he gave some negative twitters to indicate, I
suppose, that he didn't know. So off we went, following the row of
pyramids because they ran north, and I was going north.

"Man, we trailed that line for hours! After a while, I noticed another
queer thing: they were getting larger. Same number of bricks in each
one, but the bricks were larger.

"By noon they were shoulder high. I looked into a couple--all just the
same, broken at the top and empty. I examined a brick or two as well;
they were silica, and old as creation itself!"

"How you know?" asked Leroy.

"They were weathered--edges rounded. Silica doesn't weather easily even
on earth, and in this climate--!"

"How old you think?"

"Fifty thousand--a hundred thousand years. How can I tell? The little
ones we saw in the morning were older--perhaps ten times as old.
Crumbling. How old would that make _them_? Half a million years? Who
knows?" Jarvis paused a moment. "Well," he resumed, "we followed the
line. Tweel pointed at them and said 'rock' once or twice, but he'd done
that many times before. Besides, he was more or less right about these.

"I tried questioning him. I pointed at a pyramid and asked 'People?' and
indicated the two of us. He set up a negative sort of clucking and said,
'No, no, no. No one-one-two. No two-two-four,' meanwhile rubbing his
stomach. I just stared at him and he went through the business again.
'No one-one-two. No two-two-four.' I just gaped at him."

"That proves it!" exclaimed Harrison. "Nuts!"

"You think so?" queried Jarvis sardonically. "Well, I figured it out
different! 'No one-one-two!' You don't get it, of course, do you?"

"Nope--nor do you!"

"I think I do! Tweel was using the few English words he knew to put over
a very complex idea. What, let me ask, does mathematics make you think
of?"

"Why--of astronomy. Or--or logic!"

"That's it! 'No one-one-two!' Tweel was telling me that the builders of
the pyramids weren't people--or that they weren't intelligent, that they
weren't reasoning creatures! Get it?"

"Huh! I'll be damned!"

"You probably will."

"Why," put in Leroy, "he rub his belly?"

"Why? Because, my dear biologist, that's where his brains are! Not in
his tiny head--in his middle!"

"_C'est_ impossible!"

"Not on Mars, it isn't! This flora and fauna aren't earthly; your
biopods prove that!" Jarvis grinned and took up his narrative. "Anyway,
we plugged along across Xanthus and in about the middle o