"Jerry Pournelle - Extreme Prejudice" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pournelle Jerry)

of the night; I can’t .afford them in bright daylight. I wondered if that was what happened to the man I’d
come to see.
Dr. Peterson had a funny habit of brushing his beard with the tips of his fingers, the way a man might
test a wall to see if it had fresh paint. He had no mustache, and I found out later that few people at
Dansworth do, although beards are common. Mustaches get in the way of your diving mask. They cause
leaks.
I shook hands with Peterson and walked over to the edge of the airstrip to look down into the kelp. I
hadn’t expected anything like that in the middle of the Pacific, and I said so. “It only grows in cold,
shallow water, doesn’t it?” I asked.
“Right.” Peterson seemed pleased that I knew that much. “That is cold, shallow water, Mr. Starr.
The kelp’s anchored to platforms below the surface, and the water’s pumped up from the deep bottom.
The kelp is brought in from all over the world so we can experiment with different varieties—the stuff
right here comes from the Los Angeles area.”
I couldn’t look away. The water was clear, and millions of fish swam in the thick kelp beds. There
were long, thin, torpedo-shaped fish with bright blue -stripes down their sides, moving dartingly in
schools, every fish turning at precisely the same instant. Each thick clump of kelp held a brilliant orange
dam-selfish warily guarding its .territory. There were a few sea urchins among the kelp, and as I watched,
a swiftly moving shape darted past to snatch one—an otter, I thought.
A school of dolphins played among the fish. Two detached themselves from the rest and came over
to -examine me. One rose high on his tail, lifting himself out of the water to stand there churning while he
splashed water on me. I ducked back in alarm, but it was too “late. I was dripping wet,
Peterson clucked and whistled, then shouted, “Jolly! That’s not nice.”
The dolphin whistled something, and then, garbled but clear enough so I could understand it, it said,
“Sorry, boss.” And laughed.

Peterson was still trying to explain when we got to Admiral Kingsley’s office.
“They’ve always been able to imitate speech,” Peterson said. “The stories about dolphins talking and
singing go back to classical Greek times. But nobody ever took the trouble to systematically teach them
before.”
“Yeah, well, look,” I protested, “we get stories about intelligent fish all the time. Used to take ”em
pretty seriously, and I know how useful the dolphins are. But does that thing understand what he’s
saying?“
“They aren’t fish,” Peterson said. “OK. Cetaceans. Toothed seagoing mammals. They breathe
through lungs, and they’ve never been known to attack a man, and the Navy and fishermen have been
systematically using them, as messengers- and herders since the Fifties anyway. I’ve had the standard
briefing, Dr. Peterson. But nobody told me the damned things could talk!”
“Not many can,” Peterson said. “At least not so that an untrained, man can understand them. Tell me,
Mr. Starr, do you speak any foreign language?”
“Yeah.” It was safe to admit that. I wasn’t about to tell him just how many I could get along in. He
wouldn’t have believed me anyway. “And was it difficult to learn?” “Sure.”
“Well, to a dolphin, any human language is much more difficult. You’d find it easier to learn Urdu or
Yakut than Jolly did to learn English. Dolphin grammar isn’t like any language we speak. Couple that with
the fact that he has to suppress over half the frequencies and sounds he normally makes to communicate,
and maybe you’ll appreciate why so few dolphins ever manage to be understood.”
We’d reached the admiral’s office ten fathoms below the surface, and the conversation trailed off.
There was a watertight door to the office, and a Navy yeoman as receptionist. Admiral Kingsley didn’t
have a beard, and his tan looked pasty, as if he’d been out of the sun for a while after a long stint
outdoors. 1 was told he’d just come up from a seven-week tour of duty with the “deep mining operation
below Dansworth.
The pallor bothered me. I’d had one like that myself after the worst assignment I ever drew. The FBI