as soon as I can.”
“Where would you go?” Edmonds repeated.
Tracy again glared at the younger man. He said, “What difference does it make to you?”
“You don’t even speak the language,” Jo said mildly. “And it makes a difference to me since I have been working with the academician on this project for several years now.”
Cogswell laughed at him. “You haven’t studied up on my background as much as you claim you have. I speak—besides my native English—French, Spanish, Italian, German and even have a smattering of Slavic. What language is current in these parts?”
Edmonds said smoothly, “Your languages are understood only by scholars, these days, Cogswell. How are you on Interlingua?”
Chapter Two
Tracy Cogswell looked from one of them to the other. Another curve had been thrown. “Interlingua?” he said.
“The international language,” Betty explained. “Everybody speaks it now.”
That floored him. He said, “You mean nobody speaks English, French, Spanish?”
She shook her head, as though sorry she had to tell him. “Only scholars of linguistics.”
He said, “But… well, what was wrong with English? It was rapidly becoming more or less an international language. Practically all educated people spoke it everywhere. All the airlines… at least in the West… used it. And all ships used it in going through the red tape of leaving or entering a port. It… ”
Betty took over the explaining. “English, like all the other languages before Interlingua, was a bastard tongue, Tracy. Consider its history, for a moment. When Caesar’s Romans arrived, the language spoken in England was Celtic. The Romans, in their several centuries of occupation, grafted Latin on it. When they left, the waves of Saxons and Angelos occupied the country, followed by Danes and Norwegians, all with their own languages. Next came William the Conqueror and his Norman French. So you can see what I mean by a bastard language. Interlingua is a scientific language based on the earlier Esperanto and is more suited for a scientific society than yours was. To take just one or two examples, look at the way you form the plural in English.”
Tracy said, “You simply add an ‘s.’ ”
She shook her head, and said, “Sometimes. Sometimes not. What is the plural of man? Mans? What is the plural of woman? Womans? And how do you form the feminine in English? By simply adding ‘ess’? Sometimes, such as heir-heiress. But you can’t say horse -horseess, or bull-bulless. You have to say mare and cow and you have to say boar-sow. There are no such exceptions in Interlingua. There are only a half-dozen grammatical rules, where in your day you had to study a whole book on grammar, and spelling is completely phonetic. It’s easily learned, internationally understood. The most remote inhabitant of Mongolia speaks Interlingua.”
Cogswell thought about it after taking a deep breath.
Betty came to her feet and cleared up the breakfast things, put them on a tray and headed for the kitchen.
Apropos of nothing, Tracy muttered, “So even in Utopia, a woman’s work is never done.”
The academician frowned, not getting it at all. “How do you mean?”
Tracy smiled at him. “Your daughter has gone to wash the dishes.”
Edmonds laughed softly.
Tracy said to him, “What’s so damn funny? In my time women were beginning to revolt against such things as kitchen drudgery.”
Walter Stein said, “Tracy Cogswell, we don’t wash dishes anymore.”
Tracy scowled at him. “What do you do with them, just throw them away?”
“Yes. Or, at least, we throw them into the disposal unit. They are then recycled. The manner in which you utilized dishes and utensils, in your day, is now considered unsanitary. It was somewhat analogous to the way you washed and cleaned clothing.”
“Oh, come on now, for Christ’s sake. Are you suggesting that these days when a shirt or dress gets dirty you throw it away?” Tracy scoffed.
Stein nodded. “Yes, or any other article of clothing. In your day you washed it, ironed it, replaced any lost buttons, patched up any tears or holes, and stored it away for future use, taking up quite a bit of room in drawers or in a closet. We find that we save labor by throwing a garment away.”
Tracy Cogswell was indignant. “That’s one hell of a waste!”
The other shook his head before saying, “No, it isn’t. The material is recycled and a brand new garment made available. Each morning we dial fresh clothing from the local distribution center.”
Tracy gave it up. He said, “All right. The hell with this. Tell me, how come you three people speak English if it’s no longer in common use?”
“We studied it so that we could communicate with you, Tracy. We have been preparing for your coming for a long time.”
“This story isn’t holding up too well,” Tracy said. “You say that you want my know-how to lead an underground revolt against the present socioeconomic system. How in the hell could I, if I don’t even speak the language?”
Betty had returned and now resumed her chair, smiling at Tracy in what he assumed to be reassurance.
Jo Edmonds said, in his usual lazy tone, “We planned on teaching you Interlingua.”
Tracy grunted before saying, “It’d take a coon’s age for me to pick up a new language to the point I could communicate in such a field as socioeconomics, be able to give speeches, write pamphlets and so forth. I’m not a kid any longer. Fifteen or twenty years ago, I used to be a whiz at it. I could pick up a smattering of a language in a month, and be really fluent in a year.”
“Less than a week,” Edmonds said mildly.
“A week? You mean you figure on teaching me a language that I’ve never even heard of before in a week’s time? Don’t be ridiculous.”
The academician cleared his throat and said, “Tracy, there have been changes in education since you went into, ah, hibernation.”
Tracy snorted at that. He said, “There sure as hell would have to be.”
The other sighed and said, “Let me give you a bit of background. Do you remember a certain Dr. Robert Oppenheimer in your times?”
“Sure,” Tracy said. “He was the one who headed the nuclear fission team that produced the A-bomb.”
“Yes. He was a very competent physicist.”
Tracy accepted that but said, “And a damn fool when it came to political economy.”
“Perhaps,” the other agreed. “However, what I was getting at was that in 1955, not long before we took over your body, he made the statement that human knowledge was doubling every eight years. Let us suppose that he made his calculation beginning the year 1945 using the old calendar.”
Tracy scowled. “What do you mean, the old calendar? I think you mentioned that before. What kind of calendar do you use now?”
Betty took up the ball. She said, “We changed at the beginning of the year 2000. You see, the old calendar was inaccurate. Even the Mayans had devised one more accurate than the one Europeans had utilized since the Middle Ages. Besides, a dozen or more different calendars were being used. The Moslems, for instance, based theirs on the moon, rather than the sun. Every year they lost a day or two. The Chinese utilized still a different system. Obviously, all this was pure nonsense when a world government took over. I’ll explain it all to you some other time. It is now the year 45 New Calendar.”
The academician took over again, saying, “At any rate, a century has passed since 1945. A century which started off with human knowledge doubling every eight years.”
“Jesus Christ,” Tracy said, as some of the ramifications came through.
The other nodded. “Yes, had the pace continued, we would now have approximately eight thousand times as
