Free Takeoff! by Randall Garrett Page B

it was the only one discovered so far.
    He heard a faint swishing in the air over his head and glanced up quickly. The night things shouldn’t be out this early!
    And then he saw that it wasn’t a night thing; it was a metallic-looking globe of some kind, and
    There was a faint greenish glow that suddenly flashed from a spot on the side of the globe, and all went black for Ed Magruder.

    Thagobar Verf watched dispassionately as Lieutenant Pelquesh brought the unconscious specimen into the biological testing section. It was a queer-looking specimen; a soft-skinned, sluglike parody of a being, with a pale, pinkish-tan complexion and a repulsive, fungoidal growth on its head and various other areas.
    The biologists took the specimen and started to work on it. They took nips of skin and samples of blood and various electrical readings from the muscles and nerves.
    Zandoplith, the Chief Psychologist, stood by the commander , watching the various operations.
    It was Standard Procedure for the biologists; they went about it as they would with any other specimen that had been picked up. But Zandoplith was going to have to do a job he had never done before. He was going to have to work with the mind of an intelligent being.
    He wasn’t worried, of course; it was all down in the Handbook, every bit of Proper Procedure. There was nothing at all to worry about.
    As with all other specimens, it was Zandoplith’s job to discover the Basic Reaction Pattern. Any given organism could react only in a certain very large, but finite number of ways, and these ways could be reduced to a Basic Pattern. All that was necessary to destroy a race of creatures was to get their Basic Pattern and then give them a problem that couldn’t be solved by using that pattern. It was all very simple, and it was all down in the Handbook.
    Thagobar turned his head from the operating table to look at Zandoplith. “Do you think it really will be possible to teach it our language?”
    “The rudiments, Your Splendor,” said the psychologist. “Ours is, after all, a very complex language. We’ll give him all of it, of course, but it is doubtful whether he can assimilate more than a small portion of it. Our language is built upon logic, just as thought is built upon logic. Some of the lower animals are capable of the rudiments of logic, but most are unable to grasp it.”
    “Very well; we’ll do the best we can. I, myself, will question it.”
    Zandoplith looked a little startled. “But, Your Splendor! The questions are all detailed in the Handbook!”
    Thagobar Verf scowled. “I can read as well as you, Zandoplith. Since this is the first semi-intelligent life discovered in the past thousand years or so, I think the commander should be the one to do the questioning.”
    “As you say, Your Splendor,” the psychologist agreed.

    Ed Magruder was placed in the Language Tank when the biologists got through with him. Projectors of light were fastened over his eyes so that they focused directly on his retinas; sound units were inserted into his ears; various electrodes were fastened here and there; a tiny network of wires was attached to his skull. Then a special serum which the biologists had produced was injected into his bloodstream. It was all very efficient and very smoothly done. Then the Tank was closed, and a switch was thrown.
    Magruder felt himself swim dizzily up out of the blackness. He saw odd-looking, lobster-colored things moving around while noises whispered and gurgled into his ears.
    Gradually, he began to orient himself. He was being taught to associate sounds with actions and things.

    Ed Magruder sat in a little four-by-six room, naked as a jaybird, looking through a transparent wall at a sextette of the aliens he had seen so much of lately.
    Of course, it wasn’t these particular bogeys he’d been watching, but they looked so familiar that it was hard to believe they were here in the flesh. He had no idea how long he’d been learning the