smiled
depreciatingly. "You see, I don't know them myself. Only a few of the
most advanced minds of Aztlan can understand. We merely operate the
machines."

Matson shrugged. He had expected something like this. Now they would
stall him off about the machines after handing him a fast line of
double-talk.

"As I said," Ixtl went on, "there is no basis for understanding.
Still, if it will satisfy you, we will show you our machines--and the
mathematics that created them although I doubt that you will learn
anything more from them than you have from our explanation."

"I could try," Matson said grimly.

"Very well," Ixtl replied.

He led the way into the center of the ship where the seamless housings
stood, the housings that had baffled some of the better minds of
Earth. Matson watched while the star men proceeded to be helpful. The
housings fell apart at invisible lines of juncture, revealing
mechanisms of baffling simplicity, and some things that didn't look
like machines at all. The aliens stripped the strange devices and Ixtl
attempted to explain. They had anti-gravity, forcefields, faster than
light drive, and advanced design computers that could be packed in a
suitcase. There were weird devices whose components seemed to run out
of sight at crazily impossible angles, other things that rotated
frictionlessly, suspended in fields of pure force, and still others
which his mind could not envisage even after his eyes had seen them.
All about him lay the evidence of a science so advanced and alien that
his brain shrank from the sight, refusing to believe such things
existed. And their math was worse! It began where Einstein left off
and went off at an incomprehensible tangent that involved psychology
and ESP. Matson was lost after the first five seconds!

Stunned, uncomprehending and deflated, he left the ship. An impression
that he was standing with his toe barely inside the door of knowledge
became a conscious certainty as he walked slowly to his car. The wry
thought crossed his mind that if the aliens were trying to convince
him of his abysmal ignorance, they had succeeded far beyond their
fondest dreams!

They certainly had! Matson thought grimly as he selected five
cartridges from the box lying beside him. In fact they had succeeded
too well. They had turned his deflation into antagonism, his ignorance
into distrust. Like a savage, he suspected what he could not
understand. But unlike the true primitive, th