“Blellaaaan?”
“Blellaaaaaaaan,” agreed Wilson. “You’ll have to excuse my accent. Hurry up.” He tried to find hurry in the vocabulary, but it was not there. Either the language did not contain the idea or Diktor had not thought it worthwhile to record it. But we’ll soon fix that, Wilson thought—if there isn’t such a word, I’ll give ‘em one.
The man departed.
Wilson sat himself down Turk-fashion and passed the time by studying the notebook. The speed of his rise in these parts, he decided, was limited only by the time it took him to get into full communication. But he had only time enough to look up a few common substantives when his first acquaintance returned, in company.
The procession was headed by an extremely elderly man, white-haired but beardless. All of the men were beardless. He walked under a canopy carried by four male striplings. Only he of all the crowd wore enough clothes to get by anywhere but on a beach. He was looking uncomfortable in a sort of toga effect which appeared to have started life as a Roman-striped awning. That he was the head man was evident.
Wilson hurriedly looked up the word for chief.
The word for chief was Diktor.
It should not have surprised him, but it did. It was, of course, a logical probability that the word Diktor was a title rather than a proper name. It simply had not occurred to him.
Diktor—the Diktor—had added a note under the word. “One of the few words,” Wilson read, “which shows some probability of having been derived from the dead languages. This word, a few dozen others and the grammatical structure of the language itself, appear to be the only link
between the language of the ‘Forsaken Ones’ and the English language.” The chief stopped in front of Wilson, just short of the pavement.
“Okay, Diktor,” Wilson ordered, “kneel down. YQu’re not exempt.” He pointed to the ground. The chief knelt down. Wilson touched his forehead.
The food that had been fetched along was plentiful and very palatable. Wilson ate slowly and with dignity, keeping in mind the importance of face. While he ate he was serenaded by the entire assemblage. The singing was excellent he was bound to admit. Their ideas of harmony he found a little strange and the performance, as a whole, seemed primative, but their voices were all clear and mellow and they sang as if they enjoyed it.
The concert gave Wilson an idea. After he had satisfied his hunger he made the chief understand, with the aid of the indispensable little notebook, that he and his flock were to wait where they were. He then returned to the Hall of the Gate and brought back from there the phonograph and a dozen assorted records. He treated them to a recorded concert of “modern” music.
The reaction exceeded his hopes. “Begin the Beguine” caused tears to stream down the face of the old chief. The first movement of Tschaikowsky’s “Concerto Number One in B Flat Minor” practically stampeded them. They jerked. They held their heads and moaned. They shouted their applause. Wilson refrained from giving them the second movement, tapered them off instead with the compelling monotony of the “Bolero.”
“Diktor,” he said—he was not thinking of the old chief—”Diktor, old chum, you certainly had these people doped out when you sent me shopping. By the time you show up-if you ever do-I’ll own the place.”
Wilson’s rise to power was more in the nature of a triumphal progress than a struggle for supremacy; it contained little that was dramatic. Whatever it was that the High Ones had done to the human race it had left them with only physical resemblance and with temperament largely changed. The docile friendly children with whom Wilson dealt had little in common with the brawling, vulgar, lusty, dynamic swarms who had once called themselves the people of the United States.
The relationship was like that of Jersey cattle to longhorns, or cocker spaniels to wolves. The fight was gone out of them. It was not that they lacked intelligence, or civilized arts; it was the competitive spirit that was gone, the will-to-power.
Wilson had a monopoly on that.