"MartiansCome" - читать интересную книгу автора (Lowndes Robert W)

Gary nodded. "Any time you say we can turn it on."

Whitlowe reached for a bottle and fortified himself. "Okay -- I'm ready." He placed himself before a compound lens as big as his head and snapped on a battery of cold mercury vapor lamps which bathed him in a metallic glare. Silently Gary turned a key and closed a simple knife switch. Their four eyes swivelled automatically to a copper plate set screenwise in the tangle of operations. There were a few flashes of light, then the screen went dark.

"Something's wrong," muttered Gary, then, as he turned to Whitlowe, "Hey, watch yourself!"

"What?" asked Whitlowe, stumbling against the battery. Tsk, tsking, he reached down to replace the connections he'd jarred loose. Now which went where? He put them in feeling more and more sure that they were bollixed up. One seemed to be left over, then he remembered that it was the other half of a double connection. "Eenie, meenie, meinie mo!" He rammed it home and straightened up with a happy smile.

"Pretty high up," said Gary thoughtfully. Whitlowe gasped: with disconcerting suddenness a scene had leaped onto the plate--unstereoscopic and without color, but recognizable.

Gary turned a heavy wheel the smallest fraction of a sector; the scene went black. "Field of vision went underground," said the big man. He reversed the wheel with a lighter touch; the screen changed from black to reddish brown.

"City!" gasped Whitlowe.

"Yeah." Fascinated, they scanned the copper plate. It was as though it were hanging about five feet from the street of this Martian metropolis, while scurrying creatures about the size of men darted dizzily about on all sides. There were no vehicles to be seen.

The two men looked at one another. "Very ordinary, I think," said Whitlowe.

"Seems as if you're right. Frank R. Paul would be horribly disappointed. Wonder if they have eyes."

"We'll soon find out. Unless our calculations are imaginary, a visual image of this plate, showing whatever is directly before it--in this instance, us--should be neatly projected just a bit above their heads. They ought to see the plate before long."

One of the darting creatures was heading straight for the plate, its knobby head down. Some thirty feet away it stopped short.

"Hyperperipheral tactility," muttered Whitlowe. "Why doesn't it look up?"

The creature did, obediently. "I was shielding my eyes," it remarked over the scores of millions of miles. "You are very brightly lit."

Whitlowe switched off half of the merc battery. "That better?" he asked.

"Yes, thank you," replied the creature.

"May we ask some questions?" broke in Gary, thrusting his head before the lens.

"How do you do? Certainly; whatever you wish."

"About our communication, first. We can understand you because we had an operation performed on what we call the Cheyney-Biddle area of our brains. This so converts and awakens the translation faculty that any language not too remote from Terrestrial thought-processes becomes intelligible to us. Are you actually speaking--vocally, I mean?"

"Hardly," replied the creature with a sort of whimsical inflection. "It seems most probable that this operation of which you speak has had more far-reaching results than you think. You are enabled to receive basic thought-impressions and translate them into your own language. Most likely your friend does not receive the precise impressions as you--the wording is different."

"But what of you?" asked Gary. "How do you receive impressions of us?"

"I'm sending through a sort of static discharge engendered by the friction of two special members. I perceive your thoughts as etheric disturbances. Interesting, isn't it?" The creature's mask-like face contorted and grew lighter, as far as they could judge from the monochrome of the screen, but these changes were accompanied by a wholly nonexistent burst of rich laughter from the sounding unit.

"I wonder," said Whitlowe, "what that sounds like to an ordinary person."

"Probably a creepy conglomeration of totally unrecognizable sounds," replied the creature. "And now," it went on, "may I beg to leave you for awhile. You two are pretty gruesome-appearing monstrosities to me, and I can feel a psychological revulsion coming on. I think you'll feel one, yourself, pretty soon. Suppose we switch off and contact later; after we've become accustomed to each other, it won't be so bad. But, just now, the first enthusiasm and scientific elan is beginning to wear off. I'll be sick as a dog in a few moments."

Gary grinned. "I wonder," he mused, "what the Martian equivalent of that phrase really is--if it exists in the first place." He waved goodbye to the creature and turned the wheel abruptly. The screen went black.