"The fellow the confidence men choose for a victim." Langsmith
re-lighted his pipe, extinguished the match by shaking it. "Dr. Millar,
we have a very painful disclosure to make to you."
She straightened, feeling a sudden icy chill in her veins at the
stillness in the room.
"Your husband's death was not an accident," said Langsmith.
She gasped, and turned deathly pale.
"In the six months before this spaceship landed, there were some
twenty-eight mysterious deaths," said Langsmith. "More than that,
really, because innocent bystanders died, too. These accidents had a
curious similarity: In each instance there was a fatality of a foremost
expert in the field of language, cryptoanalysis, semantics....
"The people who might have solved this problem died before the problem
was even presented," said Speidel. "Don't you think that's a curious
coincidence."
She was unable to speak.
"In one instance there was a survivor," said Langsmith. "A British jet
transport crashed off Ceylon, killing Dr. Ramphit U. The lone survivor,
the co-pilot, said a brilliant beam of light came from the sky overhead
and sliced off the port wing. Then it cut the cabin in half!"
* * * * *
Francine put a hand to her throat. Langsmith's cautious hand movements
suddenly fascinated her.
"Twenty-eight air crashes?" she whispered.
"No. Two were auto crashes." Langsmith puffed a cloud of smoke before
his face.
Her throat felt sore. She swallowed, said: "But how can you be sure of
that?"
"It's circumstantial evidence, yes," said Speidel. He spoke with
thin-lipped precision. "But there's more. For the past four months
all astronomical activity of our nation has been focused on the near
heavens, including the moon. Our attention was drawn to evidence of
activity near the moon crater Theophilus. We have been able to make out
the landing rockets of more than five hundred space craft!"
"What do you think of that?" asked Langsmith. He nodded behind his
smoke screen.
She could only stare at him; her lips ashen.
"These _frogs_ have massed an invasion fleet on the moon!" snapped
Speidel. "It's obvious!"
_They're lying to me!_ she thought. _Why this elaborate pretense?_
She shook her head, and something her husband had once said leapt
unbidden into her mind: "_Language clutches at us with unseen fingers.
It conditions us to the way others are thinking. Through language, we
impose upon each other our ways of looking at things._"
Speidel leaned forward. "We have more than a hundred atomic warheads
aimed at that moon-base! One of those warheads will do the job if it
gets through!" He hammered a fist on the table. "But first we have to
capture this ship here!"
_Why are they telling me all this?_ she asked herself. She drew in a
ragged breath, said: "Are you sure you're right?"
"Of course we're sure!" Speidel leaned back, lowered his voice. "Why
else would they insist we learn their language? The first thing a
conqueror does is impose his language on his new slaves!"
"No ... no, wait," she said. "That only applies to recent history.
You're getting language mixed up with patriotism because of our own
imperial history. Bob always said that such misconceptions are a
serious hindrance to sound historical scholarship."
"We know what we're talking about, Dr. Millar," said Speidel.
"You're suspicious of language because our imperialism went hand in
hand with our language," she said.