Seven-Tenths Read Online Free Page B

already overcrowded geostationary orbit, the system will cover the Earth and in theory allow a person anywhere on the planet’s surface to determine his position to within a few metres. This would not be of the slightest use to a lost swimmer looking for his boat.
    Bored with the sight of bright red digital figures flickering their decimal points on display panels, I wander off in search of sound. Down in the forward hold, above the banging of the ship’s forefoot into wave troughs, the chaffinch-like chinking of the 10 kilohertz ‘fish’ can be heard through the steel hull. Up on the stern deck there is a sharp cracking sound every ten seconds, the higher frequenciesof the air gun’s detonations being transmitted back up the compressed air hose. In the water astern white puddles dimple and churn to mark the boilings of released air. They follow the ship with the measured pace of footsteps.
    Very occasionally from a chance position down in the hull, at some freak acoustical window, it is possible to hear GLORIA’s peculiar yodel. The instrument emits a correlation signal; instead of a single bleep its pulses take the shape of a whistle which swoops up and down. This is so the echo will be unmistakable, the electronic ears listening for its return being tuned to exclude all other signals. Even so, knowing how to read the GLORIA trace as it emerges from the plotter is a matter of much experience. Since parts of the signal are making a round journey of 60 kilometres or so, while others may travel only 5 (that edge of the fan nearest the ship) the returning echoes become mixed up with the fresh outgoing pulses, even with still fainter returns from previous signals. There may also be leakage and scattering, with stray echoes reflected back down from the water’s surface.
    How different the Farnella is from the old Challenger ! The real distinction between this kind of oceanography and all that went before is not merely that the technology has changed, and with it the techniques for analysing data. It is that the scientists themselves are using different senses. Nobody is actually listening to these signals returning from unexplored regions laden with information. The lab is filled, not with the hollow pinging familiar from submarine war film soundtracks, but with the click and whir of plotters and jocular bouts of repartee. No one now wears headphones and a rapt, faraway look, attentive in ambient hush. For all that modern oceanography relies so much on acoustic techniques, it is machines which do the listening. When I flip a switch on a panel which feeds through a tiny speaker the actual noise of the signals, the American technician Bob sets his face into that expression which in TV shorthand stands for displeasure. ‘That sound gives me a headache,’ he says. ‘It’s so goddamn monotonous.’ I refrain from babbling about hidden subtleties, since they are still there; it is just that they are on an inked printout.
    Allowing electronic devices to replace our senses while reducing so much information to visual imagery must have its consequences. Generally speaking, under-used faculties tend to atrophy. It has long since become a cliché in the pages of The Lancet and the BMJ to wonder whether the old-fashioned, pre-war family GP with his training in how to watch, to listen, to smell, touch and even taste may have understood more about his patients’ health than does his modern counterpart with his reliance on laboratory techniques and diagnostic machinery. Perhaps in dealing with the natural world at an electronic remove scientists in certain disciplines may also risk missing as much as they learn. How many naturalists nowadays have the artist’s eye, like the great nineteenth-century scientists who so lovingly sketched their specimens in the field? It is not only sensibility but memory itself which atrophies, since the need for attentive observation is less. The camera takes the place of the eye, the recorder of the