reckoned with. And how does unknown meet unknown? Suppose one
has no hand to shake?

The mass of that wreck reeked like a hot cinder-pile and a burning
garbage dump combined. It oozed blackened goo. There were crushed
pieces of calcined material that looked like cuttlebone. The thin
plates of charred stuff might almost have been pressed cardboard.
Foot-long tubes of thin, tin-coated iron contained combined chemicals
identifiable as proteins, carbohydrates and fats. Food, we decided.

* * * * *

Naturally, we figured that here was a wonderful clue to the plant and
animal life of another world. Take a can of ordinary beef goulash; you
can see the fibrous muscle and fat structure of the meat, and the
cellular components of the vegetables. And here it was true, too, to a
lesser degree. There were thin flakes and small, segmented cylinders
which must have been parts of plants. But most was a homogeneous mush
like gelatin.

Evidently there had been three occupants of the craft. But the crash
and the fire had almost destroyed their forms. Craig, our biologist,
made careful slides of the remains, tagging this as horny epidermis,
this as nerve or brain tissue, this as skeletal substance, and this as
muscle from a tactile member--the original had been as thin as
spaghetti, and dark-blooded.

Under the microscope, muscle cells proved to be very long and thin.
Nerve cells were large and extremely complex. Yet you could say that
Nature, starting from scratch in another place, and working through
other and perhaps more numerous millions of years, had arrived at
somewhat the same results as it had achieved on Earth.

I wonder how an other-world entity, ignorant of humans, would explain
a shaving-kit or a lipstick. Probably for like reasons, much of the
stuff mashed into that wreck had to remain incomprehensible to us.
Wrenches and screwdrivers, however, we could make sense of, even
though the grips of those tools were not _hand_-grips. We saw screws
and bolts, too. One device we found had been a simple crystal
diaphragm with metal details--a radio. There were also queer rifles.
Lord knows how many people have wondered what the extraterrestrial
equivalents of common human devices would look like. Well, here were
some answers.

A few of the instruments even had dials with pointers. And the numeral
_1_ used on them was a vertical bar, almost like our own. But zero was
a plus sign. And they counted