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On a neighboring field a group of Junior Astronauts from the Voluntary Society for the Support of Astronautics, were in training. The teaching rocket’s airlock was open and the kids were going down to the grass by a line. No doubt they were imagining that the dinoducks from Jupiter had eaten their gangway. Alice went back to the taxi. It was time to go to Bertha’s.
For some time the car drove beneath the monorail tube, the turned toward the bank of the Moscow river and then crossed the old Borodinsky Bridge and onto Smolensk Avenue. The sun had hidden itself behind the clouds; evidently the meteorologists had erred again even in the twenty-first century their auguries required more than a few grains of salt. Under the clouds hung the aerial bicycle traffic controller. The airbike was blue, and the policeman was dressed in blue, and the clouds were bluish as well. Alice immediately thought of the fairy tale of how the traffic cop was the son of the clouds, and if it became hot he would turn to rain.
Then she was in the green sidestreets of the Arbat Alice had come nearly all the way home. She stopped the car at a taxi stand covered with tiles of many different colors, gathered up the bouquet of lilacs, made certain that the mielophone was in the same case it had been in when she took it from home, and went to meet Bertha Maximovna.
“What took you so long?” Bertha was surprised.
“You told me to wait an hour before coming.”
“Oh yes, I quite forgot. I thought they were going to call me from Montevideo. You know, they say, they’re going to make contact. Did you see the last issue of our magazine? Oh, thank you for the flowers.”
Bertha was somewhat mad. So Alice thought, but, certainly, she did not say that to anyone aloud, and in front of the other kids she spoke proudly of her friendship with the vice- president of the Friends of the Dolphins society. Bertha was already about fifty years old, although she was still young and wore ‘Mermaid’ or ‘Hawaiian Breeze’ wigs. When she’d been younger she was the Moscow champion in underwater swimming, and then had joined the Friends of the Dolphins and eventually became their vice-president. The central courtyard of her apartment building housed an enormous Dolphin pool and she spent her time trying to find a common language with them. Alice’s father said that Bertha would have been better off learning to speak to people, and that if she did establish an exchange of ideas with the dolphins it would only because they both lacked a human language. Papa, certainly, was joking, but to be totally honest he and Bertha were scientific opponents. Papa was a biologist and director of the Moscow Space Zoo, and he did not believe that dolphins were the intellectual equals of people. But Alice really did want to believe it, and because of that she and her father even had some real scientific arguments.
“Know what, honey?” Bertha said, flipping a green curl to her shoulder with a sharp movement. “You go to the dolphins, and I’ll wait here a while. Perhaps I’ll get that call from Montevideo after all.”
“Okay.” Alice said. This was something she had to do alone anyway. She wanted to try out the mielophone without Bertha. Then she would return it to its proper place, and her father would never learn that she had tried it out on the dolphins.
Papa had brought the mielophone home from the Zoo the night before, telling her it was experimental. It could read thoughts. But only if the thoughts were expressed in words. Papa had been given the instrument to test on the monkeys, but this day he had gone not to his work at the zoo but to a scientific conference and he had left the apparatus at home.
All last evening Alice and her father had tried the apparatus out on each other, and Alice had listened to her own thoughts. It was a very strange thing to hear your own thoughts aloud. They did not sound quite the same when you heard them as they did in your mind. Alice had held the little grey box in her hands, placed the small earphone in one ear and a thin, high pitched voice spoke very quickly:
“It can’t be that these are my thoughts… Hey, I’m listening to myself think… It’s my voice! Is that my voice? I was thinking about my voice and right away I get to hear it….”
Alice and her father had tried it out on the house robot. The house robot’s thoughts were short and to the point, unlike Alice’s. The house robot was thinking it must clean the heating elements of the stove, shine its collection of old medals and honors (now its humans had learned its terrible secret!) And recharge its batteries on the sly so later on that night it would be able to read their paper copy of The Three Musketeers in its cubical with real light and its own eyes rather than just download the text to its memory….
Alice made her way to the enormous dolphin pool. Both sea mammals, having recognized her, raced each other over to the concrete edge. They raised masses of foam to rise half way out of the water on their tails to show Alice how happy they were to see her.
“Hold on.” Alice said. “I don’t have anything tasty for you today. Bertha told me not to feed you anything because Ruslan has an upset stomach. Isn’t that right?”
One of the dolphins, the one they called Ruslan, turned over on its back to show Alice that there was nothing wrong with his stomach, but this stirred no pity in Alice.
“Don’t swim away.” Alice said. “I want to listen and find out if you think. See, I brought the mielophone. You’ve never seen anything like this before. It reads thoughts. The doctors thought it up, as a way to help people who are psychologically sick by making a better diagnosis. Papa told me about it. Understand?”
But the dolphins said nothing at all. They dove and raced each other around the pool in circles. Alice pulled the apparatus from the case, inserted the small earphone into her ear, and pressed the black RECEIVE button. At first she could not hear a thing, but when Alice twisted the hand control some more she could suddenly hear the thoughts of one of the dolphins very clearly.
“Look at what she’s doing. That has to be some sort of experiment.”
Alice almost shouted “Hurray!” Perhaps she should call Bertha? No, it had to be tested more.
One of the dolphins swam a little closer. He was thinking: “…looks just like a little girl. But what is she doing with that thing?”
“I’m reading your thoughts.” Alice told the dolphin in a whisper. “Do you understand, silly?”
The dolphin turned away and dove, but his thoughts remained clear and audible.
“Maybe we should talk with her?” The dolphin said. “Maybe she’s just putting on airs…”
Interrupting the first thought came a second, someone else, certainly the second dolphin, thinking: “I know who she is; she’s from the apartment building across the street. She’s called Alice.”
Brilliant! Alice thought. But how could he have learned that I’m from the building across the street?
And right at that moment Alice heard the same voice speak very loudly that she had heard in the mielophone.
“Alice-barberries, you’re going to break the machine. You don’t fool us!” The voice came unexpectedly not from the pool but from behind her. Alice got up and turned.
Two small boys about six or seven years old were standing on the other side of the low concrete barrier; they stuck their tongues out and made stupid faces at her.
“You get out of here!” Alice was very angry and shouted. “You’re interfering with my experiment!”
“So we heard, just you wait!” The boys said.
But Alice made several steps in their direction and the boys vanished in a trice.
Alice, beaming, sat back down on the edge of the pool. The experiment was a failure. It was just as well she had not called Bertha and told her of her discovery. Oh well, there was still time. She could continue.
Alice turned on the mielophone again and, pulling the ante