Abel Baker Camel E-Book

Richard Wilson

• Herausgeber: Wildside Press
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 61

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

The exploration ship found them in a hollow under the asteroid's surface. It was like a dungeon, completely bare—except for a few words that glowed on a wall. And the words were in English!

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

ABEL BAKER CAMEL by Richard Wilson

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 1987 by Richard Wilson.

Originally published Amazing Stories, January 1987.

Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.

ABEL BAKER CAMELby Richard Wilson

The recon team came back to the orbiting research vessel after an overnight circumnavigation of the asteroid Ava. Sergeant Maraffi went to the bridge. There, he handed a recovery bag to the skipper, who asked, “What’s in it?”

“No evidence of human habitation,” Maraffi said. “But something. I fotofaxed it.”

Captain Anson Sheremeta, skipper of RV Pringle, opened the bag and fed the fax to his terminal. He asked, “If there’s no sign of humanity down there, what do you call this? It’s writing and it’s in English.”

Sheremeta scrolled back to it. “Hardly hurting, Heathcote hurtled heavenward. He’d had his honors. Henceforth he’d have happiness.”

“That’s English?” Maraffi asked.

“You may be right.” Sheremeta fingered the intercom and said, “Hotaling, hurry here,” He winked at the sergeant. “Catchy, isn’t it? Happily, he’ll hustle.”

“It was a hollow place under the surface,” Maraffi said. “Like a dungeon, maybe. Bare, except for the words. They glowed on a wall. I also—”

“Save it for Ernest Hotaling, psycholinguist extraordinary, inventor of that universal translator, the Hotaling Hoop,” the skipper said. “Ernest claims it can unravel anything from anywhere; even make sense of that humming from Betelgeuse. Thinks the hums might be from sentient bees. I’d better feed in a copy of this.” He pressed the xmit key. “Relax, Maraffi. Have a drink.” He poured two.

Maraffi had listened stoically to the skipper’s discourse. He’d heard it all before. Sheremeta, who’d spent most of his life in space, was inclined to be talkative.

“Thanks,” the sergeant said. “It was kind of creepy, as if something had died down in that hole. I can imagine it intriguing that mild-mannered oddball, Hotaling.”

Life hadn’t been kind to Ernest Hotaling lately. A month ago, not long after the Pringle's shakedown cruise in the asteroid belt began, Ernest had an ethergram from his mother, informing him of the death of his father. Of course, it hadn’t been possible for him to return to mother Earth for the funeral. Ernest barely had time to assuage his grief at the loss, which included regret that he and his father had not been as close as either of them wished, when a second ethergram arrived, this time from Ganymede. It had come only that morning from his fiancée, Esther. It said Esther was tired of waiting for him and was marrying a faculty member at Ganymede U. A “Dear Ernest” ethergram from Esther.

A yeoman had delivered the ethergram, an open printout from the Pringle’s signal center. The yeoman expressed his sympathy even before Ernest had a chance to read it. That’s how it had been, too, with the news of his father’s death. Ernest supposed that soon everyone aboard would know he’d been jilted. Oh, well, he hadn’t been the first in the service to lose a dear one, one way or another. The very lack of privacy that made Ernest think of the young yeoman not as tactless but as a brotherly commiserator was one of the things that drew the Pringle's crewmen closer together, helped them work as a team.

Ernest wondered whether he knew Esther’s unidentified professor. Ernest had earned his degrees in philology and linguistics at GU, with a concentration in putative extrasolar communication. He could have been teaching there himself, presumably married to the fair Esther Harlingen. She wouldn’t have to change her initials, he’d pointed out. But instead of matrimony, he’d opted for a long engagement and the rare opportunity to sign aboard the RV Pringle, which after its shakedown cruise among the asteroids was to voyage outside the solar system. Obviously, Ernest had to sign up. How else could he do field work in his specialty?

But it was also true that, like his skipper, he preferred the open spaceways to the cavernous confines of the Ganymede colony and the campus some called Grotto Tech—even if it meant a seven-year hitch with no returning in the meantime.

Esther had said she might be there when he got back. That was as positive as she’d been. He wondered what her new beloved’s specialty was. He supposed she didn’t care about his initials.

Ernest hoped the summons from the bridge had something to do with Ava, the tiny world the crew was mapping. But it could as easily be Captain Sheremeta wanting a few original words to send his wife or daughters on a birthday.

Sheremeta was a spacefaring man from way back; long separations from family were part of the job. He did keep in touch but declined to use Ethercom’s numbered list of anniversary, birthday, Valentine, Christmas, and all-purpose greetings. Fortunately, there was Ernest Hotaling. It would be cheaper to pick a pre-coded greeting and ethergram its number than to send a full-rate message of Hotaling’s devising. But Ernest’s words had more class.

The numbered greetings were intercultural and adaptable to man or beast, and had enough variety to suit the multifarious beings who shared the costs of operating Ethercom. But the skipper had reason to beware of these canned messages. Once, a transmission error resulted in his wife receiving a greeting tailored for husbands at the dreary and man-heavy colony in Titan. It read, “Congratulations! At this point in space and time, I deem you best of all my mates. May your future deportment prevent a change in this rating.”

Mrs. Sheremeta never forgave that, and never again did the skipper trust a pre-composed greeting. “Decomposed,” he snorted. Hence the reliance on Hotaling, that worthy wordsmith and sometime versifier recalled as he hotfooted it to the bridge.

Maraffi recapitulated his report to the captain, then elaborated on it for Ernest. “There was something else,” the sergeant said. “You know how sometimes a tune gets in your head and you can’t get it out? You don’t actually hear it, but it’s there? Well, without literally hearing it in my ears, I heard: Irma intruded, illegally invisible, isochronic. ‘I itch,’ Irma intoned.” Maraffi looked uncomfortable saying it.

Ernest made a mental note. Meanwhile, his micromike was getting everything down for detailed study later. “You’re sure those were the words?” he asked.

“Positive. Heard it over and over. I mean it impinged on my inner ear, or whatever, several times, if you know what I mean.”

“That’s isochronic—the repetition at intervals.”

“Nutty, anyway,” Maraffi said. He looked from Ernest to the skipper, who shrugged.

“Maybe not,” Ernest said. “First you saw the sentence that was all h’s, in those glowing letters you fotofaxed. Then you ‘heard,’ so to speak, the Irma words that all started with i’s.”

“Aye, aye,” the sergeant said.

“Alphabetic, sequential alliteration so far. Anything else?”

“A lot of unconnected h words,” said the skipper, scrolling his screen. “You’re out of luck if you want a j.”

Ernest scanned the words. “ ‘Hamlet, hiccup, Hester, hymen, Hyman, hurtle, hurtling’—no rhyme or thread to them, maybe. But there’s this.” He read, amazed, “Hurtling is also the little one who hurts, who is hurt!”

“Doesn’t fit the pattern,” the skipper said.

“No,” Ernest said thoughtfully. “But it could be significant.” He asked Maraffi, “You saw nothing other than what you’ve reported? You didn’t hear, or seem to hear, or sense, in any way, anything else?”