"Anderson, Poul - Question and Answer (Planet of no Return)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Poul)

Lorenzen looked at the chronom on his wrist. It swept out the minutes, one, two, three, ten, thirty, and time was hideously stretched. It was hot in the cabin, hot and dusty. He felt sweat trickle down under his clothes.
Forever went by in an hour. And then the siren blew. All clear ... come out ... but stay alert.
Lorenzen almost bolted from the shelter. He was close enough to the point where the aliens were to get there ahead of the crowd.
A semicircle of men, rifles in the crook of their arms, faced the strangers and held back the approaching humans. Hamilton stood in front of the guard, stiff and massive, watching the newcomers out of expressionless eyes. They looked back at him, and there was no reading their faces.
Lorenzen took them in at one gulping glance, and then went back for details. He had seen films of extraterrestrials before, and these were not as unearthly as some that had already been found-but still, it was a shock to see them here in the flesh. It was the first time he truly, fully realized that man was not unique, not anything special in the immensity of creation.
They stood on their hind legs like men, though with a forward slant which reduced their potential one and three-fourths meter height by a good ten centimeters; a heavy kangaroo-like tail balanced the body, and was probably a wicked weapon for infighting. The arms were rather skinny, otherwise humanoid, but the hands had three fingers and two opposed thumbs; each finger had an extra joint, and ended in sharp blue nails. The heads were round, with tufted ears, flat black noses, pointed chins, whiskers above the wide black-lipped mouths and the long golden eyes. They seemed to be mammals-at least, they were covered with smooth gray fur, barred in darker color that formed a mask about the eyes. Their sex was probably male, though Lorenzen couldn't be sure because they were clothed: loose blouses and baggy pants apparently woven of vegetable fiber, and a kind of mukluk on the feet. They all had leather belts supporting a couple of pouches, a knife or hatchet, and what was presumably a powder horn; on their backs were small packsacks, in their hands long-barreled affairs which he took to be muzzle-loading smoothbores.
In the first moment, they all looked alike to him; then he forced himself to locate individual differences of size, build, face: they varied as much as humans.
One of them spoke, a throaty purr. When his mouth was open, you could see the long blue canine teeth, though otherwise they seemed dentally as unspecialized as man's.
Hamilton turned around. "They don't act like a war party," he said. His voice and the low murmur of wind were the only sounds. "But you can't ever tell-Avery, you're a linguist. Can you make anything out of their talk?"
"Not ... yet." The psychman's face was shiny with sweat, and his voice jittered. Lorenzen wondered why he should be that excited. "They do have distinct words."
"Hell," grunted Gummus-lugil, "I can't even hear that. It all sounds alike to me."
Another of the strangers spoke. Straining, Lorenzen could make out the pauses between phoneme groups. He'd taken a course in comparative linguistics at college, but it was vague in his mind now.
"They act like-well, I don't know what," said Hamilton. "Except that we're obviously not great gods from the sky to them."
"Wouldn't expect that." Avery shook his head. "If they've progressed as far as gunpowder hand weapons, I imagine their society is pretty sophisticated. Those muskets look better than what they had on Earth in Newton's time."
"But where are they from?" cried Fernandez. "There are no cities, no roads, not even so much as a village-I doubt if there is a house in this planet!"
Hamilton shrugged. "That's what I hope we can find out." His voice grew crisp: "Avery, you work on their language, that's your line. Von Osten, maintain guards at the defense posts, and detail a man to accompany each of these creatures wherever he goes within the bounds of the camp. But no rough stuff unless they try something extremely suspicious, and no holding them here if they want to leave. The rest of you carry on as before, but keep your arms ready all the time and don't leave camp without checking with me first."
It was sensible, thought Lorenzen. The strangers didn't look formidable, but you never knew, you never knew.
Slowly, the group broke up. The aliens followed Avery docilely enough, and one by one the others quit staring after them. Lorenzen heard Fernandez' murmur: "Natives after all! And pretty highly developed, too."
"Yeh." There was an odd sag to Gummis-lugil's heavy shoulders. "It looks like this pretty well kills the idea of colonizing."
Which may be the death-blow to all man's dreams about the stars.
Lorenzen tagged along after Avery. "Can I help you, Ed?" he asked. "I'm at loose ends, you know."
"You're not a linguist, John," said the psychman. "I'm afraid you'd only be in the way."
Lorenzen felt a stinging sense of rebuff. He gulped and persisted: "You'll need help. Somebody to act out the verbs, and-"
Avery considered for what seemed a curiously long time. "All right," he said at last. "To start with, anyway."

CHAPTER VIII
The aleans were offered a bunkhouse and moved into it with alacrity; another was set up for the displaced humans. They were shown through the camp and the boats, but there was no telling what they thought about it. Men noticed that they always had somebody on watch while they slept. They didn't seem to like messing with the humans, and used their own utensils to cook native food given them. But they stayed around for days, and worked hard with Avery and Lorenzen.
It seemed they called themselves Rorvan, as nearly as a human throat could form the word, Individual names emerged for them: Silish, Yanvusarran, Alasvu. Pointing to objects and acting out verbs began to give an elementary vocabulary and the whole stock of phonemes: it was a flexible tongue, they had almost fifty. Tonal qualities seemed to be important, but in analyzing his data Avery said the language was not analogous to Chinese. "I'm pretty sure it's inflected," he declared, "but I can't make head or tail out of the grammar. Possibly the tones form the inflections, but-" He sighed.
"Why not teach them English or Spanish?" inquired Lorenzen.
"I don't want to scare them off by the prospect of so much hard work. They may be just a group of wanderers who chanced on us and will decide any moment to take off again. Don't forget, they could be anything from official ambassadors to hobos or bandits, or something for which we have no word. We know nothing about the structure of their society or about them personally." Avery ran a hand through his thin hair and looked at the notes he had. "Damn it, their language just doesn't make sense!"
"Let me study your data for a while," offered Lorenzen. I know a little something about gloss-analysis."
"Not just yet, John. I want to go over it myself a few more times. I'll run off a copy for you soon." The next day Lorenzen was asked to go in the aircar to help in a specimen-collecting expedition. He could not very well refuse, though he fumed at the delay. When he came back, Avery gave him a sheaf of papers and a wry grin.
"Here you are," he said. "I got a lot of information yesterday while you were off, but it leaves me in a worse mess than before. A lot of it contradicts what I thought I knew."
Lorenzen spent hours over the copy and had to confess himself beaten. The word for too many important things, or the meaning of a given sound, varied without discoverable rhyme or reason. Sister, for instance, was referred to as Ortu, Omanyi, Valakesh, Arbvu-djangiz, Zulei, and a whistling noise answering to nothing in any human tongue; and it looked as if each of these words took on an entirely different meaning in other sentences. It didn't seem merely a question of synonymy: you wouldn't expect the Rorvan to be so stupid as to confuse the issue thus. The name seemed to depend on the context in some obscure manner. The whole mass of conversation held nothing identifiable as a statement.
He gave up, realizing with discouragement that he was doubtless only underfoot. Avery continued working doggedly, sitting up late to ponder each day's material. But he was the only one who didn't feel a darkness of futility.
"What the devil are we staying here for, anyway?" demanded Gummus-lugil. "There are natives. They seem to be in a position to make colonization impossible. Why not just go home and get drunk and forget the whole mucking place?"
"We're supposed to complete the survey," said Lorenzen mildly.
Gummus-lugil took out a foul old pipe and began to stuff it. His heavy dark face twisted into a scowl. "Survey my rear end! You know as well as I do this is a practical expedition. We're wasting time we ought to be using to find a planet we can have."
Lorenzen sighed. "I wonder if we ever will. It was tough enough to finance this trip. D'you think anybody can raise the cash for another? There's too much to do right at home for Parliament to spend more of the public funds on what's beginning to look like a wild goose chase, and individuals with money to donate are getting few and far between."
"Don't you care?" asked the Turk.
"Oh ... yes. I suppose so. But I never intended to leave Sol permanently." With sudden understanding: "This means a lot to you, 'though, doesn't it, Kemal?"
The engineer nodded. "It does. It did. I'm getting to an age where I want to settle down somewhere and raise a family. Only what can a man do in the System? Work for somebody else, all his life. I want to be my own boss. I thought-oh, hell." His voice trailed off and he stared emptily across the plain.
"There is a bit of hope yet," said Lorenzen. "It may be that the natives live underground or some such thing. That they won't care if we colonize the surface. They'd stand to benefit, even, if that's the case-trade and so on."
"It could be." There was a brief flicker in Gummus-lugil's eyes, and then a hardness grew in him. One hairy hand doubled into a fist. "But something happened to the first expedition! I suspect the natives murdered them and buried the traces-"
"I doubt it," said Lorenzen, though a thin little fear rose in his breast. "How'd they have gotten at the ship in her orbit? How'd the personnel get so careless as to let it happen at all? No, I still think space got them somehow. A chance meteor, just at the wrong moment, or-"
"Things like that don't happen to spaceships any more."
"They could, if all the improbabilities worked out just right. Or look-you say there was an attempt to sabotage the Hudson!"
"Yeh. Wait a minute-d'you mean-"
"I don't mean anything, Kemal. But there are groups at home which are opposed to the whole colony idea. The Resurrectionists think it's against the will of God. The Monarchists, the Collectivists, and the Eugenicists are all fanatics and all know that even their infinitesimal chance of getting into power will be gone if men start moving out of the System. Then there's Hilton's group, with its vague fear of the whole notion, pseudoscientific ideas about extraterrestrial diseases or invasion or the colonists mutating into something different and hostile-you see?"
"A bomb planted in the Da Gama." Gummus-lugil rubbed his chin. "It wouldn't have been so hard; she wasn't built from the keel up like ours ... Of course, it's hard to see how our converter could have been monkeyed with. All our workers, right down to the last electrician, were screened by the government with just that sabotage idea in mind. But it could be. It could be."