"William Tenn - The Liberation of Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tenn William)

When the alien came forth a few hours later, the delegation stepped up to him, bowed, and, in the
three official languages of the United NationsтАФEnglish, French and RussianтАФasked him to consider this
planet his home. He listened to them gravely, and then launched into his talk of the day beforeтАФwhich
was evidently as highly charged with emotion and significance to him as it was completely
incomprehen-sible to the representatives of world government.
Fortunately, a cultivated young Indian member of the secretariat detected a sus-picious similarity
between the speech of the alien and an obscure Bengali dialect whose anomalies he had once puzzled
over. The reason, as we all know now, was that the last time Earth had been visited by aliens of this
particular type, humanity's most advanced civilization lay in a moist valley in Bengal; extensive dictionaries
of that language had been written, so that speech with the natives of Earth would present no problem to
any subsequent exploring party.
However, I move ahead of my tale, as one who would munch on the succulent roots before the
dryer stem. Let me rest and suck air for a moment. Heigh-ho, truly those were tremendous experiences
for our kind.
You, sir, now you sit back and listen. You are not yet of an age to Tell the Tale. I remember, well
enough do I remember, how my father told it, and his father before him. You will wait your turn as I did;
you will listen until too much high land be-tween water holes blocks me off from life.
Then you may take your place in the juiciest weed patch and, reclining gracefully between sprints,
recite the great epic of our liberation to the carelessly exercising young.


Pursuant to the young Hindu's suggestions, the one professor of comparative lin-guistics in the world
capable of understanding and conversing in this peculiar ver-sion of the dead dialect was summoned from
an academic convention in New York, where he was reading a paper he had been working on for
eighteen years: An Initial Study of Apparent Relationships Between Several Past Participles in
Ancient Sanskrit and an Equal Number of Noun Substantives in Modern Szechuanese.
Yea, verily, all these thingsтАФand more, many moreтАФdid our ancestors in their besotted ignorance
contrive to do. May we not count our freedoms indeed?
The disgruntled scholar, minusтАФas he kept insisting bitterlyтАФsome of his most essential word lists,
was flown by fastest jet to the area south of Nancy which, in those long-ago days, lay in the enormous
black shadow of the alien spaceship.
Here he was acquainted with his task by the United Nations delegation, whose nervousness had not
been allayed by a new and disconcerting development. Several more aliens had emerged from the ship
carrying great quantities of immense, shim-mering metal which they proceeded to assemble into
something that was obviously a machineтАФthough it was taller than any skyscraper man had ever built,
and seemed to make noises to itself like a talkative and sentient creature. The first alien still stood
courteously in the neighborhood of the profusely perspiring diplomats; ever and anon he would go
through his little speech again, in a language that had been almost for-gotten when the cornerstone of the
library of Alexandria was laid. The men from the U.N. would reply, each one hoping desperately to
make up for the alien's lack of fa-miliarity with his own tongue by such devices as hand gestures and
facial expres-sions. Much later, a commission of anthropologists and psychologists brilliantly pointed out
the difficulties in such physical, gestural communication with creatures possessingтАФas these aliens
didтАФfive manual appendages and a single, unwinking compound eye of the type the insects rejoice in.
The problems and agonies of the professor as he was trundled about the world in the wake of the
aliens, trying to amass a usable vocabulary in a language whose pecu-liarities he could only extrapolate
from the limited samples supplied him by one who must inevitably speak it with the most outlandish of
foreign accentsтАФthese vexations were minor indeed compared to the disquiet felt by the representatives
of world government. They beheld the extraterrestrial visitors move every day to a new site on their
planet and proceed to assemble there a titanic structure of flickering metal which muttered nostalgically to
itself, as if to keep alive the memory of those faraway factories which had given it birth.