"Chapter 18" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gordon Dickson - Forever Man)

"By God!" said Jim suddenly.
"What?" Mary's voice seemed to pounce upon him.
Out of nowhere, Jim had been struck by a startling suspicion; this was that it was not the Laagi as individuals to which Squonk was attached, but to those aliens as suppliers of work. Work, it seemed, was Squonk's pleasure. Work that had been publicly acknowledged as having been done was the greatest pleasure of all. But Jim hesitated to pass this hypothesis on to Mary right now. For one thing, it might not be true. For another, it might contain the germ' of something useful to him, privately, in making his escape from the hypnotic control. He chose instead something he had noticed about Squonk's dreams and which should be more interesting to her, anyway.
"You know," he told Mary now, "nothing in any of these dreams of Squonk's shows either Laagi or squonks doing anything but working. I mean, there haven't been any glimpses of homes or sleeping places or recreation areas."
Mary apparently thought about this for a minute.
"You mean that squonks may not be allowed into such areas?"
"That," said Jim slowly, "or maybe even the Laagi don't have them. They might sleep on the job, too, and do nothing but work."
"That's unthinkable," said Mary. "Unless all the Laagi we've seen so far are slaves, or something like that, tied to their work like galley slaves used to be chained to their oar. A technological civilization at all comparable to ours would have to have some reward for working that constantly. Otherwise there'd be no reason to develop a technology. To assume they do nothing but work doesn't make sense. The most primitive humans had more work than they could handle. It was the need to get in out of the rain and get free from having to be always gathering more wood for the fire that gave rise to technology."
"In our case," said Jim.
"Any technological civilization has to have been built in


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response to a teed. All right, you imagine a reason for being built at all, otherwise."
Jim tried, and found he could not, at least on short notice like this.
"All right, a technological civilization has to have rewards," he said. "Squonk sleeps, therefore the Laagi and other species here sleep. So there should be sleeping places-unless they do sleep on the job, as I said-and as our Squonk seems to be doing right now. And so there ought to be recreation areas . . . or at least nonwork areas, reward areas. For the moment, I'll agree."
"I don't know why we have to argue over everything," said Mary.
"Everyone's unique," said Jim. "I'm not you and you're not me. That means you're not going to see and do things the way I'd see and do them, at least part of the time. So there's always a difference of opinion."
"This much?" said Mary.
..Maybe."
"I really don't deliberately start out to argue with everything you say," said Mary. "It's just that. . . "
"I'm wrong."
"Well, yes. Frequently you're wrong, particularly when you're in an area I know something about. When you were driving AndFriend, I didn't argue with you, because that was something you knew something about. But in the areas of sociology and psychology, I know a lot more than you."
"Human psychology and sociology."
"The point is you don't know anything at all in those areas."
"The point is we're dealing with an alien culture where neither one of us is an expert. Correct? Where your human knowledge applies, you could be in a better position to make guesses than I am-maybe. But since we're both in unknown territory, the only thing that's certain is the fact neither one of us knows anything for sure. You could be right on the basis of what you've learned. But unlearned as I am, I could be right on the basis that I see things a little differently than you, being a different person, and I might just see something you don't see. So am I or am I not entitled to an opinion, in your opinion?"


204 / Gordon R. Dickson
h was a moment before she answered.
"You're entitled to your opinion," she said. "I'm entitled to tell you when you're wrong."
"When you think I'm wrong."
"All right, when I think you're wrong."
There was another pause.
"Now we're arguing about arguing," said Mary.
Squonk opened its eyes, rolled over on its feet, elongated them and stuck its head out once more. "Hello, world," it seemed to be saying.
"I'm sorry," said Jim. "I'll try to do better."
"Me too," said Mary. "Squonk's awake."
"It didn't sleep very long," said Jim. "Now what?"
For Squonk had just left the line of its fellows and was ambling back toward the real of the building. It entered the eating room there, which was clearly divided into two areas, one for Laagi and one for squonks. In both the squonk and Laagi areas there were what seemed to be buffets, each against a wall at an opposite end of the room. In the Laagi area, groups of two to eight or ten were standing around pedestals on which sat what looked like large silver basins, eating to the accompaniment of a large amount of arm waving and alterations in leg and body size. Every so often one of the Laagi eating in a group would turn and leave and eventually a new Laagi would join a group, evidently bringing with him, her or it a double handful of materials from the buffet.
These, it dumped into the silver bowl and began, with the others, to eat the new mixture. It was plainly the mixture of everything in the bowl they were all eating, for occasionally a Laagi would reach in and stir the contents of the bowl.
Squonk had meanwhile approached the buffet at the squonk end of the room and was browsing along it, stopping to briefly intertwine tentacles as it encountered other squonks engaged in the same activity. This touching seemed more in the way of a perfunctory, if friendly, greeting or self-identification than anything else, since it was very brief and the two squonks, having touched tentacles, thereafter paid no attention to each other.
The buffet on the squonk side was considerably longer and contained more dishes-in this case, actually shallow pans about half a meter long and half a meter wide. The reason for


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the difference became apparent immediately, for instead of picking food from their buffet and carrying it off to eat it at pedestals, of which there were none at their end of the room, the squonks simply ate as they went along the line of the buffet. There was not as much variety as Jim had assumed at first glance. A number of trays of each item were set out in rotation. So that if Squonk was browsing at one and another squonk came along and found the contents of that pan interesting, it could simply move on to find one from which the contents were not currently being taken.
Jim's reaction to Squonk's eating was a touch of nausea. For the first pan the small, shelled alien approached had what appeared to be a mass of wriggling worms sticking their heads up out of a layer of moist earth; and Squonk immediately began to gather in tentacle-loads of worms and earth indiscriminately and start stuffing them into its mouth. Jim felt an echo of his nausea also through his mental contact with Mary.
"Watch the Laagi, ignore this," Jim said.