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formed the habit of dropping in on me for a coffee break now and then. More now than then; I don't know if all Russians are the same way, and if they are it might account for the way they made out in the war, but he seemed to need his coffee break every hour on the hour. He said:
    "Is a question of vocabulary, Logan. RAGNAROK has not the vocabulary."
    I said stiffly, "A computer a quarter the size of RAGNAROK translated Russian back in the fifties."
    "Ah, Russian, you say," he said mildly. "It is the language of animals, you say?"
    "Oh, Semyon. I didn't mean—"
    "No, no, no, I do not mean I am insulted. I only ask, is Russian the language of animals? It is not, we will suppose. It is merely a human language."
    "Merely?"
    "Merely! Small vocabulary, you see. Not like animal, large ."
    I stared at him. "If I understand what you're saying," I said, "which is unlikely, you're trying to tell me that animals have a bigger vocabulary than Russ—than people."
    "Exactly so, Logan." He nodded gravely. "Think! Is it engraved on your machine, that motto? 'Think.' Read the motto, Logan, and do as it says. Think, for example, if an animal possesses the capacity for abstract thought. He does not, you will say? Correct."
    "But that makes a smaller vocabulary, doesn't it?"
    "Ah." Semyon crossed his legs, sipped his coffee and got ready for a nice, long chat. He said professorially: "Be, for the moment, my little dog Josip, and think of how he thinks. Are you and I 'men', Logan, in Josip's eyes? Or is each of us a man, an individual—you, perhaps, 'man who sits and watches' and I 'man who makes clicking sounds and gives food'? It is the latter, you will see. For that is how nouns begin in speech, as proper nouns, not class-words but names for particular things. This is why, with Josip, I have followed in the great tradition of my mother and cut to the root. Two words! Just a single word and a silence which is—"
    "You told me," I said shortly. "Do you mean that to an animal each thing has its own individual word?"
    "I simplify," Semyon said sunnily. "But you grasp my meaning."
    I did; and I also grasped his arm and escorted him to the door. But it made the job look even harder than before.
     
    But things got done. Almost without knowing it, we were in full swing. The seeker groups fed me long lines of symbols, representing, they thought, the conceptual elements of the language of cows and seals, dogs and rabbits, cats and pigs. We got nowhere with the rabbits—too stupid; and the pigs were farm bred, too fat to do anything but eat. But with the other animals there was progress.
    The seekers watched the animals as Harun-al-Rashid did his harem favorites. They recorded every sound, photographed every movement. With chemical nostrils they examined the odors the animals gave off (someone had remembered that bees use odor to indicate sources of nectar); with a million dollars' worth of electronic equipment they palped the electromagnetic spectrum for signals that coarse human senses could not read.
    And they found things. Sound, scent, body posture, bodily functions: These were the elements of language.
    To whatever seemed to have meaning they assigned a symbol—even if the meaning itself was not clear. (Usually it wasn't.) Then they had a list of the essential parts of the animal vocabulary—lacking translations for the most part, but very nearly complete. And that was half their job.
    And the other half was to record, in infinite detail, everything the animals felt and saw and experienced: That was the list of referents for the "word" symbols.
    The two lists gave, first, the "words," second, the meanings.
    And then it was up to me and my WAVE to tape them, program them, and feed them to RAGNAROK, so that RAGNAROK's patient electronic mind could, from frequency and from context and from comparison with the known parts of other languages, match symbols with referents, and make for us a dictionary of Pig and Cat and Seal.
    I made the