"William Morrison - The Sack" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morrison William)

Because there was a conversation every twenty hours, Siebling had to rearrange
his eating and sleeping schedule to a twenty-hour basis, which made it a little difficult
for a man who had become so thoroughly accustomed to the thirty-hour space day.
But he felt more than repaid for the trouble by his conversations with the Sack. He
learned a great many things about the planets and the system, and the galaxies, but he
learned them incidentally, without making a special point of asking about them.
Because his knowledge of astronomy had never gone far beyond the elements, there
were some questionsтАФthe most important of all about the galaxiesтАФthat he never
even got around to asking.
Perhaps it would have made little difference to his own understanding if he had
asked, for some of the an-swers were difficult to understand. He spent three entire
periods with the Sack trying to have that mastermind make clear to him how the
Sack had been able, without any previous contact with human beings, to understand
Captain Ganko's Earth language on the historic occasion when the Sack had first
revealed itself to human beings, and how it had been able to answer in practically
unaccented words. At the end, he had only a vague glimmering of how the feat was
performed.
It wasn't telepathy, as he had first suspected. It was an intricate process of
analysis that involved, not only the actual words spoken, but the nature of the ship
that had landed, the spacesuits the men had worn, the way they had walked, and
many other factors that indicated the psychology of both the speaker and his
language. It was as if a mathematician had tried to explain to someone who didn't
even know arithmetic how he could determine the equation of a complicated curve
from a short line segment. And the Sack, unlike the math-ematician, could do the
whole thing, so to speak, in its head, without paper and pencil, or any other external
aid.
After a year at the job, Siebling found it difficult to say which he found more
fascinatingтАФthose hour-long conversations with the almost all-wise Sack, or the
cleverly stupid demands of some of the men and women who had paid their hundred
thousand credits fir a precious sixty seconds. In addition to the relatively simple
questions such as were asked by the scientists or the fortune hunters who wanted to
know where they could find precious metals, there were complicated questions that
took several minutes.
One woman, for instance, had asked where to find her missing son. Without the
necessary data to go on, even the Sack had been unable to answer that. She left, to
return a month later with a vast amount of information, carefully compiled, and
arranged in order of descending importance. The key items were given the Sack first,
those of lesser significance afterward. It required a little less than three minutes for
the Sack to give her the answer that her son was probably alive, and cast away on an
obscure and very much neglected part of Ganymede.
All the conversations that took place, including Siebling's own, were recorded and
the records shipped to a central storage file on Earth. Many of them he couldn't
understand, some because they were too technical, others because he didn't know
the language spoken. The Sack, of course, immediately learned all languages by that
process he had tried so hard to explain to Siebling, and back at the central storage
file there were expert technicians and linguists who went over every detail of each
question and answer with great care, both to make sure that no questioner revealed
himself as a criminal, and to have a lead for the collection of income taxes when the
questioner made a fortune with the Sack's help.
During the year Siebling had occasion to observe the correctness of the Sack's