The Stardroppers by John Brunner Page B

could be explained in traditional terms.”
    A lean, fiftyish man on the other side of Angel took a pipe from his mouth and frowned. “But is Berghaus what you’d call an enthusiast?” he said. “I gather he’s not.”
    “He told me—” Dan said, and broke off, because instantly all the eyes of the group were on him. Well, it was a fast way of staking his claim in the conversation. “He told me he thought that if the signals are of alien origin they’ll probably be intrinsically incomprehensible.”
    “You know Berghaus?” Angel said in a wondering voice.
    “Well, I’ve met him and talked about this to him.”
    “And that louse Wally Watson didn’t bother to mention it to us?”
    “I don’t think I told him,” Dan said. He felt the mood of the group shift toward awe:
here’s a man who knows Berghaus and is modest about it!
All the dogmatism went out of Jerry. He spoke in a changed voice.
    “Well—uh—I’m Jerry Bartlett, and this is Angel Allen. And Leon Patrick,” the man with the pipe offered his hand for a foursquare shake. “And …”
    The other two in the group muttered names Dan barely heard; they both seemed to be listeners, not talkers. Angel kept her eyes on his face.
    “But he must take his theory seriously,” she insisted.
    “I assume he does. But he certainly doesn’t pin as much faith to it as most people seem to.”
    “So much for your ‘self-identifying’ bit,” Jerry said to Angel.
    “Not at all.” She rounded on him sharply. “Can you tell me how it feels to ride a bicycle?”
    “Don’t be irrelevant. You sit astride it, you put one foot—”
    “I didn’t ask you to explain the mechanics of it. I said tell me how it feels. You can’t verbalize the balancing sensation you experience. But you can learn it when it happen to you. Human beings
can
absorb nonverbal knowledge. We just aren’t very good at it.”
    “You’re not falling for this supernatural-wisdom bit, are you?” Jerry’s bluster was beginning to return.
    “If you’ve started to resort to loaded words like ‘supernatural,’ it seems to me you’re afraid of being convinced. In which case, what the hell are you doing here?”
    “I’m a physicist. Stardropper signals are a phenomenon in my province, obviously. What annoys me is people like you telling me I ought to be humble—when did
I
claim to know more than Berghaus?”
    Angel sighed. “What gives you the impression that
I
did? All I’m saying is that he proposed his theory because the signals convey a hint of their own nature, which I’ve experienced myself. If Berghaus does have reservations, that’s what I’ve always been taught to regard as a proper scientific attitude. Now let’s hear your reasons for contesting
that
!”
    Before Jerry could utter his counterblast, plainly boiling at the tip of his tongue, they were interrupted by Watson’s voice calling them to take their places for the demonstration, and they joined a slow shuffling procession into the other half of the room. Dan hoped the argument might resume later. There was something reassuring about the fact that some people at least were approaching the subject from this highly critical standpoint, instead of simply swallowing Berghaus’s theory whole in the manner displayed by the members of the Carlton’s commune.
    At Angel’s invitation, he took a place in the front rowbetween her and the pipe-smoking Leon Patrick. On the dais stood a huge stardropper on a rubber-tired trolley, attended by Watson and a roly-poly man in shiny-seated slacks and a green sweater; while Watson made delicate adjustments to its controls, the latter was listening intently through earphones, gesturing vigorously.
    The adjustments satisfactorily completed and the audience settled down, Watson called the meeting to order and read a set of formal minutes, which were largely concerned with routine matters such as raising the membership fee and organizing a charter flight for members of the club to