This was no help. Toms continued to muse on love and think lengthily of Doris. In the long haunted evenings on her porch when the shadows from the trellis vines crossed her face, revealing and concealing it, Toms struggled to tell her what he felt. And since he could not bring himself to use the weary commonplaces of love, he tried to express himself in extravagances.
“I feel about you,” he would say, “the way a star feels about its planet.”
“How immense!” she would answer, immensely flattered at being compared to anything so cosmic.
“That’s not what I meant,” Toms amended. “The feeling I was trying to express was more—well, for example, when you walk, I am reminded of—”
“Of a what?”
“A doe in a forest glade,” Toms said, frowning.
“How charming!”
“It wasn’t intended to be charming. I was trying to express the awkwardness inherent in youth and yet—”
“But, honey,” she said. “I’m not awkward. My dancing teacher—”
“I didn’t mean awkward. But the essence of awkwardness is—is—”
“I understand,” she said.
But Toms knew she didn’t.
So he was forced to give up extravagances. Soon he found himself unable to say anything of any importance to Doris, for it was not what he meant, nor even close to it.
The girl became concerned at the long, moody silences which developed between them.
“Jeff,” she would urge, “surely you can say something!”
Toms shrugged his shoulders.
“Even if it isn’t absolutely what you mean.”
Toms sighed.
“Please,” she cried, “say anything at all! I can’t stand this!”
“Oh, hell—”
“Yes?” she breathed, her face transfigured.
“That wasn’t what I meant,” Toms said, relapsing into his gloomy silence.
At last he asked her to marry him. He was willing to admit that he “loved” her—but he refused to expand on it. He explained that a marriage must be founded upon truth or it is doomed from the start. If he cheapened and falsified his emotions at the beginning, what could the future hold for them?
Doris found his sentiments admirable, but refused to marry him.
“You must tell a girl that you love her,” she declared. “You have to tell her a hundred times a day, Jefferson, and even then it’s not enough.”
“But I do love you!” Toms protested. “I mean to say I have an emotion corresponding to—”
“Oh, stop it!”
In this predicament, Toms thought about the Language of Love and went to his professor’s office to ask about it.
“We are told,” his professor said, “that the race indigenous to Tyana II had a specific and unique language for the expression of sensations of love. To say ‘I love you’ was unthinkable for Tyanians. They would use a phrase denoting the exact kind and class of love they felt at that specific moment, and used for no other purpose.”
Toms nodded, and the professor continued. “Of course, developed with this language was, necessarily, a technique of love-making quite incredible in its perfection. We are told that it made all ordinary techniques seem like the clumsy pawing of a grizzly in heat.” The professor coughed in embarrassment.
“It is precisely what I need!” Toms exclaimed.
“Ridiculous,” said the professor. “The technique might be interesting, but your own is doubtless sufficient for most needs. And the language, by its very nature, can be used with only one person. To learn it impresses me as wasted energy.”
“Labor for love,” Toms said, “is the most worthwhile work in the world, since it produces a rich harvest of feeling.”
“I refuse to stand here and listen to bad epigrams. Mr. Toms, why all this fuss about love?”
“It is the only perfect thing in this world,” Toms answered fervently. “If one must learn a special language to appreciate it, one can do no less. Tell me, is it far to Tyana II?”
“A considerable distance,” his professor said, with a thin smile. “And an unrewarding one, since the race is extinct.”
“Extinct! But why? A sudden pestilence? An invasion?”
“It is one of the mysteries of the galaxy,” his professor said somberly.
“Then the language is lost!”
“Not quite. Twenty years ago, an Earthman named George Varris went to Tyana and learned the Language of Love from the last remnants of the race.” The professor shrugged his shoulders. “I never considered it sufficiently important to read his scientific papers.”
Toms looked up Varris in the Interspatial Explorers Who’s Who and found that he was credited with the discovery of Tyana, had wandered around the frontier planets for a time, but at last had returned to deserted Tyana, to devote his life to investigating every aspect of its culture.
After learning this, Toms thought long and hard. The journey to Tyana was a difficult one, time-consuming, and expensive. Perhaps Varris would be dead before he got there, or unwilling to teach him the language. Was it worth the gamble?
“Is love worth it?” Toms asked himself, and knew the answer.
So he sold his ultra-fi, his memory recorder, his philosophy texts, and several stocks his grandfather had left him, and booked passage to Cranthis IV, which was the closest he could come to Tyana on a scheduled spaceway. And after all his preparations had been made, he went to Doris.
“When I return,” he said, “I will be able to tell you exactly how much—I mean the particular quality and class of—I mean, Doris, when I have mastered the Tyanian Technique, you will be loved as no woman has ever been loved!”
“Do you mean that?” she asked, her eyes glowing.
“Well,” Toms said, “the term ‘loved,’ doesn’t quite express it. But I mean something very much like it.”
“I will wait for you, Jeff,” she said. “But—please don’t be too long.”
Jefferson Toms nodded, blinked back his tears, clutched Doris inarticulately, and hurried to the spaceport.
Within the hour, he was on his way.
Four months later, after considerable difficulties, Toms stood on Tyana, on the outskirts of the capital city. Slowly he walked down the broad, deserted main thoroughfare. On either side of him, noble buildings soared to dizzy heights. Peering inside one, Toms saw complex machinery and gleaming switchboards. With his pocket Tyana-English dictionary, he was able to translate the lettering above one of the buildings.
It read: COUNSELING SERVICES FOR STAGE-FOUR LOVE PROBLEMS.
Other buildings were much the same, filled with calculating machinery, switchboards, ticker tapes, and the like. He passed THE INSTITUTE FOR RESEARCH INTO AFFECTION DELAY, stared at the two-hundred-story HOME FOR THE EMOTIONALLY RETARDED, and glanced at several others. Slowly the awesome, dazzling truth dawned upon him.
Here was an entire city given over to the research and aid of love.
He had no time for further speculation. In front of him was the gigantic GENERAL LOVE SERVICES BUILDING. And out of its marble hallway stepped an old man.
“Who the hell are you?” the old man asked.
“I am Jefferson Toms, of Earth. I have come here to learn the Language of Love, Mr. Varris.”
Varris raised his shaggy white eyebrows. He was a small, wrinkled old man, stoop-shouldered and shaky in the knees. But his eyes were alert and filled with a cold suspicion.
“Perhaps you think the language will make you more attractive to women,” Varris said. “Don’t believe it, young man. Knowledge has its advantages, of course. But it has distinct drawbacks, as the Tyanians discovered.”
“What drawbacks?” Toms asked.
Varris grinned, displaying a single yellow tooth. “You wouldn’t understand, if you don’t already know. It takes knowledge to understand the limitations of knowledge.”