Project Purple

27 - The Linguist

She left her office that night as happy as she had ever been in the twenty-two years she had been teaching.

It had been quite an extraordinary week, and so many thoughts filled her head as she floated out through the darkening campus and out to her car in the faculty parking lot. If what had been brought to her was authentic-and she had no reason to doubt its validity, because it all patterned out quite convincingly- then people were speaking a language that many academicians not only thought long dead and gone, but had doubted ever existed in the first place!

The research potential was enormous! Even from just a morphological perspective, the angles she could take on this boggled her mind, and she almost skipped along the Eucalyptus-lined walkway to parking lot C. She ran her fingers through her pageboy cut, and she even considered doing something new with her hair, something a little more adventurous, once it grew out.

She was humming when she saw it. A note, with her name on it, taped delicately to the trunk of a small Ponderosa Pine that had been planted a few years back-a piece of notebook paper with nothing more than her name printed neatly with a thick, black pen, and with an arrow next to her name pointing down the small footpath toward the observatory...

She didn't usually walk that way, but it had been such an incredible, nearly ethereal, week that she felt anything was likely, and a sign with her name on it didn't strike her as anomalous.

If she had stopped to consider the strange little sign, she would have appreciated the fact that in her lifetime no one had ever taped her name to the trunk of a tree.

But she drifted along the pretty footpath with Balsam Firs and dense, overhanging junipers. No one else was on the sheltered, meandering conduit that ran between Social Sciences and the little-used observatory. But this was a pleasant roundabout, especially since she had so many extraordinary opportunities to consider.

And then the linguist saw her, standing on a grassy mound by some tall sagebrush. She was young, and with such musculature, and such strength, and with a stoic expression of such fine resolve.

And completey naked.

"Are you all right?"

The question gave the linguist a reason to take a few steps closer-to examine, to admire. Because she knew just who, just what she was; she was gorgeous, yes! But more than that, she was indubitably Proto-Woman!

The linguist would contend that there was nothing absurd about that observation, yet dark doubts would grow within her about everything else-because when the naked girl looked at the linguist she smiled and held out her arms, and there was something in her balled-up fist, and it dropped to the white pebbles under the sagebrush below and began to smoke like a potent mosquito coil.

The gas knocked her unconscious in seconds and she fell, gently, to the grass. But as she closed her eyes she had a few moments of clarity ... she had been misled!

The sudden understanding was ruinously disappointing.