He gave three of the remaining porters, Muzezi, Amburi, and Harawi, shotguns along with a supply of tear-gas canisters.
With Ross, he boosted power on the perimeter fence to almost 200 amps. This was the maximum the thin mesh could handle without melting; they had been obliged to reduce the pulses from four to two per second. But the additional current changed the fence from a deterrent to a lethal barrier. The first animals to hit that fence would be immediately killed, although the likelihood of shorts and a dead fence was considerably increased.
At sunset, Munro made his most difficult decision. He loaded the stubby tripod-mounted RFSDs with half their remaining ammunition. When that was gone, the machines would simply stop firing. From that point on, Munro was counting on Elliot and Amy and their translation.
And Elliot did not look very happy when he came back down the hill.
7.Final Defense
"How LONG UNTIL YOU'RE READY?" MUNRO asked him.
"Couple of hours, maybe more." Elliot asked Ross to help him, and Amy went to get food from Kahega. She seemed very proud of herself, and behaved like an important person in the group.
Ross said, "Did it work?"
"We'll know in a minute," Elliot said. His first plan was to run the only kind of internal check on Amy that he could, by verifying repetitions of sounds. If she had consistently translated sounds in the same way, they would have a reason for confidence.
But it was painstaking work. They had only the half-inch VTR and the small pocket tape recorder; there were no connecting cables. They called for silence from the others in the camp and proceeded to run the checks, taping, retaping, listening to the whispering sounds.
At once they found that their ears simply weren't capable of discriminating the sounds - everything sounded the same. Then Ross had an idea.
"These sounds taped," she said, "as electrical signals."
"Yes . .
"Well, the linkup transmitter has a 256K memory."
"But we can't link up to the Houston computer."
"I don't mean that," Ross said. She explained that the satellite linkup was made by having the 256K computer on-site match an internally generated signal - like a video test pattern - to a transmitted signal from Houston. That was how they locked on. The machine was built that way, but they could use the matching program for other purposes.
"You mean we can use it to compare these sounds?" Elliot said.
They could, but it was incredibly slow. They had to transfer the taped sounds to the computer memory, and rerecord it in the VTR, on another portion of the tape bandwidth. Then they had to input that signal into the computer memory, and run a second comparison tape on the VTR. Elliot found that he was standing by, watching Ross shuffle tape cartridges and mini floppy discs. Every half hour, Munro would wander over to ask how it was coming; Ross became increasingly snappish and irritable. "We're going as fast as we can," she said.
It was now eight o'clock.
But the first results were encouraging: Amy was indeed consistent in her translations. By nine o'clock they had quantified matching on almost a dozen words:
FOOD .9213 .112
EAT .8844 .334
WATER .9978 .004
DRINK .7743 .334
{AFFIRMATION} YES .6654 .441
{NEGATION} NO .8883 .220
COME .5459 .440
GO .5378 .404
SOUND COMPLEX: ?AWAY .5444 .363
SOUND COMPLEX: ?HERE .6344 .344
SOUND COMPLEX: ?ANGER
?BAD .4232 .477
Ross stepped away from the computer. "All yours," she said to Elliot.
Munro paced across the compound. This was the worst time. Everyone waiting, on edge, nerves shot. He would have joked with Kahega and the other porters, but Ross and
-Elliot needed silence for their work. He glanced at Kahega. Kahega pointed to the sky and rubbed his fingers together. Munro nodded.
He had felt it too, the heavy dampness in the air, the almost palpable feeling of electrical charge. Rain was coming.
That was all they needed, he thought. During the afternoon, there had been more booming and distant explosions, which
he had thought were far-off lightning storms. But the sound was not right; these were sharp, single reports, more like a sonic boom than anything else. Munro had heard them before, and he had an idea about what they meant.
He glanced up at the dark cone of Mukenko, and the faint glow of the Devil's Eye. He looked at the crossed green laser beams overhead. And he noticed one of the beams was moving where it struck foliage in the trees above.
At first he thought it was an illusion, that the leaf was moving and not the beam. But after a moment he was sure: the beam itself was quivering, shifting up and down in the night air.
Munro knew this was an ominous development, but it would have to wait until later; at the moment, there were more pressing concerns. He looked across the compound at Elliot and Ross bent over their equipment, talking quietly and in general behaving as if they had all the time in the world.
Elliot actually was going as fast as he could. He had eleven reliable vocabulary words recorded on tape. His problem now was to compose an unequivocal message. This was not as easy as it first appeared.
For one thing, the gorilla language was not a pure verbal language. The gorillas used sign and sound combinations to convey information. This raised a classic problem in language structure - how was the information actually conveyed? (L. S. Verinski once said that if alien visitors watched Italians speaking they would conclude that Italian was basically a gestural sign language, with sounds added for emphasis only.) Elliot needed a simple message that did not depend on accompanying hand signs.
But he had no idea of gorilla syntax, which could critically alter meaning in most circumstances - the difference between "me beat" and "beat me." And even a short message could be ambiguous in another language. In English, "Look out!" generally meant the opposite of its literal meaning.