Anywhen by James Blish

he was laboring. Once he was able to talk to his eight charges with some facility, he did try at once to explain the situation to them. But it turned out that they were not in any mood to listen.
    Nor could I blame them. After all, they were in the tank, which, provided though it was with every need Roche had been able to anticipate, was still utterly unlike any environment they had ever imagined, let alone encountered. As for Dr. Roche himself, he was to them a grossly magnified face on a wall—a face like those of the demons who had brought the plague in the first place, but huge and with a huge, disembodied voice to go with it. Roche was careful not to let any of the rest of us—the subsidiary demons—go drifting across the background of the screen, but it seemed to be too late for such precautions. The savages had already decided that they had been taken into the Underworld. They stood silently with their visible pairs of arms folded across their narrow chests, looking with sullen dignity into the face of the archdemon, waiting for judgment. They would not respond to any question except by giving their names, in a rapid rattle which went right around the circle, always in the same direction:
    "Ukimfaa, Mwenzio, Kwa, Jua, Naye, Atakufaa, Kwa, Mvua."
    Dr. Roche spoke briefly, was greeted by more silence, and turned the screen off, mopping his brow. "A stubborn lot," he said. "I expected it, but—I can't seem to get through it."
    "Two of them have the same names," Doc Bixby noted.
    "Yes, sir. They're all related—a clan, which is also a squad. 'Kwa' means `if-then'; signifies that they're bound to each other, by blood and duty. That's the trouble."
    "Do all the other names mean something too?" I asked.
    "Yes, of course. Standard for this kind of society. The total makes up the squad, the functional fighting unit. But I don't have nearly enough data to work out the meanings of the connections. If I did, I could figure out which one of them is senior to the others, and concentrate on him. As it is, all I'm sure of is that neither Kwa can be; that's obviously a cousin-cousin crossover."
    I almost didn't ask the next question. After all, I didn't know the language, and Dr. Roche did. But since he was obviously stumped, I couldn't see what harm it would do to introduce a little noise into the situation.
    "Could it be grammatical? The connection, I mean?"
    `What? Certainly not. No culture of this . . . Uh. Wait a minute. Why did you ask that, Hans?"
    "Well, because they always name themselves in the same order. I thought just maybe, if the names all mean something, it might make up a sentence."
    Roche bit his lip gently. After a few seconds, he said: "That's true, dammit. It does. It's condensed, though. Wait a minute."
    He pulled a pad to him and wrote, very slowly and with the utmost effort, and then stared at what he had written.
    "It says: RAINY SEASON/SOMEONE/HELP/HIM/IF-THEN/DRY SEASON/MAYBE/YOU. By God, it's—"
    "The Golden Rule," Doc Bixby said softly. "Games theory; non-zero-sum theorem one."
    "More than that. No, not more than that, but more useful to us right now. All these words are related, you see. You can't show that in English, but Savannahan is a highly inflected language; each of these eight words stands in a precise hierarchical relationship to all the other seven. The only grammatically unique word is `help'; the others are duplicates, either in meaning or in function."
    He took a deep breath and snapped the screen back on. "MWENZIO!" he shouted into the tank.
    One of the tall tubular torsos stood abruptly as straight as a ramrod and came forward, the bullet head exalted. "Mpo-kuseya," the savage cried, and waited.
    "What's that mean?" Bixby whispered, offstage. It was a gross violation of Roche's rules, but Roche himself could not resist whispering back.
    "It means: I cannot fail."
    The savage and the U.N.R.R.A. man stared at each other, as intently as though they were face to face, instead of watching