"Incommunicado" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maclean Katherine)

It was a language.

The people of Station A did not know that it was a language, they thought they were going pleasantly cuckoo, but he knew. They had been exposed a long time to the sound of Reynolds’ machines. Reynolds had put in the sound system and brought it down to audible range to help himself keep track of the workings of it, and the people of Station A for five years had been exposed to the sounds of the machine translating all their requests into its own symbolic perfect language before translating it back into action, or service, or English or mathematics.

It had been an association in their minds, and latent, but when Archy included frequency symbol themes in his jazz, they had come away humming the themes, and it had precipitated the association. Suddenly they could not stop humming and whistling and clicking, it seemed part of their thought, and it clarified thinking. They thought of it as a drug, a disease, but they knew they liked it. It was seductive, irresistible, and frightening.

But to Cliff it was a language, emotional, subtle and precise, with its own intricate number system. He could talk to the computers with it.

Cliff sat before the computer panel of his working desk. He did not touch it. He sat and hummed to himself thoughtfully, and sometimes whistled an arpeggio like a Reynolds’ automatic making a choice.

A red light lit on the panel. Pluto had been contacted and had reported. Cliff listened to the spiel of the verbal report first as it was slowed down to normal speed. “I didn’t know you could reach us,” said the medico. “Ole is dead. Smitty has one hand, but he can still work. Danny Orlando—Jacobson—” rapidly the doctor’s weary voice went through the list reporting on the men and the hours of work they would be capable of. Then it was the turn of the machinery and orbit report. The station computer translated the data to clicks and scales and twitters, and slowly the picture of the condition of Pluto Station project built up in Cliff’s mind.

When it was complete, he leaned back and whistled for twenty minutes, clicking with a clicker toy and occasionally blowing a chord on a cheap harmonica he had brought for the use, while the calculator took the raw formulas and extrapolated direction tapes for all of Pluto Station’s workers and equipment.

And then it was done. Cliff put away the harmonica, grinning. The men would be surprised to have to read their instructions from directional tapes, like mechanicals, but they could do it.

Pluto Station Project was back under control.



Cliff leaned back, humming, considering what had been done, and while he hummed the essentially musical symbology of the Reynolds’ index sank deeper and deeper into his thoughts, translating their natural precision into the precision of pitch, edging all his thinking with music.

On Earth teemed the backward human race, surrounded by a baffling civilization, understanding nothing of it, neither economics nor medicine or psychology, most of them baffled even by the simplicity of algebra, and increasingly hostile to all thought. Yet through their days as they worked or relaxed, the hours were made pleasant to them by music.

Symphony fans listened without strain while two hundred instruments played, and would have winced if a single violin struck four hundred forty vibrations per second where it should have reached four hundred forty-five. Jazz fans listened critically to a trumpeter playing around with a tune in a framework of six basic rhythms whose relative position shifted mathematically with every note. Jazz, symphony or both, they were all fans and steeped in it. Even on the sidewalks people walked with their expressions and stride responding to the unheard music of the omnipresent earphones.

The whole world was steeped in music. Saturated in music of a growingly incredible eloquence and complexity, of a precision and subtlety that was inexpressible in any other language or art, a complexity whose mathematics would baffle Einstein, and yet it was easily understandable to the ear, and to the trained sensuous mind area associated with it.

What if that part of the human mind were brought to bear on the simple problems of politics, psychology and science?

Cliff whistled slowly in an ordinary non-index whistle of wonderment. No wonder the people of Station A had been unable to stop! They hummed solving problems, they whistled when trying to concentrate, not knowing why. They thought it was madness, but they felt stupid and thick-headed when they stopped, and to a city full of technicians to whom problem solving was the breath of life, the sensation of relative stupidity was terrifying.

The language was still in the simple association baby-babbling stage, not yet brought to consciousness as a language, not yet touching them with a fraction of its clarifying power—but it was raising their intelligence level.

Cliff had been whistling his thoughts in index, amused by the library machine’s reflex bookish elaboration of them, for its association preferences had been set up by human beings, and they held a distinct flavor of the personalities of Doc Reynolds and Archy. But now, abruptly the wall speaker twittered something that carried an over-positive opinion in metaphor. “Why be intelligent? Why communicate when you are surrounded by cows? It would drive you even more bats to know what they think.” The remark trailed off and scattered in twittering references to cows, bats, nihilism, animals, low order thinking and Darwin, which were obviously association trails added by the machine, but the central remark had been Archy himself. Somewhere in the station Archy was tinkering idly and unhappily with the innards of his father’s machine, whistling an unconsciously logical jazz counterpoint to one of the strands of twittering that bombarded his ears.

It was something like being linked into Archy’s mind without Archy being aware of it. Cliff questioned, and suggested topics. The flavor of the counterpoint was loneliness and anger. The kid felt that Cliff and Mike had deserted him in some way, for his father had died when he was in high school, and Cliff and Mike had long given up tutoring him and turned him over to his teachers. His father had died, and Cliff and Mike were not around to talk with or ask advice, so leaving Archy to discover in one blow of undiluted loneliness that his mental immersion in science and logic was a wall standing between him and his classmates, making it impossible to talk with them or enjoy their talk, making it impossible for his teachers to understand the meaning of his questions. Archy had reacted typically in three years of tantrum, in which he despairingly hated the world, hated theory and thinking, and sought opiate in girls, dancing, and a frenzied immersion in jazz.

He had not even noticed what his jazz had done to the people who listened.

Cliff smiled, remembering the abysmal miseries of adolescence, and smiled again. Everyone else in the station was miserable, too. There was Dr. Brandias, who should have been trying to solve the problem of the jazz madness, miserably turning over the pages of a light magazine in the next cubicle, pretending not to notice Cliff’s strange whistling and harmonica blowing.

“Brandy.”

The medico looked up and flushed guiltily. “How are you doing, Cliff?”

“Come here. I’ve something to tell you.”