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Bush back on _Victoria_ had constructed for him.
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Then, he picked up some dried seaweed "plywood" boards, sawed them into
shape, and assembled them into a box. Using the hand-awl and circular file
tools on his Swiss Army Mech-All, he cut three holes into the top, into which
the smaller end of the conical whistles fit tightly. The three tubes now stood
upright out of the box, one short, one medium and one tall.
"It's an organ!" said Deirdre, fascinated.
"Not yet," replied David. "It needs a source of wind for the wind
chest, and they don't have electrically powered rotary blowers here on Zulu,
so we'll improvise a bellows instead." He reached back into his chestpack and
pulled out a sheet of all-purpose tough plastic. "This stuff is flexible and
impervious to air. I imagine coelashark skin would work even better."
Deirdre watched, as curious as the aliens, as David skillfully cut,
shaped, and folded the pieces of plastic and glued them between two triangular
pieces of seaweed board, one with a hole in it. He closed the hole in the top
board with an intake valve flap made of thicker plastic, and fit the exit
nozzle of the bellows tightly into a hole in the side of the wind chest below
the three pipes.
First making sure the sliding valves under the three pipes were closed,
he separated the two boards of the bellows on their hinge. The air rushed in
through the large intake hole and the flap valve closed to his satisfaction.
He pressed gently on the handles and was relieved when he felt back pressure,
indicating that the bellows, wind chest, and valves were all air tight.
Mentally crossing his fingers, he opened all three sliding valves under
the pipes, and pressed down hard on the bellows. Deirdre winced at the discord
that sounded from the three pipes, while the two aliens moved back sharply on
their carpets.
"Close, but so wrong! I was trying for a C major chord. I should have
done them one at a time!"
Although the aliens had been surprised, they immediately returned,
bending over the ugly contrivance. Silver-Rim's tentacles reached out, then
stopped.
"You may touch it," said David generously. The humans watched in
silence, as the alien tentacles prodded the flexible plastic on the bellows,
felt delicately within the valves, and then closed the valves on two of the
pipes and pushed firmly on the bellows. The sound which emerged was not
pretty, but was at least a single, more or less coherent tone. Clear-Eye and
Silver-Rim began a careful examination, pushing the bellows frequently to
produce sound. Amazed, David saw that they had almost instantly learned to
produce the same force upon the bag each time; their tentacles apparently were
more sensitive to pressure than fingertips.
Having tuned tubular ice chimes, they realized that the tones of this
musical instrument also depended upon the length of the tubes, and used their
tentacles to melt away and add ice to the ends of the tubes until they had
tuned the device to a harmonic chord.
Then David put one gloved hand over the open end of one of the pipes
and motioned for Clear-Eye to push down on the bellows again. As the alien did
so, the pipe emitted a tone that was an octave lower in pitch. The bodies of
the two aliens emitted a "rowf" noise -- whether in surprise or pleasure
Deirdre never found out.
"A stopped pipe produces a sound that is an octave lower in pitch than
an open pipe of the same speaking length," explained David as he stepped back
to let the icerugs repeat his experiment themselves.
Once the icerug craftsmen had satisfied themselves that they understood
the construction of the valve and whistle mechanism, they left the device
David had made, went to their storeroom, and selecting some very long hollow
ice tubes, began to make, out of ice, a whistle and valve for each one.
David bent closer to see, and Clear-Eye obligingly extended its
handiwork towards him. With dexterity and skill, the alien was indeed shaping
the ice as easily as an earthly potter worked with clay. Meanwhile, Silver-Rim
had been identically busy, producing a shorter pipe.
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"It looks like they'll have no problem making pipes, but what concerns
me a little is the bellows-bag," he said, looking along the shelves and in the
junk area. "To make an organ large enough to be used in the Grand Meeting Hall
would require a gigantic bellows. Coelashark skins might be too expensive to
use."
Clear-Eye pulled loose the bellows from the wind chest and extended it
to David, while at the same time Silver-Rim removed the three pipes.
"This has been most interesting," said Silver-Rim. "Your demonstration
is clearly understood. Using air in this way might not have occurred to us for
a long time, and we shall want to try many things with these sustainable new
tones. This flexible substance of yours we return, as perhaps it is as
valuable to you as coelashark skin is to us. Something so simple as a ...
bellows to move air, we shall, of course, construct out of a more readily
available material."
"What sort of material?" asked David.
In answer, Silver-Rim pointed to Clear-Eye. "Observe."
The human's gaze slid down the considerable length of the alien, to
rest upon the thickened area of electric blue carpet that had formed to one [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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