January 4

Dr. Horkkk has spent most of the last two days running tapes of his “conversation” with the robot through his linguistic computer, trying to wring some meaning out. Zero results. The robot spoke only about two dozen different words, arranging them in various ways, and that’s not enough to allow the finding of a meaningful pattern.

The rest of us have constantly been going back and forth between the ship and the vault, taking full advantage of the robot’s hospitality. By now it’s quite clear that the robot isn’t hostile. The death of 408b was a tragic mistake; the vault evidently was designed not to admit anything without the robot’s permission, and if 408b hadn’t impulsively rushed in the moment the door came loose, it wouldn’t have been killed. Once we established that we were friendly organisms, the robot turned the lightning field off, and we now are welcome to enter the vault as often as we please.

We are getting bolder. The first day we stood around edgily as if expecting the robot to change its mind and zap us any minute, but now we’ve made ourselves at home to the extent of making a full tridim record of the machinery and taking plenty of shots of the robot itself. What we don’t dare do is touch any of the machinery, since the robot is plainly the custodian of the vault and might very well destroy anyone who even seemed to threaten its contents. Besides, with 408b gone we have only the flimsiest notions of what that machinery is all about.

The robot has run its travelog several more times for us, and we’ve filmed it in its entirety. This is catching your archaeology on the hoof, all right: instead of digging up broken bits and rusty scraps of the High Ones’ civilization, we have glossy tridims of the actual cities and people. Looking at them gives us an uncanny sensation. It’s something like having a time machine. We’ve learned more than we ever dreamed was possible about the High Ones, thanks to the globe and what the robot has showed us. We know more about these people of a billion years ago, suddenly, than archaeologists have ever managed to find out about the Egyptians or Sumerians or Etruscans of the very recent past.

The robot goes through the same curious pantomime routine whenever we visit it. It points to us, points to itself, points to the stars. Over and over. Pilazinool argues that the robot is telling us that it would like to lead us somewhere — to some other vault, maybe, or even to a planet once inhabited by the High Ones. Dr. Horkkk, as usual, disagrees. “The robot is merely discussing origins,” Dr. Horkkk says. “It is indicating that both itself and ourselves come from worlds outside the solar system of GGC 1145591. Nothing more than that.”

I like to think Pilazinool is right. But I don’t know, and I doubt that we’ll ever know.

Communicating by pantomime isn’t terribly satisfying.

Three hours have gone by since the foregoing, and everything has turned upside down again. Now the robot is talking to us. In Anglic.

Steen Steen and I were sent across to the vault to get some stereo shots of one instrument panel, because we had botched the calibration on the first try. We found the robot busy in one corner with its back to us. Since it was taking no notice of us, we quietly went about our business.

Five minutes later the robot turned and came clanking over. It extended one arm and aimed an intricate little gadget at us. I thought it was a gun and I was too scared to move.

The robot said, slowly, with great effort:

“Speak… words … to … this.”

I did a quick spectrum trip of astonishment. So did Steen, whose mantle fluttered within his/her breathing-suit.

“It was speaking Anglic?” I said to Steen.

“It was. Yes.”

The robot said again, more smoothly, “Speak words to this.”

I took a close look at the gadget in its hand. It wasn’t a gun. It consisted of an inscription node with a tesseract-shaped puzzle-box mounted at one end. Within the struts of the puzzle-box glowed a deep crimson radiance.

“Words of you,” the robot said. “More. To this.”

The situation began to acquire some spin for me. The robot had been listening to us speak — recording our words, prying into them for meanings — and had taught itself Anglic. And now it wanted to increase its vocabulary. Perhaps, I thought, an inscription node with a puzzle-box attached is a kind of recorder. (I was wrong about that.)

Steen figured this out a fraction of a second ahead of me. He/she nudged me aside, put the voice-output of his/her breathing-suit close to the glowing end of the puzzle-box, and began rapidly to speak — in Calamorian! He/she spewed forth at least a dozen sentences in his/her native tongue before I woke up, grabbed him/her, and pulled him/her away from the robot.

“Get your sposhing hands off me!” Steen shouted.

“You idiot, what was the idea of speaking Calamorian?”

“To program the robot’s translating machine!” Indignantly. “Why can’t it be given words of a civilized language?”

I was so furious over Steen’s stupid militancy that I overlooked the important thing he/she had said, for a moment. I said, “You know damn well that Anglic is the official language of this expedition, and you’ve agreed to use it throughout. If we’re going to give this robot words, they ought to be in only one language, and that language should be—”

“The robot should have a chance to know that Anglic is not the only language in the cosmos! This suppression of the Calamorian language is an act of racial genocide! It—”

“Shut up,” I said, not very tolerant of Steen’s outraged racial pride. Then I reacted to the right thing at last, ” — translating machine?”

Of course.

Inscription nodes and puzzle-boxes weren’t separate artifacts. They were meant to work together, as this robot had assembled them. And they weren’t recording devices, either.

They were machines for converting the babble of primitive barbarian races into the language of the High Ones.

Steen had seen this quickly, and wanted to get his/her own wonderful Calamorian language into the record, in defiance of expedition agreements. Maybe doing it enhanced his sense of racial pride, but it also quonked up our chances of quick communication with the robot, since it had placed a dozen incompatible sentences on the record. No translating machine ever invented would get anywhere operating under the assumption that what Steen had just blurted and what the rest of us had been saying were both the same language.

I warned Steen not to try it again. Steen gave me a surly look; but he/she had scored the intended point and now subsided, leaving me a clear shot at the translating machine.

I bent close to it.

Then I wondered what I ought to say.

Words wouldn’t come. Steen Steen had probably bellowed some glib testimonial to the everlasting merits of the Calamorian people, but I wasn’t about to do that, and I developed a paralyzing case of mike fright as I tried to imagine the most useful and appropriate possible statements.

The robot said encouragingly, “Speak words of you to this.”

I said, “What kind of words? Any words?”

Then silence. Steen laughed at me.

I said, “My name is Tom Rice. I was born on the planet Earth of the sun Sol. I am twenty-two years old.”

I stopped again, as if the machine needed time to digest one set of statements before receiving another. It didn’t, I now know.

“Speak more words,” prompted the robot.

I said, “The language I am speaking is Anglic, which is the most important language of Earth. The language spoken by the last voice was Calamorian. This is a language of another world in a different solar system.”

As I spoke, I saw streams of High Ones hieroglyphics rippling along the surface of the inscription node. The gadget was converting my sounds into the written characters of the ancient language. What good that did was hard to say, in terms of communication. When I write Dihn ruuu mirt korp, I’m converting the robot’s sounds into our kind of alphabetic writing, but I’m not getting one step closer to understanding what those sounds mean.