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

attention; and the emotion pricked him to something he might not otherwise
have had the courage to do.
"Fly over to the mainland with me," he said, "and have lunch. I'll tell you all
about it."
"All right." She looked up from the dolphins at him at last and he was
surprised to see her frowning. "There's a lot I don't understand," she
murmured. "I thought it was Brayt I had to learn about. But it's you – and the
dolphins."
"Maybe we can clear that up at lunch, too," Mal said, not quite clear what
she meant, but not greatly caring, either. "Come on, the helicopters are
around the north side of the building."


They flew a copter across to Carúpano, and sat down to lunch looking out
at the shipping in the open roadstead of the azure sea before the town,
while the polite Spanish of Venezuelan voices sounded from the tables
around them.
"Why should I laugh at your theory?" she said again, when they were
settled, and eating lunch.
"Most people take it to be a crackpot excuse for our failure at the station,"
he said.
Her brown arched brows rose. "Failure?" she said. "I thought you were
making steady progress."
"Yes. And no," he said. "Even before Dr. Knight died, we ran into
something he called the environmental barrier."
"Environmental barrier?"
"Yes." Mal poked with his fork at the shrimp in his seafood cocktail. "This
work of ours all grew out of the work done by Dr. John Lilly. You read his
book, Man and Dolphin?"
"No," she said. He looked at her, surprised.
"He was the pioneer in this research with dolphins," Mal said. "I'd have
thought reading his book would have been the first thing you would have
done before coming down here."
"The first thing I did," she said, "was try to find out something about
Corwin Brayt. And I was pretty unsuccessful at that. That's why I landed
here with the notion that it was he, not you, who was the real worker with the
dolphins."
"That's why you asked me if I knew much about him?"
"That's right," she answered. "But tell me about this environmental
barrier."
"There's not a great deal to tell," he said. "Like most big problems, it's
simple enough to state. At first, in working with the dolphins, it seemed the
early researchers were going great guns, and communication was just
around the corner – a matter of interpreting the sounds they made to each
other, in the humanly audible range and above it; and teaching the dolphins
human speech."
"It turned out those things couldn't be done?"
"They could. They were done – or as nearly so as makes no difference.
But then we came up against the fact that communication doesn't mean
understanding." He looked at her. "You and I talk the same language, but