"As I said," he continued, "I obtained the photographs of the
characters. Very strange shapes, totally unlike the characters of
Oriental languages, but yet that is the closest way to describe them."
He jerked forward in his chair, "Except, of course, ostensively."
"Later," I said. I wanted to get through the preliminaries first. There
would be time later to see the photographs.
* * * * *
"The characters projected by the sphere," he said, "weren't like the
characters of any known language." He paused dramatically. "There was
reason to believe they had origin in an unknown culture. A culture more
scientifically advanced than our own."
"And the reasons for this supposition?" I asked.
"The material ... the material of the sphere. It could only be roughly
classified as _ferro-plastic_. Totally unknown, amazing imperviousness.
A synthetic material, hardly the product of a former culture."
"From Mars?" I said, smiling.
"There were all kinds of conjectures, but, of course, the important
thing was to see if the projection of characters was a message. The
message, if any, would mean more than any conjecture."
"You translated it?"
_He polished the coin on his jacket. "You won't dare believe it," he
said sharply._
He cleared his throat and stiffened into a more rigid posture. "It
wasn't exactly translation. You see, _to us_ none of the characters had
designation. They were just characters."
"So it was a problem of decoding?" I asked.
"As it turned out, no. Decoding is dependent on knowledge of language
characteristics--characteristics of known languages. Decoding was
tried, but without success. No, what we had to find was a key to the
language."
"You mean like the Rune Stone?"
"More or less. In principle, we needed a picture of a cow, and a sign
of meaning indicating one of the characters.
"For me, there was no possibility of finding similarities between the
characters and characters of other languages--that would require
tremendous linguistic knowledge and library facilities. Nor could I use
a decoding approach--that would require special knowledge of techniques
and access to electronic computers and other mechanical aids. No, I had
to work on the assumption that the key to the sphere was implicit in
the sphere."
"You hoped to find the key to the language in the language itself?"
"Exactly. You know, of course, some languages do have an implicit key?
For example hieroglyphics or picture language. The word for _cow_ is a
picture of a cow."
_He looked at the toes of his shoes. "You won't be able to believe it.
It's impossible to believe. I use the word impossible in its logical
sense._
"In most languages," he continued, looking up from his shoes, "the
sound of some words themselves indicates the meaning of the word.
Onomatopoetic words like _bowwow, buzz_."
"And the key to the unknown language?" I asked. "How did you find it?"
* * * * *
I watched him push the coin against the back of his arm, then lift it
to read the backward letters pressed into his skin. He looked up at me
and smiled.
"I built models of the characters. Big material ones, exactly
proportionate to the ones projected. Then--quite by accident--I viewed
one of them through a glass globe the size of the original sphere. What
do you think I saw?"
"What?" I noticed he had the boyish look again.
"A distortion of the model. But that's not what's important. The
distortions, on study, gave specific visual entities. Like when looking
at one of those trick pictures and suddenly seeing the lion in the
grass. The lines outlining the lion are there all the time, only the
observer has to view them as the outline of a lion. It was the same
with the models of the characters, except the shapes that appeared were
not of lions or other recognizable things. But they did suggest."
_He pressed the coin against his forehead, closed his eyes and appeared
to be thinking deeply. "Yes, impossible to believe. No one can believe
it."_
"In addition to the visual response, the distortions gave me definite
feelings. Not mixtures of feelings, but one definite emotional
experience."
"How do you mean?"
"One character when viewed through the globe gave me a visual image
and, at the same time, a strong feeling of light hilarity."
"I take it then that these distortions seemed to connote meanings,
rather than denote them. You might say that their meaning was conveyed
through a Gestalt experience on the part of the observer."
"Yes, each character gave a definite Gestalt. But, the Gestalt was the
same for each observer. Or at least for thirty-five observers there was
an eighty per cent correlation."