he
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