Washington, just next to the dome of the United Nations building. He said, "They were very glad to be able to send me to this place. We have not so very many officers in the Free Russian Forces who are versed in animal psychology, do you see? Much less one who is the son of a colleague of Pavlov's."

"I didn't know it ran in the blood."

He looked at me appraisingly, then chuckled. "Oh, it does not. Surely not. But my mother was also my teacher. She was unhappy when my opportunity came to attend the Suvorov Academy. She would have preferred, you see, a scientific life for me. But in a world at war, one is best as a soldier. And if one must be a soldier, why not attend the Academy and have perhaps the prospect of becoming a general?" He added pensively, "That was some years ago, of course. Before the Orientals occupied us. Now—perhaps my mother knew best."

I made my excuses after a little while. Semyon made me just a little uncomfortable.

I know that the Russian business is all done and over, and you don't hold a grudge against somebody who's down. And, in a way, it's our fault that the Russians are in the kind of shape they're in. If we hadn't pulverized them so thoroughly in the Short War, they wouldn't have been so soft a touch ten years later for the Caodais coming over through Mongolia. And if they had been able to hold on for a while then, long enough for us to get off the dime, the Caodais might have been stopped in their tracks right there, as Hitler might have been stopped at the Sudetenland. And universal conscription might not have been necessary, and my wife might not have been so many thousands of miles away . . .

And if wishes were horses, beggars would ride the winners at Tropical Park.

Howsoever, we got to work.

The next morning Chief Oswiak picked up the Russian and me and took us in the helicopter to our base of' operations.

I said: "I didn't see those buildings when you flew me in."

"Sure you didn't, Lieutenant," the Chief agreed. "They wasn't any buildings there to see. The Seabees come in yesterday morning, and more fuss and commotion you never heard in your life. But they got them up." He brought the copter down gently between two of the new buildings. Three-story prefabs, they were, with the workmen still laying power lines around them. "Looks like we're getting busy, all right," said Oswiak. And it did.

Computer officer—that was I. That was what I had done aboard
Spruance
, and that was what I was going to be doing at Mako. A chunk of one floor in one of the prefabs was all mine. It was my first assignment to supervise the installation of my computers, already on hand and waiting to be hooked up. After that—after that I wasn't very clear; but, as I say, it had something to do with talking to animals.

Well—

At any rate, the computers were plenty big and plenty good. The Seabees had already made a start. I pitched in, and the job was completed by bed time. The night shift came on to test connections as I left. I stopped by my new roommate's quarters to see if he wanted a lift back to the BOQ.

But he didn't; it was well on to midnight, but he was busy doing something with a collie.

From the door I heard a clicking sound, like one of those tin gadgets from childhood called crickets. I looked, and that was what it was—formed tin body, hardened, cupped tin plate fitted into it. "What's up?" I demanded. Semyon looked up angrily. "Hush, Logan!" he ordered severely. "New dog, I must finish this trial. Stay where you are!"

The dog looked at me pleadingly. It was clearly confused; its tongue was hanging, it was panting, its slightly raised foreleg was quivering. Semyon didn't say another word. We all waited and the dog got tired first.

It started toward me, looked at Semyon, hesitated, stopped. Semyon was as silent as old Stalin in his tomb. The dog turned tentatively to one side, and
click
went the cricket in Semyon's fingers. The dog walked slowly to a straight-backed chair.
Click
. The dog touched the chair with its nose;
click
,
click
.

Yes, I was puzzled. Semyon had called it a "trial"; but all he was doing was clicking his little cricket. He didn't say a word, he hardly moved.

The dog was as puzzled as I, which was some consolation. It stopped and looked at Semyon; Semyon, blue eyes serene under his pale brows, looked calmly back. The dog took a hesitant step away from the chair, and paused, waiting for a reaction. Silence. The dog whined worriedly, and returned to the chair.
Click
went Semyon's cricket. The dog placed its forepaws on the seat.
Click
,
click
. The dog leaped up into the seat and curled up, tail wagging madly.
Click
,
click
,
click;
and then Semyon, grinning broadly, said:

"Fine dog. Oh, excellent dog! You may come in now, please, Logan." He walked over to the dog, talking to it in Russian, and scratched enthusiastically behind its ears.

"What the devil is it?" I demanded. "Were you sending Morse code?"

"Exactly," he beamed. "Oh, not precisely the Morse, you understand. But a code. We were talking, the dog and I."

"Some Russian invention?"

He shrugged modestly. "Of course a Russian invention. My own mother invented it herself, you will find it described in Great Russian Encyclopedia. Of course," he added judiciously, "she was assisted in inventing it by a man named Skinner in America, who invented it also, some years earlier. But my mother invented it in
Russia
, you see."

"Tell me," I demanded. Semyon was delighted, of course, but he was far from clear. It was a way of communicating with animals, but the animals couldn't talk back. It was a way of getting a dog to do what you wished, but it wasn't training.

"Is it the same thing Lineback uses for cows?"

"No, no!" he said. "Radically different, Logan!"

"Different how?"

Semyon gave me a queer look. I could see he was wondering how anyone as stupid as I had been assigned to Project Mako, but he was too polite to say so. He said only: "You have heard the cattle language. It is only a matter of listening to the sounds the beasts make—we will dismiss, for the moment, the visual components. One discovers how one beast informs another that there is, shall we say, a patch of clover here or a stinging-nettle there. Once you have learned the, shall we call it, ox-tongue—" he peered coyly at me—"you say it back to the beast. You make the stinging-nettle bleat for danger and pain; you say it to the beast, and you show him, perhaps, a clump of marigolds. Then perhaps, he does not eat the marigolds. Of course, he perhaps slips sometimes, for he is quite stupid. He may take a nibble to see for himself. Then you beat him, and make the stinging-nettle bleat again, and he learns. Oh, he learns, surely; it is a question of time and repetition." He frowned at me and said argumentatively: "Is
training
, you see? The language is only to expedite the training."

"I see. And what you are doing?"

"It is
language
." He smiled abruptly and charmingly. "But I admit, Logan, it is a very tiny language. One word: 'Yes.'
My
dog here, Josip; if he does as I wish, I say 'yes' to him. If he does what I do not wish, I say nothing at all, and he understands 'no.' I snap this thing for yes; I do nothing for no. A very simple language, isn't it?"

"Too simple. How can it work?"

He shrugged. "See for yourself. What would you have Josip do?"

"Do?"

"So I said,
do
. Set a task for him, Logan. We shall see."

I hesitated, and he flared up: "You think it is no language, yes? I see. You think it is some kind of trick or game, like trained dog acts in the fair. But see for yourself, Logan; give me an order and I will translate. Would you perhaps care to have Josip sit in your lap? Push the door you left ajar closed with his nose? Fetch you a book from the shelf?"

I said awkwardly, "I've seen trained dogs do some astonishing things—"

"Not trained!" he almost screamed. "Is absolutely untrained, this dog! Except for only one hour this afternoon, when I taught him the language. Nothing else. Is not training, Logan, you must understand that!" He cast about the room agitatedly. "No discussion," he said peremptorily. "Look here, I choose a task. You see the cardboard cup on the floor? Once it had coffee in it; I drank the coffee; I forgot the cup. I shall require Josip to pick it up and put it in the wastebasket. Neatness is important, is it not? Even for a dog."

"I had a Scotty who carried newspapers—"

"Logan! I shall stand behind this folding screen, peeping at him with only my eyes. I shall say nothing, except in our tiny language. One word, remember! No, no—no discussion, only watch."

He huffed and went behind the screen, the dog watching him worriedly.

It was a sad little spectacle, in a way. My sympathies were all with the dog. He knew something was expected of him, but he clearly did not know what. There was silence from Semyon behind the screen, then the dog took a tentative step toward Semyon. Silence still. The dog, forlorn, took a step away.
Click
from Semyon.

The dog brightened and, with assurance, took several more steps.
Click
,
click
,
click;
and then the clicking stopped. The dog had veered away from the direction of the paper cup.

Josip was beginning to get the hang of it. He lolled his tongue worriedly for only a second, then he tried another direction, at random. Silence. Then another, and this time it was straight for the cup.
Click
,
click
until the dog was standing right at the cup, touching it with his nose.

It might have taken three or four minutes in all, .but, guided by Semyon's cricket noises, the dog unarguably did exactly what Semyon had promised. He pushed the cup, touched it with his paw, rolled it with his nose. Eventually he picked it up, and eventually he carried it to the wastebasket. Like Shannon's mechanical mouse, he made random motions until he found one that paid off (with a
click);
and continued with it purposefully until the pay-off stopped.

It all went quite rapidly. The cup went into the waste-basket and Semyon came gleefully from behind the screen. "Ah, Logan?" he asked. "Training? Or language?"

I was getting sleepy. I left him and looked in on the last stages of checking my digital computers.

Well, I am no more stupid than most; but man's mind is divided into compartments, leakproof and thought-tight. I had been polite with Semyon, but I had not been convinced.

Set aside the question of what it all had to do with the Navy or the Caodais—that was a separate problem. On its own merits, what Semyon was doing was interesting enough. And perhaps it was even important, in a way. But to call it language? Ridiculous. I had at least a nodding acquaintance with the theory of language. Language is a supple and evocative thing; how could you dignify a one-word vocabulary by that term? Imagine compressing information, any quantity whatsoever of information into a simple yes-and-no code.

Thinking which, I checked the installation of my digital computers, capable of infinite subtle operations, packed with countless bits of knowledge and instruction. And all of it transcribed, summarized and digested into what the mathematicians call the binary system, and reproduced in the computers by the off-or-on status of electronic cells.

III

MAYBE I WAS STUPID. But you have to admit that the idea of binary language is hard to take.

Animals, after all, are not electronic computers. They are flesh and blood like ourselves. I would have thought of talking to animals in a mathematical code about as soon as I would have thought of talking to my RAGNAROK in German. . . .

And then I found out that, way back in the fifties, people had begun to do just that. I poked through the briefing documents in the project library until I found a resume of some trials that had taken place, long ago, in England, on a computer called APEXC—heaven knows why. They set the computer the problem of translating German into English; and the computer, no doubt, clicked and hummed and blew a couple of fuses, and then settled down to the job of squeezing the sense of one language into the forms of another.

It didn't say just how well APEXC made out, but there were hints. In the first place, some mere human had to give APEXC a hand in the clinches—what they called post-editing, meaning the choice, from context, of several possible translations for a single word. But it worked.

So I read farther—on animal communication, this time. I found Semyon's mother's "invention" in the literature—also way back in the early fifties. I found sample vocabularies for cow, for dog, for crow, even for rabbit and duck. Some of the "words" were kind of interesting. For crow, a B-natural whole note, two staccato A-sharp quarter notes and a scattering of grace notes. Translation: Beat it, there's an eagle coming. Crow was one of the simpler vocabularies, only about fifty identified words; but it was astonishing what
corvus
could convey to his friends with a few simple caws. And some of the beasts, nearly mute, got considerable meaning across without any sound at all.

Take the Bombay duck's train-switching wiggle of the tail feathers, for instance. Translation: "I love you very much, honey, let's get married."

I suspected, at about that point, that some of the early researchers were carried away by their senses of humor. "Language?" I complained to Semyon in our quarters, while I was reading the briefing books and he was playing something he called a balalaika, "How can they call that language? If my mouth waters, that means I want to eat, but is mouth-watering a word? It's only a reflex action, Semyon!"