even though both of them had to be pulled sharply outward. Semyon was astonished. "Oh that Mamushka should not see!" he moaned. "Observe, Logan! They chat like diplomat's wives!"
It was true enough; when we left them in a simulated abandon-ship, retreating to the whaleboat and communicating with the animals in Weems proper only through the telecom, they chattered at each other. Since a very large proportion of canine vocabulary is aromatic, that contributed to the soggy state of Weems ' s interior. Fortunately, those sections of their vocabulary—though of paramount interest to the dogs—had nothing to do with ship handling, so it wasn't necessary for us to duplicate them.
The biggest hitch in communicating from the whale-boat was that we were living a lie, and we knew it. It was all very well to dry-run the animals from the whaleboat, in communication by means of the telecom, but in actual combat we would not be so fortunate. Water bars microwaves; communication is possible, but only by sonar beam, and that presents a real challenge to a telecom.
But not one which COMCARIB refused. Early one morning the engineers were back, ripping out all our communication equipment and replacing it with something complicated and new. Semyon and I sat on the shore, playing with Josie's puppies and waiting, and the whole business was installed in an hour.
The engineer from COMCARIB mopped his brow and explained it to us. "Oof," he said, sweating. "It's a sonar-vision installation, and Flag Section thinks it ought to do for whatever kind of lashup you guys have got here."
He looked puzzledly at Josie and at Semyon and shrugged "Anyway, it'll give you a two-way picture. But not instantaneous; it's got a slow rate of scan, and you can transmit about one full image every two seconds. There's a little bell that rings when your picture is taken. The phosphors in the picture tube are—"
From there on it got deep, but I understood. Instead of radio waves, which the sea would stop, this thing beamed sound waves, which the sea carried beautifully; but because of the slow speed of sound waves, apparently, we were confined to transmitting a series of stills instead of a movie.
When I pounded it through Semyon's head, after the engineers had left, he glowered at me. "But the essence , Logan," he complained, "the essence of the vocabulary is motion and—"
I patted him on the head. "Back to the computers," I said, as kindly as I could.
Well, we worked it out, and if we didn't have perfect rapport with the animals, there were compensations—with practice they got almost good enough to shiphandle by themselves anyhow.
The image in the sonarvision screen wasn't terribly sharp, but by turning up the gain we got a patchy sort of vivid light-and-dark silhouette that looked awful to me, but which the dogs and apes had no trouble recognizing. The only thing was, they couldn't seem to grasp the notion that the picture of Semyon was the same as the person of Semyon; they would take orders from Semyon in person, but the semaphoring stills only puzzled them.
We ran picture recognition tests for two whole days, and Josie was the first of the dogs to begin to get the idea. I pointed to Semyon and announced his name; I pointed to the photo of Semyon the signal lab had made for us, as contrasty as the screen image, and named it, and Josie got up on her hind feet and leaped over to the photo and licked it. It was like winning the Battle of the Atlantic.
"Good girl," I said in English, because by the time we got the dogs they had already naturally acquired ten or twenty loan words, like any other reasonably intelligent mutt. And, in Dog: "Now. This one. Do."
It was a photo of a cow. Josie stared at it thoughtfully for a moment and then pronounced "Big—." Well, never mind what the Dog word for "cow" is. But she got it. I ran through a couple of dozen pictures, and she called every one; and when I came to a photo of her puppies she called each name and,
It was true enough; when we left them in a simulated abandon-ship, retreating to the whaleboat and communicating with the animals in Weems proper only through the telecom, they chattered at each other. Since a very large proportion of canine vocabulary is aromatic, that contributed to the soggy state of Weems ' s interior. Fortunately, those sections of their vocabulary—though of paramount interest to the dogs—had nothing to do with ship handling, so it wasn't necessary for us to duplicate them.
The biggest hitch in communicating from the whale-boat was that we were living a lie, and we knew it. It was all very well to dry-run the animals from the whaleboat, in communication by means of the telecom, but in actual combat we would not be so fortunate. Water bars microwaves; communication is possible, but only by sonar beam, and that presents a real challenge to a telecom.
But not one which COMCARIB refused. Early one morning the engineers were back, ripping out all our communication equipment and replacing it with something complicated and new. Semyon and I sat on the shore, playing with Josie's puppies and waiting, and the whole business was installed in an hour.
The engineer from COMCARIB mopped his brow and explained it to us. "Oof," he said, sweating. "It's a sonar-vision installation, and Flag Section thinks it ought to do for whatever kind of lashup you guys have got here."
He looked puzzledly at Josie and at Semyon and shrugged "Anyway, it'll give you a two-way picture. But not instantaneous; it's got a slow rate of scan, and you can transmit about one full image every two seconds. There's a little bell that rings when your picture is taken. The phosphors in the picture tube are—"
From there on it got deep, but I understood. Instead of radio waves, which the sea would stop, this thing beamed sound waves, which the sea carried beautifully; but because of the slow speed of sound waves, apparently, we were confined to transmitting a series of stills instead of a movie.
When I pounded it through Semyon's head, after the engineers had left, he glowered at me. "But the essence , Logan," he complained, "the essence of the vocabulary is motion and—"
I patted him on the head. "Back to the computers," I said, as kindly as I could.
Well, we worked it out, and if we didn't have perfect rapport with the animals, there were compensations—with practice they got almost good enough to shiphandle by themselves anyhow.
The image in the sonarvision screen wasn't terribly sharp, but by turning up the gain we got a patchy sort of vivid light-and-dark silhouette that looked awful to me, but which the dogs and apes had no trouble recognizing. The only thing was, they couldn't seem to grasp the notion that the picture of Semyon was the same as the person of Semyon; they would take orders from Semyon in person, but the semaphoring stills only puzzled them.
We ran picture recognition tests for two whole days, and Josie was the first of the dogs to begin to get the idea. I pointed to Semyon and announced his name; I pointed to the photo of Semyon the signal lab had made for us, as contrasty as the screen image, and named it, and Josie got up on her hind feet and leaped over to the photo and licked it. It was like winning the Battle of the Atlantic.
"Good girl," I said in English, because by the time we got the dogs they had already naturally acquired ten or twenty loan words, like any other reasonably intelligent mutt. And, in Dog: "Now. This one. Do."
It was a photo of a cow. Josie stared at it thoughtfully for a moment and then pronounced "Big—." Well, never mind what the Dog word for "cow" is. But she got it. I ran through a couple of dozen pictures, and she called every one; and when I came to a photo of her puppies she called each name and,
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