“Lanky,” said Beau St. Clair, “that’s all wrong. They can’t attach the words you’d attach, they can’t pronounce the statements — but they make them. Like, ‘what I see there is something I have seen before, so I’ll look at the other thing I haven’t seen before.’ Like ‘that noise is my mother.’ Stuff like that.”
“Shit,” said Lanky again. “Fairies and angels. Fairy shit and angel shit.”
They were used to Lanky Pugh; they went ahead with it in spite of him.
“So,” Showard wound it up, “that’s what we know. There’s something about the way the non-humanoid Aliens perceive things, something about the ‘reality’ they make out of stimuli, so impossible that it freaks out the babies and destroys their central nervous systems permanently.”
“Like what?” Lanky demanded.
“Pugh,” said Showard, “if I knew that, my central nervous system would have been destroyed permanently, and I sure as hell wouldn’t be able to tell you about it.”
“Aw, shit,” said Lanky.
“The obvious solution,” Dolbe put in, glad to have come to at least one thing he was sure he understood, “is desensitization.”
“Yeah,” said Brooks. “And God knows we’ve tried that. We’ve tried putting the baby in the Interface for just a fraction of a second at a time, over weeks and weeks, working up to a whole second… makes no damn difference. Come the time that baby somehow gets an Alien perception, it self-destructs, all the same.”
“So let’s think about that,” Dolbe insisted. “Let’s think about that seriously. The problem is desensitization. We’ve tried it by decreasing the exposure to the absolute minimum, and that hasn’t helped. So that’s out. We can’t ask the baby to imagine it in advance; the baby can’t understand what we’re saying, and we don’t know what to tell it to imagine even if it could understand. So that’s out. What else is there, that we haven’t ruled out?”
The silence went on and on, while they thought. And at last Beau cleared his throat tentatively.
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe there’s something.”
“Spit it out.”
“Maybe it’s crazy, too.”
“Let’s talk about it, man!” said Dolbe. “What is it? And you, Showard, Pugh — put those cursed knives away, before I go out of my mind!”
“Sure, Arnold,” said Lanky solemnly, and folded the offending object ostentatiously into itself and put it in his pocket. “Now that you’ve asked.”
“Go on, Beau,” said Showard. And he put his knife away, too.
“Well,” said Beau slowly, “I was just thinking. What if — just what if, now — you gave a baby, right from minute one, one of the hallucinogens? Maybe different kinds, even. What if you did that for a month or so before you ever put it in the Interface? What do you suppose you’d get that way?”
Brooks Showard stared at his colleague, as if he’d perceived an angel, and he came roaring up out of his apathy with a suddenness and intensity that startled even Lanky.
“By Christ, St. Clair!” he shouted. “You’d get a baby, you’d get a baby that had made itself a statement that went roughly ‘Well, hell, anything at all might very well come along!’ God damn. Beau, that’s it! That is it!!”
Arnold Dolbe sat there, shocked stiff. He went white, and his twitches all went chronic on him at one time. “You can’t administer hallucinogenic drugs to a baby!” he pronounced. “That’s obscene! It’s barbaric!”
The silence was vast around him, and when he finally heard it he lost all the stiffness.
“Oh, my,” he said sadly. “Oh, my. I suppose, after what we’ve already done to babies, that was not the most intelligent remark I could have made. I forget… I forget, you know?”
“Brooks,” said Lanky, politely looking away from Arnold Dolbe to give the man time to recover some of his composure, “you sound damn certain. Are you really sure?”
Showard made a wry face. “Of course I’m not sure. How could I be sure? But it sounds right. Even adults, if they don’t overdo it for starters, can get used to having their realities altered damned drastically on LSD or synthomescaline or any of the others. A baby, with its brain still soft in the mold — in a manner of speaking — hell, it ought to get broadminded enough to be ready for anything whatsoever to come its way. No, I’m not sure, Lanky — but I’m sure enough that I want to try it. Right now.”
“But we don’t have a baby right now,” Dolbe pointed out. “And unless somebody just turns up out of nowhere, like that Landry kid, we don’t have any volunteer prospects right now, either. You’re not suggesting that we go into the kidnapping business again, are you?”
“I’m not sure,” said Brooks Showard very carefully. “I’m not sure exactly what I’m suggesting.”
“But see here, man — ”
“Naw! Shut up, Dolbe, and let me think! Will you for chrissakes let me think?”
Dolbe shut his mouth and waited, while Showard frowned and beat his fist in a slow steady drumming against the edge of the table. They all waited, and they all saw the change in Showard as he got ready to tell them exactly what he had in mind. They hadn’t seen Brooks Showard with a look of optimism in so long they’d forgotten what it was like, but he looked optimistic now.
“Two things,” he said at last. “I say we do two things.”
“Name them,” said Dolbe briskly.
“I want you, Dolbe, to go twist some arms over at NSA and have them put some real muscle into digging up dirt on the Lingoes.”
“I thought you were going to talk about — ”
“I’m getting to that! This is something I want out of the way first, Dolbe! There have got to be linguists that aren’t morally the equivalent of the Virgin Mary… there’ve got to be. I want ’em. I want to know which ones are open to blackmail. I want to know what they’re doing, when they’re doing it, who or what they’re doing it with, and how often. The works. The NSA is the right unit to do that, that’s what they’re for, and you, Dolbe, I want you to get them onto it. There’s only thirteen of the Lines, and all of them crammed together like animals in a communal building — that ought to be the easiest surveillance assignment NSA’s had in decades. Let’s get that going, in case we need it later.”
“Done,” said Dolbe. “Consider it done.”
“Okay. Now, for the business of sending the babies on the fancy trips… we have got babies.”
“We have?”
“Yeah. We have. We’ve got damnall cartons and bales of babies. Freezersful of babies.”
“What?” And then, “Oh.”
“Brooks,” said Beau St. Clair, “we didn’t have very good luck with those test-tube infants. Remember? They were… they… Ah, hell, I don’t know how to put it. But you remember — you were there.”
“Yes,” said Showard, “I remember. And I agree with you, it wasn’t the greatest. But if we’ve got to go monkeying around with the brains of infants, feeding them peyote with their pablum, I for one would rather start with the tubies. We’ve got plenty of them, there are no parents to grieve over what happens to them; it’s the obvious way to go. Let’s work it out on them. The doses. How much a baby can take without it wrecking his physical system, never mind the central nervous system. We’ll start it with the test-tube babies, and we’ll learn as we go along… And by the time somebody volunteers us another Infant Hero, gentlemen, we’ll be ready. We’ll know what we’re doing. Don’t you see? We’ll bygod solve this problem!”