"Murray Leinster - First Contact (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leinster Murray)

captain’s room to convey the news of success. The captain’s room, as usual, was a place of silence
and dull-red indicator lights and the great bright visiplates on every wall and on the ceiling.
“We’ve established fairly satisfactory communication, sir,” said the psychologist. He
looked tired. His work on the trip was supposed to be that of measuring personal factors of error
in the observation staff, for the reduction of all observations to the nearest possible decimal to
the absolute. Lie had been pressed into service for which he was not especially fitted, and it
told upon him. “That is, we can say almost anything we wish to them,, and can understand what they
say in return. But of course we don’t know how much of what they say is the truth.”
The skipper’s eyes turned to Tommy Dort.
“We’ve hooked up some machinery,” said Tommy, “that amounts to a mechanical translator. We
have vision plates, of course, and then short-wave beams direct. They use frequency-modulation
plus what is probably variation in wave forms—like our vowel and consonant sounds in speech. We’ve
never had any use for anything like that before, so our coils won’t handle it, but we’ve developed
a sort of Code which isn’t the language of either set of us. They shoot over short-wave stuff with
frequency-modulation, and we record it as sound. When we shoot it back, it’s reconverted into
frequency-modulation.”
The skipper said, frowning:
“Why wave-form changes in short waves? How doyou know?”
“We showed them our recorder in the vision plate; and they showed us theirs. They record
the frequency modulaton direct. I think,” said Tommy carefully, “they don’t use sound at all, even
in speech. They’ve set up a communication room, and we’ve watched them in the act of communicating
with us. They made no perceptible movement of anything that corresponds to a speech organ. Instead
of a microphone, they simply stand near something that would work as a pick-up antenna. My guess,
sir, is that they use microwaves for what you might call person-to-person conversation. I think
they make short-wave trains as we make sounds.”
The skipper stared at hlm:
“That means they have telepathy?”
“M-m-m. Yes, sir,” said Tommy. “Also it means that we have telepathy too, as far as they
are concerned. They’re probably deaf. They’ve certainly no idea of using sound waves in air for
communication. They simply don’t use noises for any purpose.”
The skipper stored the information away.
“What else?”
“Well, sir,” said Tommy doubtfully, “I think we’re all set. We agreed on arbitrary symbols
for objects, sir, by the way of the visiplates, and worked out relationships and verbs and so on
with diagrams and pictures. We’ve a couple of thousand words that have mutual meanings. We set up
an analyzer to sort out their shortwave groups, which we feed into a decoding machine. And then
the coding end of the machine picks out recordings to make the wave groups we want to send back.
When you’re ready to talk to the skipper of the other ship, sir, I think we’re ready.”
“H-m-m. What’s your impression of their psychology?” The skipper asked the question of the
psychologist.
“I don’t know, sir,” said the psychologist harassedly. “They seem to be completely direct.
But they haven’t let slip even a hint of the tenseness we know exists. They act as if - they were
simply setting up a means of communication for friendly conversation. But there is. . . well .
. . an overtone—”
The piychologist was a good man at psychological mensuration, which is a good and useful
field. But he was not equipped to analyze a completely alien thought pattern.
“If I may say so, sir—” said Tommy uncomfortably.
“What?”
“They’re oxygen brothers,” said Tommy, “and they’re not too dissimilar to us in other
ways. It seems to me, sir, that parallel evolution has been at work. Perhaps intelligence evolves