They were closeted a long time. Through the thin walls of the hotel we could hear Kolff’s booming voice chanting rhythmically in a language none of us understood: reciting Sanskrit erotic verse for Vornan, maybe. Then he translated, and we could catch an occasional salacious word, even a wanton line or two about the pleasures of love. We lost interest after a while: we had heard Kolff’s recitals before. When I bothered to eavesdrop again, I caught Vornan’s light laughter cutting like a silver scalpel through Kolff’s earthy boomings, and then I dimly detected Vornan speaking in an unknown tongue. Matters seemed serious in there. Kolff halted him, asked a question, recited something of his own, and Vornan spoke again. At that point Kralick came into our room to give us copies of the morning’s itinerary — we were taking Vornan to a gold mine, no less — and we ceased to pay attention to Kolff’s interrogation.
An hour later Kolff came into the room where the rest of us sat. He looked flushed and shaken. He tugged heavily at a meaty earlobe, clutched the rolls of flesh on the back of his neck, cracked his knuckles with a sound like that of ricocheting bullets. “Damn,” he muttered. “By everlasting eternal damn!” Striding across the room, he stood for a while at the window, peering out at snowcapped skyscrapers, and then he said, “Is there what to drink?”
“Rum, Bourbon, Scotch,” Helen said. “Help yourself.”
Kolff barreled over to the table where the half-empty bottles stood, picked up the Bourbon, and poured himself a slug that would paralyze a hippo. He downed it straight, in three or four greedy gulps, and let the glass drop to the spongy floor. He stood with feet firmly planted, worrying his earlobe. I heard him cursing in what might have been Middle English.
At length Aster said. “Did you learn anything from him?”
“Yah. Very much.” Kolff sank into an armchair and switched the vibrator on. “I learned from him that he is no phony!”
Heyman gasped. Helen looked astonished, and I had never seen her poise shaken before. Fields blurted, “What the hell do you mean, Lloyd?”
“He talked to me… in his own language,” Kolff said thickly. “For half an hour. I have taped it all. I’ll give it to the computer tomorrow for analysis. But I can tell it was not faked. Only a genius of linguistics could have invented a language like that, and he would not have done it so well.” Kolff smacked his forehead. “My God! My God! A man out of time! How can it be?”
“You understood him?” Heyman asked.
“Give me more to drink,” said Kolff. He accepted the Bourbon bottle from Aster and put it to his lips. He scratched his hairy belly. He passed his hand before his eyes as though trying to sweep away cobwebs. Eventually he said, “No, I did not understand him. I detected only patterns. He speaks the child of English… but it is an English as far from our time as the language of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It is full of Asian roots. Bits of Mandarin, bits of Bengali, bits of Japanese. There is Arabic in it, I am sure. And Malay. It is a chop suey of language.” Kolff belched. “You know, our English. it is already a big stew. It has Danish, Norman French, Saxon, a mess of things, two streams, a Latin and a Teutonic. So we have duplicate words, we have preface and foreword, we have perceive and know, power and might. Both streams, though, they flow from the same source, the old Indo-European mutter-tongue.Already in Vornan’s time they have changed that. They have taken in words from other ancestral groups. Stirred everything all around. Such a language! You can say anything in a language like that. Anything! But the roots only are there. The words are polished like pebbles in a stream, all roughness smoothed away, the inflections gone. He makes ten sounds and he conveys twenty sentences. The grammar — it would take me fifty years more to find the grammar. And five hundred to understand it. The withering away of grammar — a bouillabaisse of sounds, a pot-au-feu of language — incredible, incredible! There has been another vowel shift, far more radical than the last one. He speaks… like poetry. Dream poetry no one can understand. I caught bits, only pieces…” Kolff fell silent. He massaged the huge bowl of his belly. I had never seen him serious before. It was a profoundly moving moment.
Fields shattered it. “Lloyd, how can you be sure you aren’t imagining all this? A language you can’t understand, how can you interpret it? If you can’t detect a grammar, how do you know it isn’t just gibberish he was drooling?”
“You are a fool,” Kolff replied easily. “You should take your head and have the poison pumped out of it. But then your skull would collapse.”
Fields sputtered. Heyman stood up and walked back and forth in quick penguinlike strides; he seemed to be going through a new internal crisis. I felt great uneasiness myself. If Kolff had been converted, what hope remained that Vornan might not be what he claimed to be? The evidence was mounting. Perhaps all this was a boozy figment of Kolff’s decaying brain. Perhaps Aster had misread the data of Vornan’s medical examination. Perhaps. Perhaps. God help me, I did not want to believe Vornan was real, for where would that leave my own scientific accomplishments, and it pained me to know that I was violating that fuzzy abstraction, the code of science, by setting up an a priori structure for my own emotional convenience. Like it or not, that structure was toppling. Maybe. How long, I wondered, would I try to prop it up? When would I accept, as Aster had accepted, as Kolff had now accepted? When Vornan made a trip in time before my eyes?
Helen said sweetly, “Why don’t you play us the tape, Lloyd?”
“Yes. Yes. The tape.” He produced a small recording cube, and fumbling a bit, managed to press it into the pickup slot of a playback unit. He thumbed for sonic and suddenly there flowed through the room a stream of soft, eroded sounds. I strained to hear. Vornan spoke liltingly, playfully, artfully, varying pitch and timbre, so that, his speech was close to song, and now and then a tantalizing fragment of a comprehensible word seemed to whirl past my ears. But I understood nothing. Kolff made steeples of his thick fingers, nodded and smiled, waved his shoe at some particularly critical moment, murmured now and then, “Yes? You see? You see?” but I saw not, neither did I hear: it was pure sound, now pearly, now azure, now deep turquoise, all of it mysterious, none of it intelligible. The cube whirled to its finish, and when it was over we sat silently, as if the melody of Vornan’s words still lingered, and I knew that nothing had been proven, not to me, though Lloyd might choose to accept these sounds as the child of English. Solemnly Kolff rose and pocketed the cube. He turned to Helen McIlwain, whose features were transfigured as though she had attended some incredibly sacred rite. “Come,” he said, and touched her bony wrist. “It is the time for sleeping, and not a night for sleeping alone. Come.” They went together. I still heard Vornan’s voice, gravely declaiming some lengthy passage in a language centuries unborn, or possibly rattling off a skein of nonsense, and I felt lulled to dreaminess by the sound of the future or the sound of ingenious fraud.