Ten minutes later Stuart was seated at his apparatus, stuffing
breakfast food into his mouth and feeling very tired. "Been making this
stuff for a hundred and fifty years," he grumbled to himself, chewing
doggedly, "and it's still lousy." Suddenly he dropped his spoon and
adjusted the view screen controls. Gordon walked in, buttoning up his
dungarees and yawning. "Brother," said the chief, "when we get back
we're going to sleep for two weeks!" He looked at the busy linguist and
was immediately wide awake. "What's up?"
Stuart pointed to the screen. "Native just peeked out." He reached over
toward one of the cephaloids, mindless brains with tremendous memory
and associative power, and began flipping switches. Activating solution
flowed through the micro-cellular colloid; little lights on a panel
winked on as the surface potentials reached operating level.
The linguist glanced briefly at the screen. "I guess there's time to
show you one of its little tricks, just to warm it up," he said. He
sang, in Universal Speech, a couple of ribald verses of "The Venus of
Venus," then touched a switch. Immediately the song came back at him
through a little speaker, but in English--and with the unmistakable
drawl of Rogers. "I conditioned it a few minutes ago with his
voice," explained Stuart. He was delighted with Gordon's reaction of
incredulous astonishment. "It's really a wonderful mechanism, Gordon.
It--oops! There's a native!"
He jabbed hastily at the "Primary Condition" stud, erasing the song
and the accent, and switched on the remote control for the picture
sequence. He handed Gordon a headset. "Will you monitor the pickup,
please? The rest of this stuff will keep me busy." He fell silent,
watching the screen.
Gordon reached over and switched on the movie camera set up beside him
to record the scene.
V
Three scarlet natives had come out of the cave. They stood in a patch
of brilliant sunlight, swinging their middle limbs about and playing
with a sassy little monkey-rat as men would with a fox terrier. At
length they picked up what seemed to be a crossbow and several spears,
slung bundles across their sloping shoulders, and started down the
trail. They walked slowly, spears at the ready, and were obviously
alert. Frequently they glanced up, or paused as if listening.
Rounding a turn, the lead native stopped abruptly, leaped back and
dropped flat. The other two dropped almost simultaneously. The leader
motioned cautiously for his companions to crawl forward; he pointed
with a tentacular upper limb toward the picture sequence machine
gleaming in the morning light. On it was showing a picture of a native,
enlarged from Stuart's picture of his temporary "prisoner".
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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