Class 8 English Chapter 13: Feathered Friend

The rule that never existed

The story opens with a joke about regulations. As far as the narrator knows, nothing has ever forbidden a pet in a space station, simply because nobody thought a rule was needed. And even if one had existed, he is quite certain Sven Olsen would have ignored it, which tells us about Sven before we meet him.

Why Sven was in space at all

The narrator calls him a wiry little fellow, typical of the early spacers. Wiry means thin but strong. He qualified easily for the 150-pound bonus. That was the bonus which kept so many of the crew on a reducing diet. Built otherwise, the narrator says, his chances of a job up there would have been slim.

What that joke is really about

Lifting mass into orbit costs fuel, so a light crewman is cheaper to keep than a heavy one. The story never explains this. It simply mentions a weight bonus and a station full of men on diets, and lets a reader work out the economics for themselves.

Sven’s work

He was one of their best construction men, and he excelled at the tricky part. Girders drifted around in free fall, and he collected them, moved them through a slow three-dimensional ballet into position, and fused the pieces once they fitted exactly. It was skilled and difficult, because a space suit is a poor garment for working in.

Dovetailed, and other borrowed words

Dovetailed means fitted together exactly, and it belongs to carpentry rather than to steel. Ballet belongs to the stage. Both words are borrowed here to describe engineering in orbit, and both do the same job: they make something unfamiliar feel like something you already know.

The one advantage over Earth

Sven’s team had something no crew on a skyscraper has. They could stand back to admire their handiwork, without gravity abruptly parting them from it. Abruptly means suddenly, and the sentence is a joke about falling off a building, delivered without ever using the word.

Why a canary

The narrator is not a psychologist and will not guess at Sven’s reasons, but he admits the choice was sensible. Claribel weighed practically nothing, her food requirements were tiny, and unlike most animals she was not troubled by the absence of gravity. Three reasons, and all three are practical.

The whistle beside his ear

The narrator first noticed her while sitting in the little cubbyhole he laughingly calls his office, working through lists of technical stores. A musical whistle sounded beside his ear, and he assumed it had come over the station intercom, so he waited for an announcement. None came.

A bump on the head

Instead there was a long and involved pattern of melody. It made him look up with such a start that he forgot the angle beam just behind his head. The stars exploding before his eyes are the cartoon kind, and they are the story’s way of saying he hit it hard.

First sight of Claribel

She was a small yellow canary, hanging quite still in the air, as motionless as a hummingbird, and with far less effort, because her wings were quietly folded along her sides. A hummingbird has to beat its wings to hover. Claribel did not, and that single comparison explains weightlessness better than a paragraph could.

What she had already learnt

They stared at each other for a minute. Then, before he had recovered his wits, she performed a backward loop that no earthbound canary could have managed, and left with a few leisurely flicks. She had worked out how to operate without gravity, and she did not believe in doing unnecessary work.

Why that detail is the best in the story

A canary cannot be taught zero gravity. She had simply tried things until something worked, and arrived at the laziest method available. The crew, with their training and their suits and their diets, are being quietly outdone by a bird who weighs almost nothing.

How she got there

Sven did not confess to owning her for several days, and by then it hardly mattered, because she had become a general pet. He had brought her up from Earth on the last ferry, as he came back from leave. His stated reason, at least in part, was sheer scientific curiosity.

The experiment

He wanted to find out how a bird manages with no weight at all, while still having wings to use. That is a real question. It is also the hinge of the whole story. Sven brings a canary aboard as an experiment about flight, and the canary turns out to be an experiment about air.

Hiding a bird from VIPs

Claribel thrived and grew fat. Concealing her when visitors came from Earth was not usually hard, since a space station offers more hiding places than anybody could count. The only trouble was that she grew noisy when upset, so the crew had to invent explanations for peeps and whistles out of the ventilating shafts and the storage bulkheads.

A couple of narrow escapes

The first half of the story ends on a line that is both funny and useful. There were some close calls, the narrator admits, but then who would ever look for a canary up in a space station? Nobody searches for what cannot possibly be there, which is how the crew keep getting away with it.

Scenario:

A school dug a small pond and stocked it with twenty fish. A science club member asked for a water-testing kit and was told the budget would not stretch to one. She put six water snails into the pond instead, explaining that snails close up and stop moving when the water goes bad, and that they do it well before fish show any sign. In March the snails all sealed themselves shut within two days. The pond was drained and a blocked outflow was found. None of the twenty fish had died.

Analysis:

The snails are Claribel, and the water-testing kit is the alarm circuit. What the story and the pond have in common is a creature that reacts to danger sooner than the thing being protected. The narrator remembers that miners once carried canaries underground to warn them of gas, and the reason it works is unglamorous: a small animal with a fast metabolism is affected first. The second thing both cases share is cost. The story ends by pointing out that a visitor to a space station is doubly safeguarded at practically no extra expense, and six snails are cheaper than any testing kit.

Activity:

Write four lines about an everyday warning sign that costs nothing to watch.

Title:

Explain weightlessness in one comparison

Safety:

No safety concerns.

What You Notice:

A good comparison does the explaining by itself, which is why one sentence about a hummingbird beats a paragraph about gravity.

Every kilogram lifted into orbit costs a great deal of fuel, which is why the story makes a joke of a weight bonus and a crew on reducing diets.

Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote this story, also proposed the idea of communications satellites in a geostationary orbit years before any were built.

Birds really do manage badly in weightlessness, because most of them steer using gravity as a reference. A canary that works it out in a few days is the story’s one piece of flattery.

Why Claribel suited a space station — No weight, no appetite, no complaint — Light, cheap to feed, and untroubled by zero gravity.

Sven’s job, in three steps — Catch, position, fuse — And only once the pieces dovetailed exactly.

Day and night in permanent sunlight

The crew were working twelve-hour watches, which the narrator says is not as bad as it sounds, because you need little sleep in space. There is no day or night when you float in permanent sunlight, but they kept the words anyway. It was simply convenient, and the detail quietly tells us how strange their ordinary life is.

Three signs nobody read

When the narrator woke, it felt like six in the morning. He had a nagging headache, and vague memories of dreams that had been fitful and disturbed. It took him ages to undo his bunk straps. He was still half awake when he reached the mess. Every one of those is the bad air, and he reads none of them.

The quiet breakfast

There was one seat vacant that morning, and the room was unusually quiet. Two small facts, offered without comment. A reader who has been paying attention feels the wrongness before any character says anything, which is exactly how a writer builds dread without raising his voice.

Where’s Sven?

The narrator asks the question without much caring, and that phrase is a symptom too: he is too dull that morning to be curious. Sven is looking for Claribel, somebody answers, and cannot find her anywhere. She usually wakes him up.

What Sven was carrying

He came in through the doorway and they could see at once that something was wrong. He opened his hand slowly. Inside it lay a tiny bundle of yellow feathers, its two claws clenched and sticking pathetically into the air. Clenched means pressed tightly together, and the word does a great deal of work.

The cook-doctor-dietitian

Jock Duncan holds all three jobs at once, which is the story telling us how small the station is. He held Claribel against his ear to listen for a heartbeat, and the crew waited in hushed silence. Hushed means quiet, and the quiet is the crew’s answer.

An honest doctor

He shook his head and said he could hear nothing, and then added the sentence that saves the day. That does not prove she is dead, he said, because he had never listened to a canary’s heart. A less honest man would have pronounced her dead and the story would have ended there.

A shot of oxygen

Somebody suggested oxygen, and pointed at the emergency cylinder with the green band, sitting in its recess by the door. Everyone thought that an excellent idea. Claribel was tucked snugly into a face mask big enough to be a complete oxygen tent for a bird her size.

Revived, and then not

She came round at once. Sven beamed, removed the mask, and she hopped onto his finger and gave her usual trills. Then she keeled straight over again. That second collapse is the important half of the scene, because it proves the oxygen cured a symptom and not a cause.

Something tugging at a memory

For some minutes the narrator had felt something pulling at his memory. His mind was sluggish, as though he could not shake off sleep, and he thought he could do with some of that oxygen himself. That thought is the clue arriving by the wrong door, and it works.

Understanding exploded in his brain

Before he reached the mask he had it. He turned on the duty engineer and said there was something wrong with the air, and that this was why Claribel had passed out. He had just remembered that miners once carried canaries underground to warn them of gas.

Why a canary works as an alarm

The reason is unglamorous. A canary is small, breathes fast and has a quick metabolism, so bad air affects her long before it affects a man. The crew had headaches; she had fainted. The difference in degree is the whole warning.

Jim’s denial

Nonsense, says the duty engineer. The alarms would have gone off, because they have duplicate circuits operating independently. It is a good argument, and it is the kind of argument that makes accidents possible: he is reasoning from how the system was designed rather than from how it was built.

The assistant’s correction

Then his assistant reminds him, with an awkward er, that the second alarm circuit is not connected up yet. That shook Jim, says the narrator, and the phrase means he was startled by unexpected information. He left without a word, which is the most eloquent exit in the story.

The pipe of peace

While he was gone the crew went on arguing, passing the oxygen bottle round as though it were a pipe of peace. It is a comic image and an honest one. They are frightened, they are sharing the only remedy they have, and the sharing is holding the argument together.

What had actually happened

Jim came back ten minutes later looking sheepish, which means embarrassed. There had been one of their rare eclipses by the Earth’s shadow during the night. The air purifier partly froze. And the single alarm that was wired had failed to go off. Three things, in a row.

Slightly dead

Half a million dollars of chemical and electronic engineering, the narrator says, had let them down completely. Without Claribel they should soon have been slightly dead. Slightly dead is a joke, and the joke is the measure of how close it was. You cannot be slightly dead.

The ending, and its argument

So if you visit a space station, the narrator says, do not be surprised by an inexplicable snatch of birdsong, and do not be alarmed by it either. Quite the opposite. It means you are being doubly safeguarded, at practically no extra expense, which is the cheapest safety system anybody has ever installed.

Scenario:

A hostel kitchen had a gas detector mounted above the stove. A spare detector sat in its box in the store cupboard, bought as a backup two years earlier. In November the cook noticed that the kitchen cat had stopped coming in at feeding time. It was sitting outside the door instead. He mentioned it twice, and was told that the detector would have sounded if anything were wrong. On the third day a plumber found a slow leak behind the stove. The mounted detector had a dead battery, and the spare had never been taken out of its box.

Analysis:

This is the story’s accident almost exactly. The hostel had two detectors by design and one in use. That is the gap between duplicate circuits operating independently and a second circuit not connected up yet. Jim dismissed the warning for the same reason the staff dismissed the cook. The alarms would have gone off, both of them said. Both were reasoning from the design. And in both cases the animal was the working detector. The cat and Claribel did nothing clever. They simply reacted to bad air sooner than a person would. Somebody had to notice that they had.

Activity:

Write four lines about a backup in your own home that nobody has ever tested.

Title:

Symptom or cause?

Safety:

No safety concerns.

What You Notice:

There are far more symptoms than causes, and the crew act only on the loudest one, which is a bird falling over twice.

Miners really did take canaries underground until the 1980s. A canary breathes faster than a person and shows the effects of carbon monoxide long before a human would.

A space station in orbit passes in and out of the Earth’s shadow regularly, but a long eclipse that cools the station badly is rare, which is why the accident could not be foreseen.

Arthur C. Clarke was writing in the 1950s, before anybody had lived in orbit, and he still got the real danger right: not an explosion, but the quiet failure of the air.

The three signs nobody read — Headache, dreams, a quiet table — All three were the air, and none was recognised.

The two failures — One alarm froze, the other was never wired — And an eclipse started it.

Three kinds of language work

This part of the chapter is not about the story at all. It takes three things from the way the story is written. There are adjectives that pair with particular nouns, and words built by fusing two words together. And there are the five ways English has of talking about something that has not happened yet. Every example below comes from the chapter or from ordinary speech.

Adjective and noun

An adjective describes a noun. That much is simple. What is less obvious is that certain adjectives sit naturally with certain nouns, and read oddly with others. A worry nags. A path is narrow. A look is sheepish. You could write a nagging path, and a reader would stop to wonder what you meant.

Eight pairs worth learning

Take these from the chapter and from everyday use: a narrow path, a nagging worry, a vague plan, a sheepish look, an inexplicable reason, sluggish traffic, hushed voices, a delighted expression. Each adjective brings its own shade of meaning, and swapping two of them around spoils both phrases.

Why the pairing is not a rule

Nothing in grammar forbids an unusual pairing. Writers break these habits deliberately, and the chapter itself does it: a three-dimensional ballet is not a phrase anybody expects. The difference is that the story breaks the habit on purpose, to make you see the work in orbit freshly.

Merged words

A merged word takes part of one word and part of another, and makes one new word out of them. The chapter supplies a good example without drawing attention to it. Intercom, the thing the narrator mistakes a canary for, comes from internal and communication. Nobody would say internal communication system aloud twice.

Seven more of them

Brunch is breakfast and lunch. Motel is motor and hotel. Smog is smoke and fog. Sitcom is situation and comedy. Vlog is video and blog, which was itself a merged word. Spork is spoon and fork. And webinar is web and seminar.

Why English keeps making them

Each one replaces a longer phrase, and shorter wins. A merged word also names something new without inventing a new sound, so a listener can usually guess it. That is why the words spread so fast, and why so many of them were coined in the last hundred years.

Portmanteau, the other name

These words are also called portmanteau words, after a travelling case that opens into two equal halves. Lewis Carroll used the image to explain the words he invented, and the name has stuck ever since, which is itself a small piece of literary history.

English has no future tense

This surprises people. Many languages change the verb ending to point forward, while English does not. Instead it borrows five other forms and shares the work among them. Each of the five carries a slightly different meaning, and the differences matter more than they look.

Will, the obvious one

Use will for a prediction, a promise or an order. I think our house will win the match. I will not tell anyone. You will report at eight. One form, three jobs, and the context tells a listener which of the three is meant.

The simple present for timetables

School reopens on Monday. The train leaves at six. Nothing in either verb points forward, and both sentences are clearly about the future. This form belongs to timetables and fixed schedules, because a published timetable is treated as a present fact.

The present progressive for arrangements

I am visiting my grandparents next week. The arrangement is already made, and probably somebody else knows about it. That is the difference from a plan: an arrangement has been settled, while a plan is still only an intention.

Going to, for a plan

We are going to get a new bike. This is the informal form, and it states an intention rather than a settled arrangement. It also serves for something you can see coming: look at those clouds, it is going to rain.

The future perfect

Will have plus a past participle. She will have finished the course by May. Two moments in time are needed here: a later moment, and an action already complete by then. It is the only one of the five that needs two.

Choosing between the five

Ask what kind of future you mean. A guess or a promise takes will. A timetable takes the simple present. A settled arrangement takes the present progressive. A plan takes going to. Something finished by a later date takes the future perfect.

Six words to spell carefully

The chapter uses these, and each one loses a vowel if you write it as it sounds: regulation, forbid, fuse, abruptly, confess, dietitian. Dietitian is the worst of them, because the last syllable sounds nothing like its spelling.

Sven fused girders, English fuses words

There is a neat accident in this chapter. Sven spends his working day fusing pieces of steel together once they dovetail exactly, and the language of the chapter does the same thing with words. Internal and communication dovetail into intercom.

Scenario:

A school noticeboard carried three lines about one trip. The first said the bus leaves at six on Friday. The second said we are meeting at the gate. The third said the fee will have been collected by Thursday. A parent complained that the three lines did not match. The teacher explained that each line was doing a different job, and that all three were correct. She then added a fourth line, saying the trip is going to be a long one, and a fifth, saying it will be worth the early start.

Analysis:

Five lines, five different future forms, and the parent is wrong on every count. The first line is the simple present, because a departure time is a timetable. The second is the present progressive, because meeting at the gate is an arrangement already settled. The third is the future perfect, and it needs two moments: the collecting, and the Thursday it is finished by. The fourth is going to, which is the informal plan form. And the fifth is will, used for a prediction. The noticeboard is a neat accident of a grammar lesson, and it works because each form carries a meaning the others cannot.

Activity:

Write five lines about a real school event, using a different future form in each.

Title:

Hunt for merged words

Safety:

No safety concerns.

What You Notice:

Your own coinages work only when a listener can hear both halves, which is exactly why brunch lasted and most inventions do not.

A merged word is also called a portmanteau, after an old kind of travelling case that opens into two halves.

Smog was coined in London in about 1905, from smoke and fog, and the word arrived long before anybody could measure what it described.

English really has no future tense. Many languages change the verb ending for the future, while English borrows other forms to do that work.

The five futures — Will, timetable, arrangement, intention, finished — Will, simple present, present progressive, going to, future perfect.

What makes a merged word — Two words in, one word out — Internal plus communication gives intercom.