She forced herself to stop, though she could have gone on. Her father had been such a huckster that she, by inclination, hated the very idea of a sales pitch. She waited for Nate to latch on to the concept on his own, had no doubt that he would. After all, hadn’t he been by her side for the past two years? Wasn’t the one-minus-one as much his baby as hers? But his dark eyes looked troubled. She couldn’t read him.
“What we want to know,” she said, nodding toward the computers, “is if their space technology uses the one-minus-one wave. Any suggestions on how we do that?”
Nate turned slowly back to the monitor. “Maybe we can find some math.”
“Nope. I thought about that. We’re used to math being a cross-language tool because most cultures on Earth use the Greek math symbols. But of course, that wouldn’t apply here.”
“No. You’re right. Who knows how they represent the number four?”
“Exactly. But diagrams might be helpful. Think you can get into the guts of this thing?”
He was staring blankly at the screen.
“Nate?”
He blinked, sat up straighter. “I can try.” His fingers moved over the screen. “I’m pretty blind without knowing the language; all I can do is poke around. But something might come up.” Even as distracted as he seemed to be, he couldn’t let a line like that go by without comment. He looked at her and waggled his eyebrows. “Heh heh heh.”
She let out a snort that was part laughter, part embarrassment. Nate proceeded to poke around for a good long time. Mostly the screens made absolutely no sense to them. After about twenty minutes a diagram appeared.
“What’s that?” Jill asked, studying it.
“Looks like a diagram of the spaceport.” Nate pointed out the shape of the dome. “It’s marked one of the rooms. See? It’s blinking.”
“Umm,” Jill said, not very interested. “Let’s see what else we can find.”
They found a few other diagrams but nothing that looked like physics, nothing that provided any insight. The day dragged on. Jill was starting to get deeply frustrated, realizing the depth of their ignorance. Here she was with the most amazing technology at her fingertips and she couldn’t read a damn word. It was a Twilight Zone nightmare, like the episode where the guy who loves to read is left alone at the end of the world with all the books and endless time to read them—but his glasses break.
How were they ever going to be able to learn the language?
The spaceport diagram came up several more times; they ignored it.
Jill groaned, rubbing her eyes. “What we really need is something like Hammurabi’s code—a key that would help us decipher their math symbols. Do you think there’s any chance they might have developed something like that for their space program?”
Nate started to answer when paper emerged from an unnoticed slot in the computer’s side. It slid to the table’s surface and another followed. Nate shot Jill a confused look and picked up the page. She studied it over his shoulder.
“Holy shit,” Nate breathed. “It’s a code breaker!”
“Let me see.” Jill was sure he was having her on. She tried to take the page from him but he refused to give it up. They ended up leaning over it together, their heads jockeying for space.
On one side of the page, in very small print, was a simple series of lines. Next to them was a character of the alien script. The lines went from one line to two lines to three, increasing in neat rows.
“Those are their number symbols!” Nate said, putting his finger on the alien script next to the lines. “That’s the symbol for ‘one,’ then ‘two,’ three, four, five… Christ!”
Jill turned the page slightly toward herself. She didn’t want to allow herself to hope, forced herself to look at the lines again and again. The computer, meanwhile, continued to print pages. She and Nate pored over them. By the fourth page the ideograms were describing the symbols for addition and subtraction, and from there it grew increasingly complex. It would take days, if not months, to figure out some of the ideograms. But she had no doubt that they could decipher them, eventually. The ideograms were very well designed.
“Jill,” Nate said, his voice strained, “you asked for it and it printed it.”
“You must have pushed something.”
“Yeah,” Nate snorted, “I knew how to do it all along. I was just holding back.” He looked around the room, paranoid, as if expecting an alien Allen Funt to reveal himself.
“Maybe it was an idiot detector,” Jill suggested, her heart beating fast. “Like… I don’t know, a help screen that comes up when you clearly don’t know what you’re doing.”
“I hope so.” Nate snuck a look under the tables. “Because the thing is, even if the computer understands speech, which is no biggie, how would it be able to understand our language?”
“I don’t know.” Jill felt uneasy herself and then got annoyed for feeling that way. “Look, what are we complaining for? This is the best thing that could have happened. We should be drinking champagne!”
Nate gave her a funny look and got up. He scratched his head. “Well—it is incredible luck, even if it’s damned weird.”
“Absolutely.”
He gave her a rough congratulatory hug and moved away before she could return it. “Um—I’ll be back. I need to take a quick break.”
“ ‘Kay.” Jill smiled at him, already focused on the next ideogram.
She lost track of time after that. She had never been particularly emotional, and her surprise over their discovery was quickly replaced by exaltation, and that was quickly replaced by an unobtrusive satisfaction and a determination to get down to work. She identified the symbols for multiplication and division and the notation for exponentials. Her butt was killing her, straddling these ridiculous banana-split chairs. It was going quite numb. She didn’t care. With some impatience she skipped past more ideograms looking for complex equations.
It might be here, she thought. It just might. But when she finally did locate what she thought were longer equations, she realized it would take weeks to painfully translate each one, symbol by symbol by symbol. She put the papers aside and got up, stretching her tired back. Nate had not returned, which was strange in itself. She walked back and forth to get the pins and needles out, glanced at the computer.
She dismissed the idea when it first occurred to her, but a moment later it was back. And as silly as it was, it was worth a shot. So she turned to the computer, a bit shamefaced, and began to talk to it.
Nate came in a few minutes later. He snuck up on her and leapt out wearing huge black goggles that covered most of his face. “Booga-booga!”
Jill screamed bloody murder. She lectured him halfheartedly about the dangers of heart attacks or serious injury here, where there were no hospitals, but she could not deflate his good mood or her own.
“I found that blinking room on the spaceport diagram,” Nate said, pulling off the goggles. “It’s a supply room. Supercool. There are all kinds of alien spacesuits, helmets, these sunglasses, I think like pagers or signaling devices—a ton of stuff. I have no idea what most of it is. I got a handful of these…” He fished in his pocket, brought out little metal capsules. He shook them. “Thought you might have an idea—”
“Nate?” Jill interrupted.
“Huh?”
She handed him a piece of paper.
It took him a minute. He referred back to the code, where Jill marked down what she’d deciphered of the symbols. He grew serious. “God, Jill, this is your equation.”
“I know.”
“How did you get this?”
“From the computer.” Jill said evasively. “But look at this…” She pointed at the page. “This is an equation for the one-minus-one wave—at least it’s supposed to be. But the numbers are wrong.”