and what was your occupation?' And simultaneously he scanned deep.
The driver said: 'Name is Oliver, takh. Teacher of language and letters.'
The personality-integral included: Inferiority. ? Self-deprecation/Neurosis.? …..
Weakling's job/Shame? Traumata.
A light. A bell. A pendulum. Fear. Fear.
Being buried, swallowed, engulfed.
The takh was relieved. There was no danger in such a personality-integral. But the matter of security—he handed the driver a fingering-piece, a charming abstraction by the great Kh'hora. It had cost him his pay for an entire tour of duty and it was quite worth it. Kh'hora had carved it at the height of his power, and his witty juxtapositions of textures were unsurpassed to this day. It could be fingered a dozen ways, each a brilliant variation on a classic theme.
The driver held it stupidly. 'Well?' demanded the takh, his brows drawing together. He scanned.
The driver said: 'Please, takh, I don't know what to do with it.'
The personality-integral included: Fear. Bewilderment. Ignorance.
Blankness.
'Finger it, you fool!'
The driver fumbled at the Piece and the takh scanned. The tactile impressions were unbelievably obtuse and blurry. There was no emotional response to them whatsoever except a faint, dull gratification at a smooth boss on the piece. And the imbecile kept looking at it.
It was something like sacrilege. The takh snatched the piece back indignantly. 'Describe it,' he said, controlling himself.
The fellow began to maunder about its visual appearance while the takh scanned. It was true; he had practically no tactile memory.
The takh left abruptly with Lakhrut. 'You were right,' he said. 'If it amuses the fellow to pretend that he can read, I see no obstacle. And if it contributes to the efficiency of your department, we all shine that much brighter.' (More literally, with fuller etymological values, his words could be rendered: 'If it amuses the fellow to pretend that he fingers wisdom, my hands are not grated. And if it smoothes your quarry wall, we all hew more easily.')
Lakhrut's hands were not grated either; it was a triumphant vindication of his judgment.
And so, for departmental efficiency, he let his marvelous driver have all the books he wanted.
CHAPTER VII
BARKER'S head ached and his eyes felt ready to fall out of their sockets.
He did not dare take rubbings of the books, which would have made them reasonably legible. He had to hold them slantwise to the light in his cubicle and read the shadows of the characters. Lakhrut had taught him the Forty-Three Syllables, condescendingly, and the rest was up to him. He had made the most of it.
An imagery derived more from tactile than visual sense-impressions sometimes floored him with subtleties—as, he was sure, an intensely visual English nature poem would have floored Lakhrut. But he progressed.
Lakhrut had brought him a mish-mash of technical manuals and trashy novelettes—and a lexicon. The takh who had made such a fuss about the chipped pebble had brought him something like a Bible. Pay dirt!
It seems that in the beginning Spirit had created Man —which is what the A'rkhovYar called the A'arkhovYar— and set him to rule over all lesser creation. Man had had his ups and downs on the Planet, but Spirit had seen to it that he annihilated after sanguinary, millennium-long battles, his principal rivals for the Planet. These appeared to have been twelve-footed brutes who fought with flint knives in their first four feet.
And then Spirit had sent the Weak People to the Planet in a spaceship.
Schooled to treachery in the long struggle against the knife-wielding beasts, Man had greeted the Weak People with smiles, food and homage. The Weak People had foolishly taught them the art of writing, had foolishly taught Man their sciences. And then the Weak People had been slain, all twelve of them, in an hour of blood.
Barker somehow saw the Weak People as very tired, very gentle, very guileless survivors of a planetary catastrophe beyond guessing. But the book didn't say.
So the A'rkhov-Yar stole things. Science. People. Let George do it, appeared to be their morality, and then steal it from George. Well, they'd had a hard upbringing fighting down the Knifers, which was no concern of his. They'd been man-stealing for God knows how long; they'd made turncoats like the late Mister Baldwin, and Judas goats like neat Miss Winston, disgusting creatures preying on their own kind.
From the varied reading matter he built up a sketchy picture of the A'rkhov-Yar universe. There were three neighboring stars with planetary systems, and the Cyclopes had swarmed over them once the guileless Weak People had shown them spaceflight. First they had driven their own ships with their own wills. Then they had learned that conquered races could be used equally well, so they had used them.
Then they learned that conquered races tended to despair and die out.
'THEN,' he said savagely to old man Stoss, 'they showed the one flash of creative intelligence in their career —unless they stole it from one of their subjects. They invaded Earth — secretly. Without knowing it, we're their slave-breeding pen. If we knew it, we'd either fight and win, or fight and lose—and die out in despair.'
'The one flash?' Stoss asked dryly, looking about them at the massive machinery.
'Stolen. All stolen. They have nations, trades and wars —but this is a copy of the Weak People's ship; all their ships are. And their weapons are the meteor screens and sweepers of the Weak People. With stolen science they've been stealing people. I think at a rate of thousands per year. God knows how long it's been going on—probably since the neolithic age. You want proof of their stupidity? The way they treat us. It leads to a high death rate and fast turnover. That's bad engineering, bad economics and bad housekeeping. Look at the lights they use—
low-wattage incandescents! As inefficient lamps as were ever designed—'
'I've got a thought about those lights,' Stoss said. 'The other day when Lakhrut was inspecting and you were passing out the food I took two cakes instead of one—just to keep in practice. I used slight of hand, misdirection— but Lakhrut didn't misdirect worth a damn. He slapped the pain button and I put the extra cake back. What does it mean when the hand is quicker than the eye but the sucker isn't fooled?'
'I don't get you.'
'What if those aren't very inefficient lamps but very efficient heaters?'
'They're blind,' whispered Barker. 'My God, you've got to be right! The lamps, the tactile culture, the embossed writing. And that thing that looks like an eye—it's their mind-reading organ, so it can't be an eye after all. You can't perform two radically different functions with the same structure.'
'It's worth thinking about,' old man Stoss said.
'I could have thought about it for a million years without figuring that out, Stoss. How did you do it?'
The old man looked modest. 'Practice. Long years of it. When you want to take a deacon for a long score on the con game, you study him for his weaknesses. You don't assume he hasn't got any just because he's a deacon, or a doctor, or a corporation treasurer. Maybe it's women, or liquor, or gambling, or greed.
You just play along, what interests him interests you, everything he says is wise and witty, and sooner or later he lets you know what's his soft spot. Then, lad, you've got him. You make his world revolve around his little weakness. You cater to it and play it up and by and by he gets to thinking that you're the greatest man in the world, next to him, and the only real friend he'll ever have. Then you 'tell the tale,' as we say. And the next sound you hear is the sweetest music this side of Heaven, the squealing of a trimmed sucker.'
'You're a revolting old man,' said Barker, 'and I'm glad you're here.'
'I'm glad you're here too,' the old man said. And he added with a steady look: 'Whoever you are.'
'You might as well know. Charles Barker — F. S. I. agent. They fished me out of the Riveredge gutter because I may or may not have telepathic flashes, and they put me on the disappearance thing.'
Stoss shook his head unhappily. 'At my age, cooperating with the F. S. I.
I'll never live it down.'
Barker said: 'They've got sound to go on, of course. They hear movements, air currents. They carry in their heads a sound picture—
but it isn't a 'picture': damn language!—of their environment. They can't have much range or discrimination
