"Gordon R. Dickson - Dolphin's Way" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

place, so that there were always dolphins at the station.
Castor and Pollux were the latest pair. They had showed up some four
months ago after a single dolphin frequenting the station had disappeared.
Free, independent – they had been most cooperative. But the barrier had
not been breached.
Now, they were sliding back and forth past each other underwater utilizing
the full thirty-yard length of the pool, passing beside, over, and under each
other, their seven-foot, nearly identical bodies almost, but not quite, rubbing
as they passed. The tape showed them to be talking together up in the
supersonic range, eighty to a hundred and twenty kilocycles per second.
Their pattern of movement in the water now was something he had never
seen before. It was regular and ritualistic as a dance.
He sat down and put on the earphones connected to the hydrophones,
underwater at each end of the pool. He spoke into the microphone, asking
them about their movements, but they ignored him and kept on with the
patterned swimming.
The sound of footsteps behind him made him turn.
He saw Jane Wilson approaching down the concrete steps from the back
door of the station, with the stocky, overalled figure of Pete Adant, the
station mechanic.
"Here he is," said Pete, as they came up. "I've got to get back, now."
"Thank you." She gave Pete the smile that had so moved Mal earlier.
Pete turned and went back up the steps. She turned to Mal. "Am I
interrupting something?"
"No. He took off the earphones. "I wasn't getting any answers, anyway."
She looked at the two dolphins in their underwater dance with the liquid
surface swirling above them as they turned now this way, now that, just
under it.
 "Answers?" she said. He smiled a little ruefully.
"We call them answers," he, said. He nodded at the two smoothly
streamlined shapes turning in the pool. "Sometimes we can ask questions
and get responses."
"Informative responses?" she asked.
"Sometimes. You wanted to see me about something?"
"About everything," she said. "It seems you're the man I came to talk to –
not Brayt. He sent me down here. I understand you're the one with the
theory."
"Theory?" he said warily, feeling his heart sink inside him.
"The notion, then," she said. "The idea that, if there is some sort of
interstellar civilization, it might be waiting for the people of Earth to qualify
themselves before making contact. And that test might not be a
technological one like developing a faster-than-light means of travel, but a
sociological one –"
"Like learning to communicate with an alien culture – a culture like that of
the dolphins," he interrupted harshly. "Corwin told you this?"
"I'd heard about it before I came," she said. "I'd thought it was Brayt's
theory, though."
"No," said Mal, "it's mine." He looked at her. "You aren't laughing."
"Should I laugh?" she said. She was attentively watching the dolphins'
movements. Suddenly he felt sharp jealousy of them for holding her