“Very well. Good-bye.”
Kingsley explained to Ann Halsey:
“The delay is due to the time required for the transmission to reach the Cloud and for the reply to get back here. These delays are going to make short speeches rather unprofitable.”
But Ann Halsey was less interested in the delays than in the tone of the Cloud’s messages.
“It sounded just like a human,” she said, wide-eyed with amazement.
“Of course it did. How could it have done otherwise? It’s using our language and our phrases, so it’s bound to sound human.”
“But the “good-bye” sounded so nice.”
“Nonsense! To the Cloud “good-bye” is probably just a code word for ending a transmission. Remember that it’s learned our language from scratch in about a fortnight. That doesn’t look very human to me.”
“Oh, Chris, you’re exactly what the Americans call a “sad sack”. Isn’t he, Geoff?”
“What, Chris a sad sack? I should just say he is, ma’am, the biggest god-almighty sad sack in Christendom. Yes, sir! Seriously, Chris, what did you think of it?”
“I thought the sending of a code was a very good sign.”
“So did I. Very good for our morale. Heaven knows we need it. This last year hasn’t been easy. I think I feel better than I’ve felt since the day I picked you up at Los Angeles airport, and that seems at least a lifetime ago.”
Ann Halsey wrinkled her nose.
“I can’t understand why you go all goofy over a code, and why you poured cold water on my “good- bye”.”
“Because, my dear,” answered Kingsley, “the sending of the code was a reasonable rational thing to do. It was a point of contact, of understanding, quite unconnected with language, whereas the “good-bye” was only a superficial linguistic gloss.”
Leicester walked across to join them.
“This two-day delay is rather fortunate. I think we can get the sound system working by then.”
“How about the code?”
“I’m pretty sure it’s all right, but I thought it’d be best to be on the safe side.”
Two days later in the evening the whole company assembled in the transmitting lab. Leicester and his friends busied themselves with last-minute adjustments. It was nearly eight o’clock when preliminary flashes appeared on the tube. Words soon began to appear.
“Let’s have some sound,” said Leicester.
There were broad grins and laughter as a voice came over the loud-speaker, for it was the voice of Joe Stoddard that spoke. For a minute or so most people thought of a hoax, but then it was noticed that the voice and the words on the tube were the same. And decidedly the sentiments were not those of Joe Stoddard.
Leicester’s joke had some advantage. Of necessity he had not been given sufficient time to include voice inflexions: each word was always pronounced the same way, and the words were always spoken at the same rate, except at the end of sentences where there was always a slight pause. These disadvantages of the sound reproduction were to some extent compensated by the fact that in natural speech Joe Stoddard did not show much inflexion anyway. And Leicester had cleverly timed the rate of delivery of the words to agree pretty closely with Joe’s natural speech. So although the Cloud’s speech was obviously an artificial imitation of Joe, the imitation was quite a good one. Nobody ever really got used to the Cloud speaking with the easy slow burr of the West Country, and nobody ever quite got over the indescribably comic effect of some of Joe’s mispronunciations. Ever afterwards the Cloud was known as Joe.
Joe’s first message ran roughly as follows:
“Your first transmission came as a surprise, for it is most unusual to find animals with technical skills inhabiting planets which are in the nature of extreme outposts of life.”
Joe was asked why this should be so.
“For two quite simple reasons. Living on the surface of a solid body, you are exposed to a strong gravitational force. This greatly limits the size to which your animals can grow and hence limits the scope of your neurological activity. It forces you to possess muscular structures to promote movement, and it also forces you to carry protective armour against sharp blows — as for instance your skulls are a necessary protection for your brains. The extra weight of muscle and armour still further reduces the scope of your neurological activities. Indeed your very largest animals have been mostly bone and muscle with very little brain. As I have already said, the strong gravitational field in which you live is the cause of this difficulty. By and large, one only expects intelligent life to exist in a diffuse gaseous medium, not on planets at all.
“The second unfavourable factor is your extreme lack of basic chemical foods. For the building of chemical foods on a large scale starlight is necessary. Your planet, however, absorbs only a very minute fraction of the light from the Sun. At the moment I myself am building basic chemicals at about 10,000,000,000 times the rate at which building is occurring on the whole entire surface of your planet.
“This shortage of food chemicals leads to a tooth-and-claw existence in which it is difficult for the first glimmerings of intellect to gain a foothold in competition with bone and muscle. Of course once intelligence becomes firmly established, competition with sheer bone and muscle becomes easy, but the first steps along the road are excessively difficult — so much so that your own case is a rarity among planetary life forms.”
“And so much for the space travel enthusiasts,” said Marlowe. “Ask him, Harry, to what we owe the emergence of intelligence here on the Earth.”
The question was put, and after a time the answer came:
“Probably to the combination of several circumstances, among which I would rate as most important the development about fifty million years ago of an entirely new type of plant: the plant that you call grass. The emergence of this plant caused a drastic reorganization of the whole animal world, owing to the peculiarity that grass can be cropped to ground level, in distinction from all other plants. As the grasslands spread over the Earth those animals that could take advantage of this peculiarity survived and developed. Other animals declined or became extinct. It seems to have been in this major reshuffle that intelligence was able to gain its first footing on your planet.
“There are several very unusual factors that made the decoding of your method of communication a matter of some difficulty,” went on the Cloud. “Particularly I find it most strange that your communication symbols do not bear any really close connexion with the neurological activity in your brains.”
“We’d better say something about that,” remarked Kingsley.
“I bet we had. I didn’t think you’d be able to keep quiet for long, Chris,” Ann Halsey remarked.
Kingsley explained his idea about A.C. and D.C. communication, and asked whether Joe himself operated on an A.C. basis. Joe confirmed that this was so and continued:
“This is not the only quaint feature. Your outstanding oddity is the great similarity of one individual to another. This allows you to use a very crude method of communication. You attach labels to your neurological states — anger, headache, embarrassed, happy, melancholy — these are all labels. If Mr A wishes to tell Mr B that he is suffering from a headache he makes no attempt to describe the neurological disruption in his head. Instead he displays his label. He says:
“ “I have a headache.”
“When Mr B hears this he takes the label “headache” and interprets it in accordance with his own experience. Thus Mr A is able to acquaint Mr B of his indisposition even though neither party may have the slightest idea what a “headache” really consists of. Such a highly singular method of communication is of course only possible between nearly identical individuals.”
“Could I put it this way?’ said Kingsley. “Between two absolutely identical individuals, if that were possible, no communication at all would be necessary because each individual would automatically know the experience of the other. Between nearly identical individuals a quite crude method of communication suffices. Between two widely different individuals a vastly more complicated communication system is required.”
“That is exactly what I was trying to explain. The difficulty I had in decoding your language will now be clear. It is a language suited to nearly similar individuals, whereas you and I are widely separated, much more widely than you probably imagine. Fortunately your neurological states seem rather simple. Once I had managed to understand
