“Could you angle one of the vision sets upward so we could get a look at it?”
“We’ll try.” Lackland immediately put through a call on the station telephone for one of the biologists.
“Lance, it looks as though Barlennan has run into a flying animal of some sort. We’re trying to arrange a look at it. Want to come down to the screen room to tell us what we’re looking at?”
“I’ll be right with you.” The biologist’s voice faded toward the end of the sentence; he was evidently already on his way out of the room. He arrived before the sailors had the vision set propped up, but dropped into a chair without asking questions. Barlennan was speaking again.
“It’s passing back and forth over the ship, sometimes in straight lines and sometimes in circles. Whenever it turns it tips, but nothing else about it changes. It seems to have a little body where the two sticks meet. ” He went on with his description, but the object was evidently too far outside his normal experience for him to find adequate similes in a strange language.
“If it does come into view, be prepared to squint,” the voice of one of the technicians cut in. “I’m covering that screen with a high-speed camera, and will have to jump the brightness a good deal in order to get a decent exposure.”
“. there are smaller sticks set across the long one, and what looks like a very thin sail stretched between them. It’s swinging back toward us again, very low now — I think it may come in front of your eye this time….”
The watchers stiffened, and the hand of the photographer tightened on a double-pole switch whose closing would activate his camera and step up the gain on the screen. Ready as he was, the object.was well into the field before he reacted, and everyone in the room got a good glimpse before the suddenly bright light made their eyes close involuntarily. They all saw enough.
No one spoke while the cameraman energized the develop-ing-frequency generator, rewound his film through its poles, swung the mounted camera toward the blank wall of the room, and snapped over the projection switch. Everyone had thoughts enough to occupy him for the fifteen seconds the operation required.
The projection was slowed down by a factor of fifty, and everyone could look as long as he pleased. There was no reason for surprise that Barlennan had been unable to describe the thing; he had never dreamed that such a thing as flying was possible until after his meeting with Lackland a few months before, and had no words in his own language for anything connected with the art. Among the few English words of that group he had learned, “fuselage” and “wing” and “empennage” were not included.