Дэймон Найт: Orbit 11

“Captain . . .”

After a moment had passed, Daw said, “Yes?”

“Captain, can these men hear us?”

“Of course.”

“Would you send them away? Just for a minute?”

“They could still hear us, if we stay on general band. If you have something private you wish to say, switch to my own band.”

He watched as she fumbled with the controls cm the forearm of her suit. One of the crewmen glided skillfully toward her to help, but she waved him away. Her voice came again. “Have I got you, Captain?”

“Yes.”

“I just wanted to tell you that I’m sorry I said what I did. You’ve been a friend to my husband and me, I know. I’m very tired.”

Daw said, “I understand.”

“Captain, I’ve been thinking. Will you mind if I ask some questions? I realize it may be silly, but if I don’t at least try—”

“Certainly.”

“That cyberneticist—Lieutenant Polk. You asked him to find out—” She hesitated. Then, “I’m sorry, I can’t think of the words.”

“I asked him to find out for me what the numbers in the operating registers of this ship’s computer were. To put it another way, I asked him to find out the answer—in raw form at least—of the last computation they performed.”

“Is that possible? I would think their numbers would be all different—like Roman numbers or something, or worse. I asked him about it—a few hours ago when you went back to Gladiator—and he explained to me that whatever he found would just be ones and zeros—”

“Binary notation,” Daw said.

“Yes, binary notation, because it isn’t really numbers, you can’t have real numbers inside a machine because they’re not physical, but just things turned on or off; but I don’t see what good knowing it—just one, one, one, zero, zero, zero, like that—will do you if you don’t know how they’d be used when they came out of the machine. Captain, I know you must think I don’t know what I’m talking about, but I did have to take some mathematics . . . even if I wasn’t very good at it.” The transmission ended in a whisper of despair.

“I know you’re worried about your husband,” Daw said. “We’re looking for him, as you know. I’ve got parties out. I shouldn’t have included him among the searchers— that was a mistake, and I’m—”

“No!” Helen Youngmeadow jerked at the cable she was holding, swinging herself toward him until their faceplates touched and he could hear her voice, conducted through the metal, like an echo to the sound in his earphones. “You should have sent him. That’s just it. At first, when we were waiting and waiting and the others came back I talked to them and listened to them, and, my God, they didn’t know anything, they hadn’t seen anything, and I thought just wait, just wait, Mr. Captain Daw, my man will show you what an empathist can do! Then when he didn’t come I started to blame you, but that isn’t right. I’m an empathist, my profession is supposed to be understanding cultures—every culture, when most people don’t even comprehend their own. Now you’ve got these men staying with me to watch out for me—to watch out for me!—and do you know what they are? I asked them, and one is a plastics engineer and the other’s a pharmacist’s mate.”

“They’re good men,” Daw said. “That’s why I sent them with you, not because I thought they could assist you professionally.”

“Well, you were wrong,” the girl said in a much calmer voice. “We found a dingus of some sort floating loose in that last module we were in, and your plastics engineer looked at it for a while and then told us what he thought it was and how it had been made: he said they had used a four-part mold, and showed me where they had squirted in the melted stuff. So he understands his part of them, you see, but I don’t understand mine. Now you’re implying that you understand their math, or at least something about it. Can’t you explain it to me?”

“Certainly,” Daw said, “if you’re interested. I’m afraid, though, that I don’t see that it has any immediate bearing on locating your husband.”

“A computer will answer anyone, won’t it? I mean normally.”

“Unless some sort of privacy provision has been made in the program.”

“But there isn’t much chance they’d do that on a ship like this; you said when we opened the hatch to get in that no one worried about burglars in space, so I doubt if they’d be worried about snoopers aboard their own ship either. And if their computer is like Gladiator, meant to run everything, it will know where my husband is—all we have to do is learn how to turn it on and ask it.”

“I see what you mean,” Daw told her, “but I’m afraid that’s going to be a good deal more complicated than what I’ve got Polk trying to do.”

“But it’s the first step. Show me.”

Moved by some democratic impulse he did not bother to analyze, Daw switched back to the general communication band before spreading one of file charts—without gravity or air currents it hung like smoke in the emptiness—to illustrate what he was about to say; then for the benefit of the crewmen he explained: “This is one of their star charts—we found it in the first module we entered. In a rough way you could consider it a map of this part of the galaxy, as seen from above.”

The girl said: “I don’t understand how you can talk about seeing a galaxy from above or from below, except by convention—or how you know those dots on the chart are stars at all without being able to read the language. And if they are stars, how do you know they represent the region we’re in? Or is that just a guess?” Her voice was as controlled as it might have been during a dinner-table discussion on board Gladiator, but Daw sensed tension that held her at the edge of hysteria.

“To begin with,” he said, “the galaxy’s not a shapeless cloud of stars—it is disk-shaped, and it seems pretty obvious that anyone mapping any sizable portion of it would choose to look at things from one face or the other. Which face is chosen is strictly a matter of convention, but there are only two choices. And we’re pretty certain these things are star charts, because Gladiator measured the positions of the dots and ran a regression analysis between them and the known positions of the stars. The agreement was so good that we can feel pretty sure of the identities of most of the dots. What’s more, if you’ll look at the chart closely you’ll see that our friends have used three sizes of dots.”

Daw paused and one of the crewmen asked, “Magnitude, Captain?”

“That’s what we thought at first, but actually the three sizes seem to symbolize the principal wavelengths radiated—small dots for the blue end of the spectrum, medium for yellow stars like Sol, and large for the red giants and the dark stars.”

Helen Youngmeadow said, “I don’t see how that can help you read the numbers.”

“Well, you’ll notice faint lines running from star to star, with symbols printed along them; it seems reasonable to assume that these are distances, and of course we know the actual distances.”

“But you don’t know what sort of squiggle they use for each number, or what units the distances are given in.”

“Worse than that,” Daw admitted, “we don’t—or at least we didn’t—know whether they ran their figures from left to right or from right to left—or whether they were using positional notation at all. And of course we didn’t know what base they were using, either. Or which symbol took the place of our decimal point.”

“But you were able to find all that out, just from the chart?”

“Yes. The base was fairly easy. You probably remember from your own math that the number of numerals a system needs is equal to the number of the base. Our decimal notation, for example, uses ten—zero through nine. If you’ll look at these numbers you’ll see that a total of thirteen symbols are used—”