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 

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