"Jean and Jeff Sutton - Alien From The Stars" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sutton Jean and Jeff)

language?"
From you...and others like you.
"You learned that from my mind?" he asked disbelievingly. Why, he'd only
been talking with the creature for a moment. Others! The creature had said
others! His thoughts jelled.
"The hunters?" he asked. Barlo briefly explained his earlier encounter.
They thought I was a monkey, he finished.
"But you don't look like that at all," protested Toby. His face flamed.
"Why didn't you tell them who you were when they started to shoot at you?"
I couldn't reach their minds.
"You couldn't?" He was startled. Something like a small smile touched
Barlo's lips. He explained about innate differences in minds which determined
the degree to which each could be reached. Some minds were like closed doors;
others, a rare few, were opened totally. At least, it was that way on other
worlds.
"Your world?" asked Toby.
Yes, and on others. Barlo glanced back at the rising sun. It's getting
quite warm.
Afraid that the stranger might decide to leave, Toby quickly suggested
that they sit in the shade. His brain spun with the thousand questions he had
to ask. Barlo patted the dog's head and, moving under the shade of a stunted
mountain oak, sat on the dry leaves. Toby sat across from him.
"Can you talk using speech?" he asked.
"With difficulty," answered Barlo. His voice, high and reedy, while not
unpleasant to Toby's ears, sounded strange. Later he was to think of it as a
musical voice, like the high notes of a flute. Barlo added, "I'll do better
before long."
Toby nodded his understanding. "How did you get here?"
Barlo described the disaster and how he had come to land in the nearby
hills.
"Where's your ship now?" asked Toby eagerly.
"In one of the gullies." Barlo gestured toward the east. "It's hidden."
He projected an image of the ship in the boy's mind, observing the latter's
quick, startled expression followed almost as quickly by a look of
understanding.
"How did you do that?" asked Toby.
"The same way I project ideas."
"Telepathic images..." Toby shook his head wonderingly. Or was it
telepathy? Not really, for he couldn't read Barlo's mind but could only
receive the words and pictures that Barlo projected into his. Yet when Barlo
read his mind and projected the answers, it was the same as if he had read
Barlo's mind. Yet it wasn't the same at all; Barlo could open and shut his
mind at will, project not only imagery drawn from memory but imagery woven of
imagination. In a sense, Barlo was the operator of a television station while
he, Toby, was the viewer. But the telepathy did not seem nearly so startling
as Barlo's ability to draw the contents from his mind instantly and understand
what they meant. Equally magical was his ability to project thoughts.
"It's not a matter of the projecting mind so much as of the receiving
mind," observed Barlo. He explained that the ability to receive such
telepathic images was a function of intelligence, but it was also something