Book 5: Chapter 56: Graduation
Icarus
January 2338
Roanoke
Even with all the pictures to help, translation of the library’s books took about six months. Bob with the Deltans and Phineas and Ferb with the Pav had had the advantage of being able to observe the language in daily use. With only text, we’d had to infer a lot. Degrees of confidence applied to words and phrases were then tested against other texts to see if the resulting translation made sense. We still had a significant portion of the written language with no confident translation.
But we had figured out the audiotapes. On the assumption that the Roanokians had a spoken frequency range similar to that of humans and a roughly similar processing speed for speech, we’d decided on an arbitrary playback speed. But who knew? We might sound to them like we were hopped up on helium.
But the biggest disappointment was that our initial suspicions had been correct. The hard-copy portion of this library was strictly legacy. There was nothing more recent than late-twentieth-century technology or discussion. That meant no indication of how the wormholes worked or where the populations went.
“On the other hand,” I mused, “we do have a means of communication now. We might be able to talk to the firewall sentries.”
“Or maybe this time, they’ll decide we’re a nuisance and melt us down.”
“We could send in a drone.”