Alice: The Girl From Earth

Chapter Two: Bertha and the Dolphins

Alice entered her father’s office.

The mielophone lay on his writing desk. It looked like a small camera in a leather carrying case with a strap.

Right beside it was the note Alice’s father, Professor Seleznev, the director of the Moscow Space Zoo, had left, as though he had guessed that Alice would naturally look in.

“Alice, do NOT take the mielophone from the house! It’s a one of a kind instrument. Your father.”

Alice sighed. It was a bad thing to disobey your parents. But the interests of science were more important.

The door slowly opened and the Martian Mantis crept into the room. The Mantis was entirely tame and gentle. At first, when Mantises were originally brought from Mars, some people feared them, but the Mantises proved obedient and useful about the home. For example, they could crack walnuts with their hard mandibles, but even more the Mantises loved to juggle various objects, keeping them in the air while they stood on a single foot.

“And I’m soooo frightened!” Alice told the Mantis. “Can’t you nock first before you enter?”

The Mantis lay down, collapsing on himself like a folding chair, and scuttled beneath a table. He would survive. In his considered opinion, Alice was doing wrong.

Alice went to the videophone and called Bertha Maximovna. She found the woman sitting in a chair reading a thick book. Bertha wore a wig from Northern Mermaid Styles, sea green and scaly, scaly green pantaloons and a yellow sweat shirt.

“Greetings, colleague.” Bertha said to Alice. “What’s new?”

“My summer vacation’s started.” Alice said. “How’s Ruslan feeling today?”

“Better. The physician came over from the Black Sea Dolphin Center yesterday and says everything should be okay by this evening. He seems to have swallowed a flounder, whole. By the way, kiddo, have you spoken with your father yet?”

“I spoke with him. But you know his opinion of our problem, Bertha.”

“In other words, we can’t get the mielophone?”

“Papa said that the Black Sea Institute of Dolphin Studies will get the instrument when its turn comes around.”

Alice had considered saying that the instrument in question was at that very moment in her hand, but she knew Bertha too well. Bertha was an enthusiast. She would trumpet that she had gotten her hands on the mielophone throughout Moscow, and even if the results were nothing came of the experiment she would say they were successful.

“Oh well, drop by, snookums.” Bertha said. “Our beauty has been waiting for you eagerly. But not just right now; wait about an hour while they clean the pool.”

Alice could not stand it when Bertha called her ‘Honey,’ ‘Kiddo,’ ‘Sugar Pie,’ or worst of all ‘Snookums.’ Such means of address would have been understandable if she were still in kindergarten, but not for someone who had completed the third grade. But there was no way Bertha could have understood her objections if she had expressed them aloud. Perhaps Bertha would have laughed, and told all her friends and acquaintances: “You know, little Alice is just sooo cute. You know I called her ‘snookums’ and she huffed and puffed….” Or worse.

Alice grabbed the blue carrying case and hid the mielophone inside, the better to avoid unwanted questions from the house robot, and set off for Bertha’s. Alice did not set the best of examples in her exit from the house; for starters she went down on the bannisters; secondly she called a taxi, although the distance was all of two blocks; thirdly, while waiting for the car she devoured two ice cream cones from the automatic dispenser beside the entrance.

The vehicle lurched from around the corner, snorted, evacuated the air bag on which it rode and a lay flat on its belly on the concrete. Alice sat down on the white upholstery and, rather than enter Bertha’s address directly, punched out a long and complicated route designed to take her past the swimming pool at the Institute of Time, drop by the Kuntsevsky Botanical Gardens and see how the experimental rideway tests were going at Filevsky Park. Nina had mentioned them yesterday.

It was now eleven o’clock and the streets of Moscow were almost empty. People had gone to kindergarten or university, or to their places of employment. The only people on the streets were grandmothers and robots with baby carriages.

A long bus with a huge hermetic door had stopped in front of the Martian embassy. The Martian tourists inside the bus had donned their breathing helmets to get ready to go out onto the street. One Martian in a helmet stood on the ground and was waiting for the bus’s airlock to open. The embassy itself resembled a huge ball sunk halfway into the Earth. Inside, beneath the dome, the Martians had their own atmosphere and plant life. When Alice had gone to Mars she too had been forced to walk around in a helmet. Only the Martian Mantises did not seem to care which atmosphere they breathed.

A big wedding party was driving down the street in the opposite direction. The cars were decorated with multi-colored ribbons and moved slowly, rocking on their air cushions. The bride was a in a long white dress and on her head she wore a bridal veil; evidently, the bride was one of whose described on the NewsNet trying to revive good traditions, Alice thought.

There were a lot of people in the city pool, despite the newsreader Nina’s warnings that it was too cold to go swimming. Alice thought she might go swimming herself, but the taxi had already turned toward the bridge leading to the Botanical Gardens. At the Gardens Alice stopped the car and glanced into the kiosk at the entrance. A robot with a crown of dandelions on its head handed her a bouquet of lilacs, and Alice placed them beside her on the seat. One five-petaled blossom Alice torn off and ate. For pleasure.

The car drove along a curving avenue bordered on both sides by a thick forest. The taxi slowed and then stopped completely. A herd of small deer from the Altay mountains, called Marals, came out of the forest and, clicking their hooves on the horn-like plastic surface of the road, darted toward the grove of cedars on the other side.

“Won’t they get into the vineyards?” Alice asked the taxi.

“No.” The car answered. “There’s a barrier there.”

One of the Altay deer suddenly raised its head, sniffed the air, and instantly vanished into the thicket.

“What frightened them?” Alice was disappointed. She had wanted to look at the deer for a while longer.

The taxi did not answer; an answer would have been superfluous. Down the road, bent flat over their handle bars, roared a heard of cyclists. They wore such bright, multi-colored t-shirts that they would have left spots in the eyes of the deer.

After that the taxi drove past newly planted rubber trees similar to aspens. Alice asked the machine to stop a moment at a grove of date palms. The grove was bright and quiet. Only squirrels jumped over the ground, searching for shaggy tree trunks filled with last autumn’s dates. A low barrier wound its way along the edge of the grove, a retractable plastic dome which rose to cover the grove the moment the weather turned bad. Alice sat beneath the palms and imagined herself in Africa; the white squirrels were not squirrels, but marmosets or even monkeys. One of the squirrels ran up to her and stood on its hind legs.

“Don’t beg!” Alice remonstrated with the squirrel. “You are a wild, free animal!”

The little animal understood nothing and rubbed his belly with his front paws.

“Now for Filevsky Park.”

The car gave a rumble of disapproval.

“You have something to say?” Alice was surprised.

“I thought that you had forgotten your business.”

“I’m on vacation.” Alice said. “And since when has it become the business of cars to tell people how to behave?”

“My humblest apologies.” The taxi said. “But, first of all, I did not tell you, I merely reminded you, and secondly, in as far as I can judge an organic you are far from being an adult and therefore, in this case, I am acting in the capacity of teacher, that is, ‘in loco parentis.’ Were you a pre-schooler, I would not have taken you anywhere without the express permission or accompaniment of adults.”

Having exhausted itself with such a long tirade the taxi grew silent and said no a single word from then on.

The car entered the green belt. Some time in the past the area had been covered with utterly boring five story apartment buildings; then the apartment buildings were taken down and in their place seventeen story skyscraper needles were erected, each of them provided not only habitation for some thousands of people but were self-contained cities with stores and factories, offices, repair stations, garages, landing stages for flyers, theaters and swimming pools, and clubs. You could live your whole life without venturing outside the arcologies, although Alice thought that would be very boring.

The arcologies stood amid endless fields surrounded by birch groves, fields ideal for hunting wild mushrooms, the spores for which were brought in every year from the north so that people could collect a hundred baskets of mushrooms every day and on the next day the mushrooms had grown up all over again. The wild mushrooms were the pride of the arcology district but were too much for the local people to pick and consume on their own, so they invited friends and relatives to help pick mushrooms near their own houses and even boasted of the quality and quantity.

After the arcologies the taxi came to Filevsky Park.

In a wide meadow about a hundred curiosity seekers were watching a text of the experimental rideway. A technician in a blue jumpsuit was standing between two silverish bands which twisted and turned to head in which ever direction the technician sent them. A microphone hung on the technician’s chest, and he was explaining to the onlookers how the rideway worked.

“If I should want the rode to take me to that large bush over there, I think the command, to the right. And the rideway turns to the right.”

The rideway shot back to its starting point, throwing the technician onto the grass, The crowd broke into laughter. The rideway jumped forward a short ways and stopped. Alice would have liked to have taken a ride on it but the crowd of people waiting in line was so great it would have taken her half the day before her chance came. Alice decided it was better to wait until such rideways were built in all the parks.

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 antenna out all the way, directed it toward the dolphins. There was a crackling in her ears, and occasional chirping sounds and screeching. They drew nearer when the dolphins drew nearer, and when the dolphins dove or swam to the pool’s other side they were almost completely lost.

So Alice sat there for about five minutes, but nothing came of her experiment. Overhead Bertha’s window opened and the woman stuck her green wigged head out, saying:

“Alice dear, could you come up! They called from Montevideo. Excellent news. And tell the robot to get some more fish out of the freezer.”

“Good-bye.” Alice told the dolphins. “I’ll come by to visit you again.” She held the mielophone carefully so that Bertha did not see it from the window, put it back into its case, said what was necessary to the robot, and headed for the building’s entrance.

When Alice had vanished behind the corner the dolphin they had named Ruslan stuck his turned up snout out the water and said in a low voice to his neighbor in the dolphin language:

“Interesting. What’s going on in Montevideo?”

“I don’t know.” The second dolphin answered. “Pity about the kid; she really was disappointed. Couldn’t we at least have said ‘Hello?’“

“It’s too early.” Ruslan told his companion. “The humans still aren’t smart enough to talk to. There’s too much they don’t understand.”

“Unfortunately, you’re right.” The second dolphin said. “Take those little boys. Really bad upbringing. One of them even threw a stick at me.”

And the dolphins, romping, raced each other around the pool in a circle.