Gordon R. Dickson by Wolfling

could read it, was serious.
    “It’s strange,” said the Starkien, almost to himself. “There has been more of it lately.”
    He lifted his eyes to Jim.
    “It’s their Silent Language.”
    “What did they say, then?” asked Jim. Adok shook his head.
    “I don’t know,” he answered. “It’s an old language—the Highborn first learned of it after the first Servant’s Revolt, thousands of years ago. The servants have always used it. But we Starkiens are shut out from it. That’s because we’re always loyal to the Emperor.”
    “I see,” said Jim. He became thoughtful.
    They passed down a wide hallway of the same polished brown stone and into a large interior room which seemed brown stone and into a large interior room which seemed to be filled with rank on rank of whirling, glowing globes of light—like small suns. They spun—if that indeed was what they were doing—too fast for the eye to follow their rotation. But they were obviously in constant movement.
    Adok halted. He gestured at the miniature suns.
    “This is one of the Files,” he said. “Which one, I don’t know, because they’re designed to feed not to us here but to the learning centers for the young Highborn above ground. But off to the right here there’re carrels, where you can tap the information stored, not only here, but in Files all over the Throne World.”
    He led Jim off to the right and out of the room with the miniature suns into a long, narrow corridor with a series of open doorways running down its right side. Adok led him down the corridor and into one of the doorways.
    Within was a small room—the first unoccupied one they had passed—fitted with a chair and a sort of desk or table, with a raised surface, sloping upward at an angle of about forty-five degrees to the horizontal.
    Jim sat down in front of the raised surface, which seemed perfectly blank except for a pair of small black studs, or buttons, near the bottom. Adok reached over and touched one of the buttons, however, and immediately the sloping surface resolved itself into a white screen, with one word, in the sort of shorthand figures that were the Imperial language, glowing blackly in the center of it. The word was “ready.”
    “Speak to it,” said Adok.
    “I’d like to examine whatever records there are of Empire expeditions,” said Jim slowly to the screen, “with a view to finding any that went out past—” and he gave the Imperial name for Alpha Centauri.
    The squiggles that stood for the Imperial word “ready” vanished from the screen. Its place was taken by a line of writing moving from left to right at a slow pace.
    Jim sat, reading. It appeared that the retrieval system of the File was not equipped to hunt down the information he wanted directly. It could only supply him with a vast quantity of information about past expeditions in general out in the direction in which Alpha Centauri lay from the Throne World. Apparently Jim’s task would require his searching all the relevant records of expeditions in that general direction in order to find the one which had gone on to Earth—if indeed any expedition ever had. It was not a task to be done at one sitting, Jim saw. It would take hours, days, perhaps even weeks.
    “Is there any way to speed this up?” he asked, looking up at Adok. Adok reached over to the second stud and turned it. The line of type moving across the screen began to move more rapidly. Adok’s hand fell away, and Jim raised his own. He continued to increase the speed of the line until the stud stopped, evidently having reached its highest rate. Adok made a small sound, like a badly stifled grunt of surprise.
    “What?” demanded Jim, not lifting his eyes from the swiftly sliding line of information.
    “You read,” said Adok, “almost like a Highborn.”
    Jim did not bother to answer that. He remained fixed before the screen, hardly conscious that time was sliding by, until, with the ending of one set of records and the