‘Nothing means to say anything here,’ the commander said angrily. Then he realised he was only talking to one of the Children; he went on more gently: ‘Suppose that instead of coming ahead, we had gone back in time. Suppose we met a prehistoric tribe of hunters. We learn their language. We want to use the word “luck”. In their superstitious minds the concept – and consequently the word – does not exist. We have to use a substitute they can accept: “accident”, or “good-happening”, or “bad-happening”, as the case may be. They understand that all right, but by it they mean something entirely different from our intention. We have not broken through the barrier at all, merely become further entangled in it. The same trap is operating here.
‘And now, please excuse me.’
Struback. A long, hollow syllable, followed by a short click. Night after night, I turned that word over in my tired mind. It became the symbol of the Failed Men, but never anything more.
Most of the others caught the worry. Some drifted away in a kind of trance, some went into the wards. The tractors became undermanned. Reinforcements, of course, were arriving from the present. The present! I could not think of it that way. The time of the Failed Men became my present, and my past and future, too.
I worked with the translator banks again, unable to accept defeat. I had this idea in my head that the Failed Men had been trying – and possibly involuntarily – to turn into something superior to man, a sort of super-being, and I was intensely curious about this.
‘Tell me,’ I demanded of an old man, speaking through the banks, ‘when you all first had this idea, or when it came to you, you were all glad then?’
His answer came: ‘Where there is failure there is only degradation. You cannot understand the degradation, because you are not of us. There is only degradation and misery and you do not comprehend – ’
‘Wait! I’m trying to comprehend! Help me, can’t you? Tell me why it was so degrading, why you failed, how you failed.’
‘The degradation was the failure,’ he said. ‘The failure was the struback, the struback was the misery.’
‘You mean there was just misery, even at the beginning of the experiment?’
‘There was no beginning, only a finish, and that was the result.’
I clutched my head.
‘Wasn’t burying yourself a beginning?’
‘No.’
‘What was it?’
‘It was only a part of the attempt.’
‘What attempt?’
‘You are so stupid. Can you not see? The attempt we were making for the resolution of the problematical problem in the result of our united resolve to solve the problem.’
‘Which problem?’
‘The problem,’ he said wearily. ‘The problem of the resolution of this case into the start of failure. It does not matter how the resolution is accomplished provided all the cases are the same, but in a diversity of cases the start determines the resolution and the finish arbitrarily determines the beginning of the case. But the arbitrary factor is itself inherent in the beginning of the case, and of the case itself. Consequently our case is in the same case, and the failure was because of the start, the start being our resolution.’
It was hopeless. ‘You are really trying to explain?’ I asked weakly.
‘No, young man,’ he said. ‘I am telling you about the failure. You are the struback.’
And he walked away.
Surrey looked hopelessly across at the Chinese girl. She tapped her fingers on the table.
‘What did he mean, “You are the struback”?’ she asked.
‘Anything or nothing,’ he said wildly. ‘It would have been no good asking him to elucidate – I shouldn’t have understood the elucidation. You see it’s all either too complex or too simple for us to grasp.’
‘But surely – ’ she said, and then hesitated.
‘The Failed Men could only think in abstractions,’ he said. ‘Perhaps that was a factor involved in their failure – I don’t know. You see, language is the most intrinsic product of any culture; you can’t comprehend the language till you’ve understood the culture – and how do you understand a culture till you know its language?’
Surrey looked helplessly at the girl’s little lute with its own trapped tongue. Suddenly, the hot silence of the night was shattered by a great orchestral crash half a mile away.
‘Another cartload of nervous wrecks coming home,’ he told her grimly. ‘You’d better go and see to your chickens.’
I
Brandyholm, eyes tensed into slits, peered down through the ceaselessly moving stalks before him. He lay on the edge of Sternstairs with Gwenny close behind him, his hand clutching the dazer: somewhere below them, a herd of pigs moved stealthily in search of food. He glanced back at the girl for a second, motioning her to stay where she was; that was the last time he saw her. Her bright eyes flashed an encouragement that, with the fever of the hunt upon him, he scarcely bothered to take notice of.
Slowly he worked his way down the great slope, the ponics separating stiffly at his touch. A pig squeaked a short distance away. The hunter paused. This herd was approaching, he had only to wait for them. Crouching like a sprinter, he rested the dazer on one knee and watched.
Gwenny called his name once: ‘Tom!’ There was a scuffle and the sound of men crashing through the ponic tangle above him. The pigs took fright at once and darted away to safety. Brandyholm was already blundering swiftly back up Sternstairs.
As he reached the spot where he had left his woman, an arrow twanged angrily past his shoulder. He dropped to his face in a fury. The Forwards had struck again. It was useless to try and pursue them down the corridors; he would be impaled as soon as he came up to them.
Immediately, impotent rage boiled up in Brandyholm. It was spiced with fear, fear of what the Lieutenant would say when he learnt the tribe had lost another female to the enemy, but Brandyholm let it wash through him almost with pleasure. He thrashed on the ground, kicking and tearing at the earth, his face distorted.
At last this state of mindlessness left him. Weak and abandoned, he lay in a shallow ditch he had worked round him. As he breathed less rapidly, his face regained its normal pallor. Idly, he rubbed at the hard ridges under him; their existence dawning on him, he knelt up and studied them. Regularly spaced ledges of metal … no reason existed to doubt that they ran from top to bottom of the great incline of Sternstairs, covered by the needly humus formed of countless dead ponic leaves.
‘More fuel for the ship theory,’ he muttered, sullenly kicking the soil level again; little he cared one way or the other for the ship theory. Shouldering his dazer, he turned back to Quarters to make his humiliating report. The ponic seeds clicked like beads as he roughly parted their slender stems and barged his way home.
Once Brandyholm was past the barricades, it was only a short while before he stood in front of the aged Lieutenant. The latter, guard-flanked, concealed his eyes carefully beneath bushy white eyebrows.
‘Expansion to your ego, sir,’ Brandyholm said humbly.
‘At your expense,’ came the stock response, and then Lieutenant Greene asked sternly, ‘Why are you back in Quarters at this time, hunter?’
Brandyholm explained