with modern Russian thought through the courtesy of _Izvestia_,_Pravda_, and _Krokodil_, and, finally, spending time in the UnitedNations building and near the Russian embassy in order to be sure that hecould understand the mental processes involved.
Now, science has a language of its own. Or, rather, a multiplicity oflanguages, each derived partly from the native language of the variousscientific groups and partly of borrowings from other languages. In thephysical sciences especially, the language of mathematics is a furtheraddition.
More than that, the practice of the scientific method automaticallyinduces a thought pattern that is different from the type of thoughtpattern that occurs in the mind of a person who is not scientificallyoriented.
Lenny's mind was a long way from being scientifically oriented. Worse, hewas a bigot. He not only didn't know why the light in his room went onwhen he flipped the switch, he didn't _want_ to know. To him, science wasjust so much flummery, and he didn't want his brain cluttered up with it.
Facts mean nothing to a bigot. He has already made up his mind, and hedoesn't intend to have his solid convictions disturbed by anything sounimportant as a contradictory fact. Lenny was of the opinion that allmathematics was arcane gobbledygook, and his precise knowledge of themathematical odds in poker and dice games didn't abate that opinion onewhit. Obviously, a mind like that is utterly incapable of understanding aprojected thought of scientific content; such a thought bounces off theimpregnable mind shield that the bigot has set up around his little areaof bigotry.
Colonel Spaulding had been aware of these circumstances since theinception of the Operation Mapcase. Even though he, himself, had neverexperienced telepathy more than half a dozen times in his life, he hadmade a study of the subject and was pretty well aware of its limitations.The colonel might have dismissed--as most men do--his own fleetingexperiences as "coincidence" or "imagination" if it had not been for thethings he had seen and felt in Africa during World War II. He had onlybeen a captain then, on detached duty with British Intelligence, undercrusty old Colonel Sir Cecil Haversham, who didn't believe a word of "allthat mystic nonsense." Colonel Haversham had made the mistake ofalienating one of the most powerful of the local witch doctors.
The British Government had hushed it all up afterwards, of course, butSpaulding still shuddered when he thought of the broken-spirited,shrunken caricature of his old self that Colonel Haversham had becomeafter he told the witch doctor where to get off.
Spaulding had known that there were weaknesses in the telepathiccommunication linkage that was the mainspring of Operation Mapcase, but hehad thought that they could be overcome by the strengths of the system.Lenny had no blockage whatever against receiving visual patterns anddesigns. He could reproduce an electronic wiring diagram perfectlybecause, to him, it was not a grouping of scientific symbols, but a designof lines, angles, and curves.
At first, it is true, he had had a tendency to change them here and there,to make the design balance better, to make it more aestheticallysatisfying to his artistic eye, but that tendency had been easilyovercome, and Colonel Spaulding was quite certain that that wasn't whatwas wrong now.
Still--
"Lenny," he said carefully, "are you sure you didn't jigger up thosedrawings to make 'em look prettier?"
Lenny Poe gave the colonel a look of disgust. "Positive. Rafe checked 'emover every inch of the way as I was drawing them, and he rechecked againlast night--or this morning--on those photostats Davenport gave us. That'swhen he said there was something wrong with the translations.
"But he couldn't make it clear just what was wrong, eh?"
Lenny shrugged. "How anybody could make any sense out of that gobbledegookis beyond me."
The colonel blew out a cloud of cigar smoke and looked thoughtfully at theceiling. As long as the diagrams were just designs on paper, Lenny Poecould pick them up fine. Which meant that everything was jim-dandy as longas the wiring diagrams were labeled in the Cyrillic alphabet. The labelswere just more squiggles to be copied as a part of the design.
But if the labels were in English, Lenny's mind would try to "make sense"out of them, and since scientific concepts did _not_ "make sense" to him,the labels came out as pure nonsense. In one of his drawings, a lead wirehad been labeled "simply ground to powder," and if the original drawinghadn't been handy to check with, it might have taken quite a bit ofthought to realize that what was meant was "to power supply ground."Another time, a GE 2N 188A transistor had come out labeled GEZNISSA. Therewere others--much worse.
Russian characters, on the other hand, didn't have to make any sense toLenny, so his mind didn't try to force them into a preconceived mold.
* * * * *
Lenny unzipped the leather portfolio he had brought with him--aspecially-made carrier that looked somewhat like an oversized brief case.
"Maybe these'll help," he said.
"We managed to get two good sketches of the gadget--at least, as much ofit as that Russian lady scientist has put together so far. I kind of likethe rather abstract effect you get from all those wires snaking in andaround, with that green glass tube in the center. Pretty, isn't it?"
"Very," said the colonel without conviction. "I wonder if it will helpDavenport any?" He looked at the pictures for several seconds more, then,suddenly, his eyes narrowed. "Lenny--this piece of green glass--thething's shaped like the letter Q."
"Yeah, sort of. Why?"
"You said it was a tube, but you didn't make it look hollow when you drewit."
"It isn't; it's solid. Does a tube have to be hollow? Yeah, I guess itdoes, doesn't it? Well, then, it isn't a tube."
Colonel Spaulding picked up the phone and dialed a number.
"Colonel Spaulding here," he said after a moment. "Let me speak to Dr.Davenport." And, after a wait: "This is Colonel Spaulding, doctor. I thinkwe may have something for you."
"Good morning, colonel. I'm glad to hear that. What is it?"
"The Q-shaped gadget--the one that you said was supposed to be paintedemerald green. Are you _sure_ that's the right translation of theRussian?"
"Well ... uh--" Davenport hesitated. "I can't be sure on my own say-so, ofcourse. _I_ don't understand Russian. But I assure you that Mr. Berenskyis perfectly reliable."
"Oh, I have no doubt of that," Colonel Spaulding said easily. "But, tellme, does Mr. Berensky know how to read a circuit diagram?"
"He does," Davenport said, somewhat testily. "Of course, he wasn't shownthe diagram itself. We had the Russian labels copied, and he translatedfrom a list."
"I had a sneaking suspicion that was it," said Spaulding. "Tell me,doctor, what does L-E-A-D spell?"
"Lead," said the doctor promptly, pronouncing it _leed_. Then, after apause, he said: "Or lead," this time pronouncing it _led_. "It woulddepend on the context."
"Suppose it was on a circuit diagram," the colonel prompted.
"Then it would probably be _leed_. What's all this leading up to,colonel?"
"Bear with me. Suppose you had a cable coming from a storage battery, andyou wanted to make sure that the cable was reasonably resistant tocorrosion, so you order it made out of the metal, lead. It would be a _ledleed_, wouldn't it?"
"Um-m-m ... I suppose so."
"You might get pretty confused if you didn't have a circuit diagram infront of you to tell you what the label was talking about, mightn't you?"
"I see what you mean," the scientist said slowly. "But we can't show thosecircuit diagrams to Berensky. The Secretary of Defense himself hasclassified them as Class Triple-A Ultra-Hyper Top Secret. That puts themjust below the Burn-The-Contents-Before-Reading class, and Berenskydoesn't have that kind of clearance."
"Then get somebody else," Colonel Spaulding said tiredly. "All you need isa man who can understand technical Russian and has a top-level secrecyclearance. If we haven't got at least one man in these United States withsuch simple qualifications as those, them we might as well give thecountry over to the Reds or back to the Redskins, sinc
e our culture isirreprievably doomed." And he lowered the phone gently to its cradle.
"There's no such word as 'irreprievably'," Lenny pointed out.
"There is now," said Colonel Spaulding.
* * * * *
Raphael Poe moseyed through the streets of Moscow in an apparently aimlessmanner. The expression on his face was that of a reasonably happy moron.
His aimless manner was only apparent. Actually, he was heading toward theLenin Soviet People's Higher Research
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