"H. Beam Piper - Naudsonce" - читать интересную книгу автора (Piper H Beam)

"Well, there is a common characteristic in all four sounds. A little patch on the screen at seventeen-twenty
cycles. The odd thing is that when I try to repeat the sound, it isn't there."

Odd indeed. If a Svant said something, he made sound waves; if she imitated the sound, she ought to
imitate the wave pattern. He said so, and she agreed.

"But come back here and look at this," she invited.

She had been using a visibilizing analyzer; in it, a sound was broken by a set of filters into
frequency-groups, translated into light from dull red too violet paling into pure white. It photographed the
light-pattern on high-speed film, automatically developed it, and then made a print-copy and projected
the film in slow motion on a screen. When she pressed a button, a recorded voice said, "Fwoonk." An
instant later, a pattern of vertical lines in various colors and lengths was projected on the screen.

"Those green lines," she said."

"That's it. Now, watch this."

She pressed another button, got the photoprint out of a slot, and propped it beside the screen. Then she
picked up a hand-phone and said, "Fwoonk," into it. It sounded like the first one, but the pattern that
danced onto the screen was quite different. Where the green had been there was a patch of pale-blue
line. She ran the other three Svant voices, each saying, presumably "Me." Some were mainly up in blue,
others had a good deal of yellow and orange, but they all had the little batch of green lines.

"Well, that seems to be the information," he said. "The rest is just noise."

"Maybe one of them is saying, John Doe, me, son of Joe Blow,' and another is saying, Tough guy, me;
kick anybody in town."

"All in one syllable?" Then he shrugged. How did he know what these people could pack into one
syllable? He picked up the handphone and said, "Fwoonk," into it. The pattern, a little deeper in color
and with longer lines, was recognizably like stars, and unlike any of the Svants'.

The others came in, singly and in pairs and threes. They watched the colors dance on the screen to
picture the four Svant words which might or might not all mean me. They tried to duplicate them. Luis
Gofredo and Lilli Schallenmacher came closest of anybody. Bennet Fayon was still insisting that the
Svants had a perfectly comprehensible languageтАФto other Svants. Anna de Jong had started to steer a
little away from the Dorver hypothesis. There was a difference between event-level sound, which was a
series of waves of alternately crowded and rarefied molecules of t, and object-level sound, which was an
auditory sensation inside the nervous system, she admitted. That, they crowed, was-what he'd been
doing all along; their auditory system was probably such that fwoonk and pwink and tweelt and kroosh
all sounded alike to them.

By this rime, fwoonk and pwink and tweelt and kroosh had become swear words among the joint
Space Navy-Colonial Office contact team.

"Well, if I hear the two sounds alike, why doesnтАЩt the analyzer hear them alike?" Karl Dorver demanded.

"It has better ears than you do, Karl. Look how many different frequencies there are in that word, all