His eyes flicked back and forth between them, in definite command. "I
don't want to hear any more in the way of personalities between you
two."
Moroka shrugged again. "Yes, sir," he said without inflection.
Isobel turned away and took up some paperwork, without further words.
She suppressed her feeling of seething indignation.
Homer Crawford, under his pressures, was changing. Possibly, she had
told herself before, it was change for the better. The need was for a
_strong_ man, perhaps even a ruthless one.
The Homer Crawford she had first known was an easier going man than
he who had snapped an abrupt order to her a moment ago. The Homer she
had first known requested things of his teammates and friends. El
Hassan had learned to command.
The Homer she had first known could never have ridden, roughshod, over
the basically gentle Dr. Smythe.
The Homer she had first known, when the El Hassan scheme was still
aborning, had thought of himself as a member of a team. He was quick
to ask advice of all, and quick to take it if it had validity. Now
Homer, as El Hassan, was depending less and less upon the opinions of
those surrounding him, more and more upon his own decisions which he
seemed to sometimes reach purely through intuition.
The El Hassan dream was still upon her, but, womanlike, she wondered
if she liked the would-be tyrant of all North Africa as well as she
had once liked the easy-going American idealist, Homer Crawford.
Jack and Jimmy Peters, the brothers from Trinidad, entered, the former
carrying a couple of books.
They'd evidently failed to note the raised voices and wore their
customary serious expressions. Jack looked at Homer and said, "_Cu vi
scias Esperanton?_"
Homer Crawford's eyebrows went up but he said, "_Jes, mi parolas
Esperanto tre bona, mi pensas._"
"_Bona_," Jack said, "_Tre bona_."
"_Jes, estas bele_," his brother said.
Moroka was scowling back and forth from one of them to the other. "I
thought I had a fairly good working knowledge of the world's more
common languages," he said, "but that goes by me. It sounds like a
cross between Italian and pig-Latin."
Homer said to the Peters brothers, "Let's drop Esperanto so that Dave,
Isobel and Cliff can follow us. We can give it a whirl later, if you'd
like, just for the practice."
Isobel said slowly, "_Mi parolas Esperanto, malgranda_." Then in
English, "I took it for kicks while I was still in school. Kind of
rusty now, though."
"Esperanto?" Cliff said. "You mean that gobblydygook so-called
international language?"
Jack Peters looked at him, serious faced as always. "What is wrong
with an international language, Mr. Jackson?"
Cliff was taken aback. "Search me. But it doesn't seem to have proved
very practical. It didn't catch on."
"Well, more than you might think," Isobel told him. "There are
probably hundreds of thousands of persons in one part of the world or
another who can get along in Esperanto."
Moroka said impatiently, "What're a few hundred thousands of people in
a world population like ours? Cliff's right. It never took hold."
Homer said, "All right, Jack and Jimmy. You boys evidently have
something on your minds. Let everybody sit down and listen to it."
* * * * *
Even before they got thoroughly settled, Jack Peters was launching
into his pitch.
"We need an official language," he said. "The El Hassan movement has
set as a goal the uniting of all North Africa. We might start here in
the Sahara, but it's just a start. Ultimately, the idea is to reach
from Morocco to Egypt and from the Mediterranean to ... to where? The
Congo?"
"Actually, we've never set exact limits," Homer said.
"Ultimately _all Africa_," Dave Moroka muttered softly. He ignored the
manner in which Isobel contemplated him from the side of her eyes.
"All right," the West Indian said. "There are more than seven hundred
major languages, not counting dialects, in Africa. Sooner or later, we
need an official language, what is it going to be?"
"Why _one_ official language? Why not several?" Cliff scowled. "Say
Arabic, here in this area. Swahili on the East coast. And, say,
Songhoi along the Niger, and Wolof, the Senegalese lingua franca,
and--"
"You see," Peters interrupted. "Already you have half a dozen and you
haven't even got out of this immediate vicinity as yet. Let me develop
my point."
Homer Crawford was becoming interested. "Go on, Jack," he said.
Jack Peters pointed a finger at him. "To be the hero-symbol we have in
mind, El Hassan is going to have to be able to communicate with _all_
of his people. He's not going to be able to speak Arabic to, say, a
Masai in Kenya. They hate the Arabs. He's not going to be able to
speak Swahili to a Moroccan, they've never heard of the language. He
can't speak Tamaheq to the Imraguen, they're scared to death of the
Tuareg."
Homer said thoughtfully, "A common language would be fine. It'd solve
a lot of problems. But it doesn't seem to be in the cards. Why not
adopt as our official language the one in which the _most_ of our
people will be able to communicate? Say, Arabic?"
Jack was shaking his head seriously. "And antagonize all the Arab
hating Bantu in Africa? It's no go, Homer."
"Well, then, say French--or English."
"English is the most international language in the world," Moroka
said. But his face was thoughtful, as those of the others were
becoming.
The West Indian was beginning to make his points now. "No, any of the
European languages are out. The white man has been repudiated.
Adopting English, French, Spanish, Portuguese or Dutch, as our
official language would antagonize whole sections of the continent."
"Why Esperanto?" Cliff scowled. "Why not, say, Nov-Esperanto, or Ido,
or Interlingua?"
Jimmy Peters put in a word now. "Actually, any one of them would
possibly do, but we have a head start with Esperanto. Some years ago
both Jack and I became avid Esperantists, being naive enough in those
days to think an international language would ultimately solve all
man's problems. And both Homer and Isobel seem to have a working
knowledge of the language."
Homer said, "So have the other members of my former Reunited Nations team.
That's where those books you found came from. Elmer, Bey, Kenny ... and
Abe ... and I used to play around with it when we were out in the desert,
just to kill time. We also used it as sort of a secret language when we
wanted to communicate and didn't know if those around us might understand
some English."
"I still don't get the picture," Cliff argued. "If we picked the most
common half a dozen languages in the territory we cover, then millions
of these people wouldn't have to study a second language. But if you
adapt Esperanto as an official language then _everybody_ is going to
have to learn something new. And that's not going to be easy for our
ninety-five per cent illiterate followers."
Isobel said thoughtfully, "Well, it's a darn sight easier to learn
Esperanto than any other language we decided to make official."
"Why?" Cliff said argumentatively.
* * * * *
Jack Peters took over. "Because it's almost unbelievably easy to
learn. English, by the way, is extremely difficult. For instance,
spelling and pronunciation are absolutely phonetic in Esperanto and
there are only five vowel sounds where most national languages have
twenty or so. And each sound in the alphabet has one sound only and
any sound is always rendered by the same letter."
Dave Moroka said, "Actually, I don't know anything at all about this
Esperanto."
The West Indian took him in, with a dominating glance. "Take grammar and
syntax which can take up volumes in other languages. Esperanto has exactly
sixteen short rules. And take vocabularies. For instance, in English we
often form the feminine of a noun by adding _ess--actor-actress_,
_tiger-tigress_. But not always. We don't say _bull-bulless_ or
_ghost-ghostess_. In Esperanto you simply add the feminine ending to any
noun--there's no exception to any rule."
Jack Peters was caught up in his subject. "Still comparing it to
English, realize that spelling and pronunciation in English are highly
irregular and one letter can have several different sounds, and one
sound may be represented by different letters. And there are even
silent letters which are written but not pronounced like the _ugh_ in
_though_. There are none of these irregularities in Esperanto. And the
sounds are all sharp with none of such subtle differences as, say,
_bed/bad/bard/bawd_, that sort of thing."
Jimmy Peters said, "The big item is that any averagely intelligent
person can begin speaking Esperanto within a few hours. Within a week
of even moderate study, say three or four hours a day, he's
astonishingly fluent."
[Illustration]
Isobel said thoughtfully, "There'd be international advantages. It's
always been a galling factor in Africans dealing with Europeans that
they had to learn the European language involved. You couldn't expect
your white man to learn kitchen kaffir, or Swahili, or whatever, not
when you got on the diplomatic level."
Cliff Jackson was thinking out loud. "So far, El Hassan is an unknown.
Rumor has it that he's everything from a renegade Egyptian, to an
escaped Mau-Mau chief, to a Senegalese sergeant formerly in the French
West African forces. But when he starts running into the press and
they find that Homer and his closest associates all speak English, and
most of them with an American accent, there's going to be some fat in
the fire."
"And El Hassan will have lost some of his mysterious glamour," Homer
added thoughtfully.
Even Moroka, the South African, was beginning to accept the idea. "If
El Hassan, himself, refused in the presence of foreigners ever to
speak anything but Esperanto, the aura of mystery would continue."
Jimmy Peters, elaborating and obviously pushing an opinion he and his
brother had already discussed, said, "We make it a rule that every
school, both locally taught and foreign, must teach Esperanto as a
required subject. All El Hassan governmental affairs would be
conducted in that language. Anybody at all trying to get anywhere in
the new regime would have to learn the official inter-African tongue."
"Oh, brother," Cliff groaned, "that means me." He brightened. "We
haven't any books or anything, as yet."
Isobel laughed at him. "I'll take on your studies, Cliff. We have a
few books. Those that Homer and his team used to kill time with. And
as soon as we're in a position to make requests for foreign aid of the
great powers, Esperanto grammars, dictionaries and so forth can be
high on the list."
With a sharp cry, almost a bark, a figure jumped into the entrance and
with a bound into the center of the tent, sub-machinegun in hand.
"_All right, everybody. On your feet. The place is raided!_"
Dave Moroka leaped to his feet, his hand tearing with blurring speed
for his holstered hand gun. "Where's that bodyguard?" he yelled.