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

why he was still alive and had never had a command massacred.

The wheelbarrows, four of them, came down from the ship by mid-morning. With them came a
grindstone, a couple of crosscut saws, and a lot of picks and shovels and axes, and cases of sheath
knives and mess gear and miscellaneous trade goods, including a lot of the empty wine and whisky
bottles that had been hoarded for the past four years.

At lunch, the talk was almost exclusively about the language problem. Lillian Ransby, who had not gotten
to sleep before sunrise and had just gotten up, was discouraged.

"I don't know what we're going to do next," she admitted. "Glenn Orent and Anna and I were on it all
night, and we're nowhere. We have about a hundred wordlike sounds isolated, and twenty or so are
used repeatedly, and we can't assign a meaning to any of them. And none of the Svants ever reacted the
same way twice to anything we said to them. There's just no one-to-one relationship anywhere."

"I'm beginning to doubt they have a language," the Navy intelligence officer said. "Sure, they make a lot of
vocal noise. So do chipmunks."

"They have to have a language," Anna de Jong declared. "No sapient thought is possible without
verbalization."

"Well, no society like that is possible without some means of communication," Karl Dorver supported her
from the other flank. He seemed to have made that point before. "You know," he added, "I'm beginning
to wonder if it mightn't be telepathy."

He evidently hadn't suggested that before. The others looked at him in surprise. Anna started to say, "Oh,
I doubt ifтАФ" and then stopped.
"I know, the race of telepaths is an old gimmick that's been used in new-planet adventure stories for
centuries, but maybe we've finally found one."

"I don't like it, Karl," Loughran said. "If they're tele-paths, why don't they understand us? And if they're
tele-paths, why do they talk at all? And you can't convince me that this boodly-oodly-doodle of theirs
isn't talking."

"Well, our neural structure and theirs won't be nearly alike," Fayon said. "I know, this analogy between
telepathy and radio is full of holes, but it's good enough for this. Our wave length can't be picked up with
their sets."

"The deuce it can't, Gofredo contradicted. "I've been bothered about that from the beginning. These
people act as though they got meaning from us. Not the meaning we intend, but some meaning. When
Paul made the gobbledygook speech, they all reacted in the same wayтАФfrightened, and then defensive.
The you-me routine simply bewildered them, as we'd be at a set of semantically lucid but
self-contradictory statements. When Lillian tried to introduce herself, they were shocked and horrifiedтАж"

"It looked to me like actual physical disgust," Anna interpolated.

"When I tried it, they acted like a lot of puppies being petted, and when Mark tried it, they were simply
baffled. I watched Mark explaining that steel knives were dangerously sharp; they got the demonstration,
but when he tried to tie words onto it, it threw them completely."