fe?"

Lenny glowered glumly. "I wish you and Rafe hadn't talked me into this
job. It's a strain on the brain. I don't know how he expects anyone to
understand all that garbage."

"All what garbage?"

Lenny waved a hand aimlessly. "All this scientific guff. I'm an artist,
not a scientist. If Rafe can get me a clear picture of something, I can
copy it, but when he tries to explain something scientific, he might as
well be thinking in Russian or Old Upper Middle High Martian or
something."

"I know," said Colonel Spaulding, looking almost as glum as Lenny. "Did
you get anything at all that would help Dr. Davenport figure out what
those drawings mean?"

"Rafe says that the translations are all wrong," Lenny said, "but I can't
get a clear picture of just what _is_ wrong."

* * * * *

Colonel Spaulding thought for a while in silence. Telepathy--at least in
so far as the Poe brothers practiced it--certainly had its limitations.
Lenny couldn't communicate mentally with anyone except his brother Rafe.
Rafe could pick up the thoughts of almost anyone if he happened to be
close by, but couldn't communicate over a long distance with anyone but
Lenny.

The main trouble lay in the fact that it was apparently impossible to
transmit a concept directly from Brain A to Brain B unless the basic
building blocks of the concept were already present in Brain B. Raphael
Poe, for instance, had spent a long time studying Russian, reading
Dostoevski, Tolstoy, and Turgenev in the original tongue, familiarizing
himself with modern Russian thought through the courtesy of _Izvestia_,
_Pravda_, and _Krokodil_, and, finally, spending time in the United
Nations building and near the Russian embassy in order to be sure that he
could understand the mental processes involved.

Now, science has a language of its own. Or, rather, a multiplicity of
languages, each derived partly from the native language of the various
scientific groups and partly of borrowings from other languages. In the
physical sciences especially, the language of mathematics is a further
addition.

More than that, the practice of the scientific method automatically
induces a thought pattern that is different from the type of thought
pattern that occurs in the mind of a person who is not scientifically
oriented.

Lenny's mind was a long way from being scientifically oriented. Worse, he
was a bigot. He not only didn't know why the light in his r