He squeezed into the stall shower and for several minutes rubbed himself down in the dense artificial rain, as disgusting as their real ram. True, it was slightly colder, but hard and caustic. He dried himself with a sterile towel.
Annoyed with everything—the bleary morning, this suffocating world, his idiotic situation, the lousy, greasy breakfast he would eat shortly—he returned to his room to make his bed. Breakfast was waiting for him, fuming and stinking on the table. Fishfacewas closing the window.
“Неllо,” said Maxim in the local language. “Window. Mustnot.”
“Hello,” she replied as she turned the window’s many bolts. “Must. Rain. Bad.”
“Fishface,” said Maxim in Lingcos. Her real name was Nolu, but Maxim had instantly renamed her. Fishface she would always be, for her expression and her imperturbability.
She turned and looked at him with unblinking eyes. For the nth time, she touched her finger to the tip of her nose and said “woman,” then pointed at Maxim and said “man,” then pointed to the baggy jump suit hanging on the back of a chair. “Clothes. Must.” Shorts weren’t enough. For her, a man had to be covered from the neck down.
While he dressed, she made his bed, although Maxim always insisted he could do it himself. She pushed the chair to the middle of the room (Maxim had moved it against the wall) and resolutely opened the radiator valve that Maxim always turned off. His persistent use of “must not” shattered her no less than his persistent “must.”
After buttoning his jump suit at the neck, Maxim went to the table and picked at his breakfast with a two-pronged fork. The usual exchange followed.
“Don’t want. Must not.”
“Must. Food. Breakfast.”
“Don’t want breakfast. Tastes bad.”
“Must eat breakfast. Good.”
“Fishface,” Maxim exploded in Lingcos, “you are a very cruel woman. If you were to come to Earth, I would run myself ragged trying to find food you liked.”
“I don’t understand,” she said blankly. “What is ‘fishface’?”
While disgustedly chewing a greasy chunk of food, Maxim took a piece of paper and sketched a sunfish full face. She studied it carefully and put it in the pocket of her smock. She appropriated all of Maxim’s drawings and took them somewhere. Maxim drew a great deal and enjoyed it. During free moments and at night when he could not sleep, there was absolutely nothing else to do. So he drew animals and people, charts and diagrams, and anatomical cross sections. He drew Professor Megu like a hippopotamus, and hippopotamuses like Professor Megu. He constructed an encyclopedic chart of the Lingcos language, schematics of machines, and diagrams of historical chronology. The reams of paper he consumed all disappeared into Fishface’s pocket without any visible evidence that he had succeeded in communicating with his hosts. Hippo—Professor Megu—had his own approach to the problem and had no intention of changing it.
The encyclopedic chart of Lingcos, whose study would enable them to initiate communication with Maxim, held absolutely no interest for Hippo. Fishface was the only person teaching the stranger the local language, and then only the most basic terms for communication—“Close the window,” “Put on your jumpsuit,” and the like. Not a single communications specialist was assigned to his case. Hippo, and only Hippo, was occupied with Maxim.
True, he had a rather powerful research tool at his command—mentoscopic equipment—and Maxim spent from fourteen to sixteen hours a day in the testing chair. Moreover, Hippo’s mentoscope was very sensitive. It permitted rather deep memory penetration and possessed an extremely high resolution capability. With such equipment it was possible to manage without language.
But Hippo used the mentoscope in a rather peculiar manner. He categorically refused to show his own mentograms to anyone and was even somewhat angered by suggestions that he do so. And his attitude toward Maxim’s mentograms was strange. Maxim had organized his recollections so that the natives would receive a rather comprehensive picture of Earth’s social, economic, and cultural life. But these mentograms failed to arouse an enthusiastic response from Hippo. He would make a wry face, mumble, walk away, make phone calls, or harass his assistant, frequently repeating a succulent-sounding word, “massaraksh.” When the screen showed Maxim blowing up an icy crag that was bearing down on his ship, or tearing an armored wolf to pieces, or rescuing a field laboratory from a gigantic, stupid pseudo-octopus, nothing could drag him away from the mentoscope. He would squeal softly, clap his head in delight, and yell at his exhausted assistant, who was making recordings of the images. The sight of a chromospheric protuberance would send the professor into raptures, as if he had never seen anything like it before. And he was very fond of love scenes, extracted by Maxim from movies for the specific purpose of giving the natives some idea of Earthlings’ emotional life.
The professor’s absurd reaction to this material depressed Maxim. He wondered if Hippo was really a professor and not simply a mentoscope engineer preparing material for the real commission set up for communication with visitors from outer space. Hippo seemed a rather primitive individual, like a kid interested only in the battle scenes in War and Peace. It was humiliating, Maxim felt, to have such a serious matter as his presentations of Earth taken so lightly. He was entitled to expect a more serious partner in his attempt to communicate.
Of course, it was possible that this world was located at an intersection of interstellar routes, so that visitors from outer space were commonplace—in fact, so commonplace that special commissions were not established for each new arrival. Officials simply limited themselves to eliciting the most essential information from them. In his case, for example, the people with shiny but-tons, obviously not experts, had examined his situation and, without further ado, sent him, a new arrival, to the designated place. But, he thought, perhaps some nonhumanoids had made such a bad impression that the natives reacted to all recent arrivals from other planets with a decided but justifiable suspicion. Therefore, all Professor Hippo’s fussing with the mentoscope was merely a delaying action, only a semblance of communication, until some higher authority decided his fate.
“One way or another,” concluded Maxim, gagging on the last piece of food, “I’m in a mess. If I’m going to get anywhere, I had better hurry up and learn their language.”
“Good,” said Fishface, removing his plate. “Let’s go.”
Maxim sighed and rose. They entered the corridor. It was long, dirty blue, and lined with doors, like the one to Maxim’s room. Maxim never encountered anyone here, but occasionally he heard excited voices coming from behind closed doors. Possibly other strangers were being kept here to await decisions on their fate.
Fishface walked in front of him with a long masculine stride, straight as a stick, and Maxim felt very sorry for her. Apparently this country was still uninitiated in the cosmetic arts, and poor Fishface had been left to her own devices. The professor’s assistant treated her with contempt, and Hippo took no notice of her at all. Reminding himself of his own inattentive attitude, his con-science began to bother him. He caught up with her, patted her bony shoulder, and said: “Nolu, fine girl. Good girl.”
She lifted a cold face to him, pushed away his hand, frowned, and declared sternly: “Maxim bad. Man. Woman. Must not.”
Embarrassed, Maxim dropped back again.
When they reached the end of the corridor, Fishface pushed open a door and they entered a large light room that Maxim thought of as a reception room. Its windows were decorated tastelessly with rectangular gratings of thick iron rods. A high door upholstered in leather led to Hippo’s laboratory. For some reason two huge natives were always stationed by the door. Never responding to greetings, they sat almost motionless and appeared to be in a constant trance.