Astounding Science Fiction (British edition) — page 53: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

SHARE OUR WORLD “Good _ idea,” reflected Chang. “Just a minute, though, while I finish. Now the nibblies that I’ve seen free have used their noses primarily for one purpose, as far as I can see: com- munication. Assuming this—how do they do it? By sound? That could be it, direct conduction of sound from one to the other, with too low volume to be audible through the air; but they don’t have any sound-producing ap- paratus that we can spot. By simply wiggling their noses in code? I like the idea, but I think the messages they transmit are too complex for such a limited kind of language to handle.” “O.K.,” said Hilda, “I suppose so. Your objections to those methods are pretty ...er... speculative, though, and you don’t have anything else to offer instead of them.” “Sure,” said Chang, trying to re- strain her triumph. “They communi- cate by electric current.” Hilda did not look thunderstruck. She sprawled down in her chair, feet apart, and muttered, ‘“‘Now, do I be- lieve that? They sure do use their noses. They react to current, maybe they can sense it. But, how could they ever produce it?” “I don’t think that’s so incredible. There’s nothing like it on Procyon I, but on Earth there are large animals that can give other organisms a pretty large shock, at will.” “Static electricity is one thing, alter- nating current is another.” “Yes, but Hilda, the nibbly can make a resonant circuit! He’s got a variable condenser!” “This begins to sound worth in- vestigating.” Hilda got up and began pacing the floor. Chang went on excitedly. “Think of that poor nibbly in my lab! He lets himself be caught, and comes aboard, with no idea what he’ll find, just hop- ing to find something out about us and Si possibly get back to the rest to tell them. And as soon as he’s aboard the ship—the ground starts trying to talk to him! Can you imagine what it’d be like? Quite likely he’s never sensed electric current before except from another nibbly, and now it’s coming from the ground all around him. Very faint, of course, but it’s everywhere, just from the miscellaneous unshielded circuits around my lab. Whispers. No wonder he wasn’t interested in the pictures I showed him. Would you be? ‘And then we present him with the contact. He probably wonders why, if we want to talk to him, we don’t just put our noses out. Remember he’s not civilized, he’d be just as naive as human savages were. Nibblicentric. Anyhow, he decides at least we’re going to talk with him. He’s relieved; we're friends, not wolves. And then, not once but twice, we yell in his ear so loud it knocks him out. Still he keeps trying. He tries again and again to strike up a conversation with that contact, but all it does is say ‘Ahh’ at him, first a bass ‘Ahh,’ then on up to soprano. Finally he gets discour- aged and makes up his mind he just won't bother listening any more.” “Very good, very good, very good,” said Hilda, running her hands through her shaggy brown hair. “‘Even better than that, if it’s true. Now how can we get him to listen to us again?” “Whenever we offered him some- thing new in the way of AC, he was interested. What can we try next? No new frequency range, I suppose.” “Might be more to his taste if we didn’t use a constant-voltage source; use a circuit that'll let our voltage drop off when he starts admitting current.” “More to his taste!’ Chang jumped to her feet. ““That’s the idea. If we’re going to communicate with him, we'll want to make our circuit as much conniicloooks.c© in