Seven-Tenths Read Online Free PDF Page A

ear, the computer of the memory. A laconic finger on a keyboard summons up data, an image. Less need, less time now for Edward Lear’s scrupulous parrots or Audubon’s American birds, for the hundreds of sketches made aboard the Challenger or for anatomical drawings as fine as Jan van Rymsdyk’s of the human uterus. Nor is there much call for writing that describes specimens as Philip Gosse described Cleodora , a tiny snail known as the sea butterfly, which floats in tropical oceans. ‘A creature of extreme delicacy and beauty … The hinder part is globular and pellucid, and in the dark vividly luminous, presenting a singularly striking appearance as it shines through its perfectly transparent lantern.’ *
    Roger agrees that until well after World War II sonar operators and scientists had spent much of their time with headphones on, listening to the seabed and to anything else whose noises fell within humanlyaudible wavelengths. They gave their own nicknames to certain familiar sounds, especially those which resisted all identification. One of these became known as the ‘North Atlantic Boing’.
    ‘Now and again something uncanny happens which makes you wonder about what’s down there. We’ve sometimes picked up signals which aren’t GLORIA’s own echoes but imitations . The electronic analysis is quite clear. They’re definitely some kind of deliberate response. But what could possibly imitate a sound as complicated as a correlation signal? There are really only two possibilities: either a submarine or whatever creature produced the “North Atlantic Boing” while flirting with sonar operators. Sometimes even our other sonars – the “fish”, for example – provoke an almost angry response. We’ve had the single bleep of the 10 kilohertz being answered by a double bleep, or a triple, even a quadruple, as if something’s deliberately mocking it.
    ‘You’ve got to remember that sound travels well in water and we’re making a godawful noise down there. We’re sending out four different signals powerful enough to bounce off the seabed 30 kilometres away, two of them capable of penetrating hundreds of metres into it. That’s a huge amount of sonic energy and we must be absolutely deafening, maybe even lethal, to some animal species. Certainly a whale would find us audible for hundreds of miles, perhaps a thousand.
    ‘So who or what is the author of the “North Atlantic Boing”? What creature are we enraging or provoking to mimic us? I presume cetaceans. We haven’t the first clue what goes on in a whale’s mind. We don’t even know what’s in a parrot’s mind.’ *
    At this point a very sober, older scientist breaks gently in to refute Roger’s account of the ‘Boing’. He has the air of someone who has long ago signed the Official Secrets Act and has never regretted it. It makes his explanation oddly dark, vague with the pregnant ellipsis of someone in the know who cannot tell all he knows. It comes as a reminder that the military has its own interests in oceanography and a good deal of knowledge and technology overlap. There was never any such thing, he says, as the ‘North Atlantic Boing’. The fact is, it was only ever audible on one particular occasion off one particular part of the east coast of the United States. Significantly close, in fact, to one of the major naval bases. What is more, GLORIA uses what used to be a naval signal on the same carrier frequency. Quite possibly it was a submarine communicating with an underwater beacon.
    As for Roger’s cetacean theory, there are a good few holes in that, too. All cetaceans are far-ranging and one would expect this ‘Boing’ to have cropped up in widely separated areas. Second, GLORIA’s 6.5 kilohertz is in the 5 to 10 kilometre range, and why would any cetacean be interested in anything at that distance? As for the allegedly angry responses to the ‘fish’, Roger will – he is certain – recall a good deal of active porpoise