3
een different orderings. Or nineteen different orderings if you count one which was a list of all the characters."
I made a mental note of the numbers. I felt they were significant.
"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