“OK, got it,” answered Morales.
“And what do you know?” asked the one with an eye missing of Morales, who lacked one shoe.
“I know how to load and unload frozen goods, or how to hang refrigerated meats and stow all kinds of cargo.”
“I don’t think that’s of much use to us now,” said the other. “Don’t you know anything about ships?”
“Yes, I know how to open a hold, and I know the name of every single one of its parts.”
“Why does a ship float? That’s what we’d like to know.”
“Well, it floats because it’s hollow. There’s a law of physics for that.”
“Newton’s Principle,” explained the one who’d been an office worker.
“Oh, of course. Who did you say? Newton?”
“Yes. but wait. Newton’s Principle says that gravity is what attracts all bodies. That was a great discovery. It’s a universal principle.”
“And that’s why a ship floats?”
“No. It floats for precisely the opposite reason. It’s the water that keeps it afloat.”
“So…?”
“I already told you. Newton’s Principle.”
“Since we’re on the sciences,” said Morales writing eagerly, “what’s relativity?”
“Oh, yeah, Einstein had something to do with that,” explained Silva, winking the only eye he had left. “He discovered relativity. He revolutionized astrology’. He said that everything was relative.”
“Good,” said Morales, taking a new sheet of glass. “Everything relative. How did the formulas go?”
“I dunno. Wait. They were a little complicated. He said that light travels at a speed of three hundred thousand kilometers per minute.”
“Are you sure? Isn’t that a lot?”
“No, it’s the one thing I remember with accuracy. But put down per hour, just in case.”
“Perfect, per hour. Who knows something about geometry?”
“The Pythagorean Theorem,” said Silva, whose one eye now shone with energy.
“What’s that?”
“It’s a way to measure the sides of a triangle. Listen, it goes more or less like this—don’t write yet—the sum of the sides is equal to the hypotenuse.”
“Very interesting. Can you explain it to me?”
“Yes, look.” He took out a knife, alarming the other two, but all he did was draw a right triangle on the flat ground. “You see? It means that this side”—he drew a line the same as the hypotenuse—“is equal to the sum of these other two,” and he drew two segments, one after the other, equal to the sides.
“But those aren’t the same,” said the others in unison.
“Apparently, no, but mathematically, yes. That’s why Pythagorus had to prove it.”
“Very good,” said Morales. “If beings come from another planet, they’ll find these pieces of glass and have a complete idea of everything that mankind had come to know.”
“Why don’t we add something about literature?” said Silva.
“Literature?” repeated Anderson.
“No, not literature. We need to write down fundamental things. For example, what’s an atom bomb? How do you make one? That would be very important.”
“An atom bomb?” said the other two. A heavy silence came over the three men. The rain continued to pour down and Morales had to protect the pieces of glass with his body so that the water didn’t erase what he’d written. Just then, the wet and burning wind scattered the soaked pages of a book that had escaped the great fire. Anderson, the bald one, smoothed them out and brought them over. It was a treasure of incalculable value for them: nothing less than a treatise on anatomy, astronomy, zoology.1 Immediately they started to study and transcribe it for their children.
“Let’s see, the nervous system, what’s it say?” Morales began.
Silva, with his lone eye, read: “The brain is the nervous system and it controls the entire body. Let’s suppose I touch a child someplace, any place, and I tell him: ‘You have nerves here,’ he won’t be able to tell me he doesn’t. The brain is protected by a bone that’s a cranee-yum. But first there’s the cerebellum, and after that comes the Medusa Oblongata. Then there’s the spiny column and inside that there’s like a little tube that runs through the whole body. Convolooshuns are like tiny sausages, all rolled up; they’re the things that let us do things.”
“Fascinating.” said Morales. “That’s more like it! What does it say there about the corpuscle?”
“It says: ‘The Corpuscle: What a Piece of Junk!’ Then it says: ‘Digestion is the cause of many illnesses.’”
They continued thus during all of that afternoon and many others, until the man with the one missing shoe thought that they had enough and the next day, in the morning, they gathered their raggedy offspring together and began passing their knowledge on to them. Under the unceasing rain, in that world flattened by a few men who had monopolized the most subtle and diabolical forces of destruction, those three survivors devoted themselves to teaching their descendants the knowledge that they had managed, in their own way. to accumulate, while the deformed creatures who were their children listened to them in silence, watching them with their lifeless eyes:
“The square of 2 is 4. Therefore, in order to find the square of a number, multiply it by 2: for example: the square of 8 is 16, of 12 is 24, of 24 is 48…