After a glare of puritanical disapproval, the officer connected him with Gauk. The lean, bored face of the minor Soviet official confronted him. Boredom at once gave way to interest. "A preslávni vityaz," Gauk intoned. "Dostoini konovód tolpi byezmozgloi, prestóopnaya—"
"Don't make a speech," Joe interrupted, feeling impatient. As well as surly. This was his customary morning mood.
"Prostitye," Gauk apologized.
"Do you have a title for me?" Joe asked; he held his pen ready.
"The Tokyo translating computer has been tied up all morning," Gauk answered. "So I put it through the smaller one at Kobe. In some respects Kobe is more—how shall I put it?--quaint than Tokyo." He paused, consulting a slip of paper; his office, like Joe's, consisted of a cubicle, containing only a desk, a phone, a straight-backed chair made of plastic and a note pad. "Ready?"
"Ready." Joe made a random scratch-mark with his pen. Gauk cleared his throat and read from his slip of paper, a taut grin on his face; it was a sleek expression, as if he were certain of himself on this one. "This originated in your language," Gauk explained, honoring one of the rules which all of them together had made up, the bunch of them scattered here and there across the map of Earth, in little offices, in puny positions, with nothing to do, no tasks or sorrows or difficult problems. Nothing but the harsh vacuity of their collective society, which each in his own way objected to, which all of them, in collaboration, circumvented by means of The Game. "Book title," Gauk continued. "That's the only clue I'll give you."
"Is it well known?" Joe asked.
Ignoring his question, Gauk read from the slip of paper.
‘The Lattice-work Gun-stinging Insect.'
"Gun-slinging?" Joe asked.
"No. Gun-stinging."
"'Lattice-work,'" Joe said, pondering. "Network. ‘Stinging Insect.' Wasp?" He scratched with his pen, stumped. "And you got this from the translation computer at Kobe? Bee," he decided. " ‘Gun,' so Gun-bee. Heater-bee. Laserbee. Rod-bee. Gat." He swiftly wrote that down. "Gat-wasp, gat-bee. Gatsby. ‘Lattice-work.' That would be a grating. Grate." He had it now. "_The Great Gatsby_, by F. Scott Fitzgerald." He tossed down his pen in triumph.
"Ten points for you," Gauk said. He made a tally. "That puts you even with Hirshmeyer in Berlin and slightly ahead of Smith in New York. You want to try another?"
Joe said, "I have one." From his pocket he got out a folded sheet; spreading it out on his desk he read from it, " ‘The Male Offspring in Addition Gets Out of Bed.' " He eyed Gauk then, feeling the warmth of knowledge that he had gotten a good one—this, from the larger language-translating computer in downtown Tokyo.
"A phononym," Gauk said effortlessly. "Son, sun. The Sun Also Rises. Ten points for me." He made a note of that.
Angrily, Joe said, "Those for Which the Male Homosexual Exacts Transit Tax."
"Another by Serious Constricting-path," Gauk said, with a wide smile. "_For Whom the Bell Tolls_."
"'Serious Constricting-path'?" Joe echoed wonderingly.
"Ernest Hemingway."
"I give up," Joe said. He felt weary; Gauk, as usual, was far ahead of him in their mutual game of retranslating computer translations back into the original tongue.
"Want to try another?" Gauk asked silkily, his face bland.
"One more," Joe decided.
"Quickly Shattered at the Quarreling Posterior."
"Jesus," Joe said, with deep and timid bewilderment. It rang no bell, no bell at all. " ‘Quickly shattered.' Broken, maybe. Broke, break. _Quick_--that would be fast. Breakfast. But ‘Quarreling Posterior'?" He cogitated quickly, in the Roman sense. "Fighting. Arguing. Spat." In his mind no solution appeared. " ‘Posterior.' Rear end. Ass. Butt." For a time he meditated in silence, in the Yoga fashion. "No," he said finally. "I can't make it out. I give up."
"So soon?" Gauk inquired, raising an eyebrow.
"Well, there's no use sitting here the rest of the day working that one over."
"Fanny," Gauk said.
Joe groaned.
"You groan?" Gauk said. "At one you missed that you should have got? Are you tired, Fernwright? Does it wear you out to sit there in your cubbyhole, doing nothing hour after hour, like the rest of us? You'd rather sit alone in silence and not talk to us? Not try anymore?" Gauk sounded seriously upset; his face had become dark.
"It's just that it was an easy one," Joe said lamely. But he could see that his colleague in Moscow was not convinced. "Okay," he continued. "I'm depressed. I can't stand this much longer. Do you know what I mean? You do know." He waited. A faceless moment poured past in which neither of them spoke. "I'm ringing off," Joe said, and began to hang up.
"Wait," Gauk said rapidly. "One more."
Joe said, "No." He hung up, sat emptily staring. On his unfolded sheet of paper he had several more, but—
It's gone, he said to himself, bitterly. The energy, the capacity to fiddle away a lifetime without dignified work, and, in its place, the performance of the trivial, even the voluntarily trivial, as we have constructed here in The Game. Contact with others, he thought; through The Game our isolation is lanced and its body broken. We peep out, but what do we see, really? Mirror reflections of our own selves, our bloodless, feeble countenances, devoted to nothing in particular, insofar as I can fathom it. Death is very close, he thought. When you think in this manner. I can feel it, he decided. How near I am. Nothing is killing me; I have no enemy, no antagonist; I am merely expiring, like a magazine subscription: month by month. Because, he thought, I am too hollowed out to participate any longer. Even if they—the others who play The Game—need me, need my corny contribution.
And yet, as he gazed sightlessly down at his piece of paper, he felt dim action occurring within him, a kind of photosynthesis. A gathering of remaining powers, on an instinctive basis. Left alone, functioning in its sightless way, the biological effort of his body asserted itself physically; he began to jot a further title.
Dialing his phone, he obtained a satellite relay to Japan; he raised Tokyo and gave the digits for the Tokyo translating computer. With the skill of long habit he obtained a direct line to the great, clanking, booming construct; he bypassed its host of attendants.
"Oral transmission," he informed it.
The hulking GX9 computer clicked over to oral, rather than visual, reception.
"_The Corn Is Green_," Joe said. He turned on the recording unit of his phone.
At once the computer answered, giving the Japanese equivalent.
"Thank you and out," Joe said, and rang off. He then dialed the translating computer at Washington, D.C. Rewinding the tape of his phone recorder he fed the Japanese words—again in oral form—to the computer segment which would translate the Japanese utterance into English.
The computer said, "The cliché is inexperienced."
"Pardon?" Joe said, and laughed. "Repeat, please."
"The cliché is inexperienced," the computer said with godlike nobility and patience.
"That's an exact translation?" Joe inquired.
"The cliché is—"
"Okay," Joe said. "Sign off." He hung up and sat grinning; his energy, aroused by human amusement, surged up and invigorated him.
For a moment he sat hesitating, deciding, and then he dialed good ol' Smith in New York.
"Office of Procurement and Supply, Wing Seven," Smith said; his beaglelike face, haunted by ennui, manifested itself on the little gray screen. "Oh, hey there, Fernwright. Got something for me?"
"An easy one," Joe said. " ‘The Cliché Is—‘"
"Wait'll you hear mine," Smith interrupted. "Me first; come on, Joe—this is a great one. You'll never get it. Listen." He read swiftly, stammering over the words. "Bogish Persistentisms. By Shaft Tackapple."