Adrian Kosoff sat behind his desk carefully eying the chief of the anthropology team that had been added to his scientific staff.
Forced down my throat, Kosoff thought sourly. A dozen people who have no real business being here, studying us as if we were the subject of this mission. Totally unnecessary; a waste of resources. But there he is, and I have to deal with him.
James Littlejohn was an Australian Aborigine, of course: short, black, with bushy hair and heavy brows. He had an affable personality, but Kosoff wondered if the man’s smiling amiability was a front to cover ambition.
He must have had to overcome a lot of resistance, Kosoff thought, to rise to where he stood now. But why have they stuck me with him?
Littlejohn was sitting in one of the comfortable cushioned chairs in front of Kosoff’s desk, a tentative smile on his dark face.
“One of your people wants to join the philology department?” Kosoff asked. “Who?”
Littlejohn’s smile faded. “You know him, of course. Bradford MacDaniels.”
Kosoff clamped down on his emotions and made his face freeze. “Yes, I do know him.”
“He’s spent three months out at Alpha, and he’s become intrigued with the sounds the octopods make. He’d like to try to help the linguists to decode those sounds and see if they actually are a language.”
“But he’s not a linguist.”
“No, although he minored in linguistics at Mars University.”
Mars University, Kosoff thought. A second-rate school. A sop to the people who live and work on that frozen sand trap.
Shaking his head, Kosoff said, “We can’t have people jumping from one team to another just to satisfy their personal desires.”
Littlejohn thought that just to satisfy their personal desires was an unconscious indication of Kosoff’s real motivation. But he kept silent. Sometimes silence is the best tactic, he knew.
“Your anthropology team is small enough. Letting MacDaniels shift to philology will make your job more difficult, won’t it?”
“Yes. Somewhat.”
“And the philology team would have to train him. That would take time away from their main effort.”
“He’s a very determined young man,” said Littlejohn.
“Yes, I know.”
Clearly unhappy, Kosoff drummed his fingers on his desktop for a few silent moments. Littlejohn sat patiently, his hands folded over his belly, wondering which way the mission director would jump.
Finally, Kosoff spoke to his desktop screen. “Phone: connect me to Dr. Chang.”
Littlejohn couldn’t see the screen, it was angled away from him, but he heard a softly feminine voice. “Professor Kosoff, how pleasant of you to call.”
“Elizabeth, I hate to bother you, but could you come to my office, please?”
“Now?”
“Right now.”
“I’ll be there in five minutes.”
“Thank you,” said Kosoff. Turning back to Littlejohn, he asked, “So how is your work proceeding?”
“It’s coming along nicely,” Littlejohn answered. “It always intrigues me to study the ways in which people arrange their societies. No two are exactly alike.”
“What’s unique about our society?”
With an easy smile, Littlejohn said, “It’s small, it consists entirely of very bright, very accomplished men and women. Rather like a university faculty, cut adrift from the usual social norms.”
Kosoff nodded. “That makes sense.”
“We’re moving away from the normal hierarchical structure of a university faculty toward something rather different.”
“Different? How?”
Littlejohn pursed his lips before answering. “I believe we’re moving toward a true meritocracy: a society in which power is obtained by those who demonstrate accomplishment.”
Kosoff chuckled uneasily. “You mean I could be deposed as leader of this crew?”
Littlejohn shrugged. “I doubt that. You have enormous prestige and you’re quite an accomplished fellow. But it might be possible that groups within our overall crew will begin to form. Rather like the barons of a medieval kingdom gaining fealty from their serfs.”
“And overthrowing their king?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Then how—”
A tap at the door. It slid open to reveal Dr. Elizabeth Chang, chairwoman of the philology department, standing in the doorway.
“Elizabeth,” Kosoff said heartily. “Come in, come in.”
Littlejohn suppressed a smile of relief. He had told Kosoff more than he’d intended to.
Elizabeth Chang was physically small, doll-like. Her face was quite beautiful, as delicate as an orchid. She wore an unadorned knee-length tunic of rust-red, with a high mandarin collar. The two men got to their feet as she approached the desk.
“Dr. Littlejohn,” she said in her smoky voice. She extended her hand to Littlejohn and smiled with her lips, but her eyes were not focused on him. It seemed to Littlejohn that she was surveying the office, trying to find out what was going on, who was doing what to whom.
Once Kosoff explained why he wanted her to join the discussion, she seemed to relax somewhat.
“An anthropologist, joining our group? That doesn’t make much sense, does it.” It was not a question.
Littlejohn said, “He’s the man who’s recorded the octopods’ sounds, out at Alpha.”
“Oh, him.”
“He’d like to try to build up a vocabulary, to understand their language.”
Chang closed her eyes, as if the idea was painful to contemplate. Opening them, she focused on Kosoff, behind his desk. “We are concentrating on the people of planet Gamma, as you know. They obviously have a language.” Turning to Littlejohn, she went on, “They have sonic organs in their heads. They converse with one another using low-frequency sound pulses, beyond the range of human hearing.”
“Like the elephants, back on Earth,” Kosoff added.
“I know,” Littlejohn replied. “I was on the committee that saved the African elephant from extinction.”
With a sad smile, Chang said, “I don’t see how we could spare the manpower to teach a neophyte what he’d need to know to become a useful member of our team.”
“He already knows quite a bit,” Littlejohn said gently. “He’s not exactly a neophyte.”
“But he’s not a trained philologist.”
Littlejohn conceded the point with a nod, thinking, Typical group-think. Brad doesn’t have their credentials, so they don’t want him in their group.
“We do have a couple of our junior people studying the data brought back from Alpha. But that’s a back-burner issue. Most of our effort has to be concentrated on the humanoids of Gamma.”
“I agree,” said Kosoff. “It’s regrettable, but Dr. Chang is correct. We must concentrate the resources we have on the most important problem.”
Littlejohn knew he was licked. Kosoff was smart enough to get this Chang woman to do the hatchet work, rather than veto Brad’s application himself.
With a rueful nod, Littlejohn pushed himself up from the chair. “I understand. But Dr. MacDaniels is going to be very disappointed. He so wanted to work on the octopods’ language.”
“If it is a language,” said Kosoff.
“Which I doubt,” Chang added. Right on cue.