yielded no fewer than fourteen more bodies, or more accurately,
bits of bodies from which at least fourteen individuals of both
sexes could be identified. Clearly, none of the bodies was in
anything approaching the condition of Charlie’s. They had all been
literally blown to pieces. The remains comprised little more than
splinters of charred bone scattered among scorched tatters of
spacesuits. Apart from suggesting that besides being physically the
same as humans, the Lunarians had been every bit as accident-prone,
these discoveries provided no new information-until the discovery
of the wrist unit. About the size of a large cigarette pack, not
including the wrist bracelet, the device carried on its upper face
four windows that looked like miniature electronic displays. From
their size and shape, the windows seemed to have been intended to
display character data rather than pictures, and the device was
thought to be a chronometer or a computing-calculating aid; maybe
it was both-and other things besides. After a perfunctory
examination at Tycho Three the unit had been shipped to Earth along
with some other items. It eventually found its way to the Navcomms
laboratories near Houston, where the gadgets from Charlie’s
backpack were being studied. After some preliminary experimenting
the casing was safely removed, but detailed inspection of the
complex molecular circuits inside revealed nothing particularly
meaningful. Having no better ideas, the Navcomms engineers resorted
to applying low voltages to random points to see what happened.
Sure enough, when particular sequences of binary patterns were
injected into one row of contacts, an assortment of Lunarian
symbols appeared across the windows. This left nobody any the wiser
until Hunt, who happened to be visiting the lab, recognized one
sequence of alphabetic sets as the months that appeared on the
calendar. Hence, at least one of the functions performed by the
wrist unit seemed closely related to the table in the diary.
Whether or not this had anything to do with
recording the passage of time remained to be seen, but at least odd
things looked as if they were beginning to tie up.
The Linguistics section was making steady if less spectacular
progress toward cracking the language. Many of the world’s most
prominent experts were getting involved, some choosing to move to
Houston, while others worked via remote data links. As the first
phase of their assault, they amassed volumes of statistics on word
and character distributions and matchings, and produced reams of
tables and charts that looked as meaningless to everybody else as
the language itself. After that it was largely a matter of
intuition and guessing games played on computer display screens.
Every now and again somebody spotted a more meaningful pattern,
which led to a better guess, which led to a still more meaningful
pattern-and so on. They produced lists of words in categories
believed to correspond to nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs,
and later on added adjectival and adverbial phrases-fairly basic
requirements for any advanced inflecting language. They began to
develop a feel for the rules for deriving variants, such as plurals
and verb tenses, from common roots, and for the conventions that
governed the formation of word sequences. An appreciation of the
rudiments of Lunarian grammar was emerging from all this, and the
experts in Linguistics faced the future with optimism, suddenly
confident that they were approaching the point where they would
begin attempting to match the first English equivalents to selected
samples.
The Mathematics section, organized on lines similar to Linguistics,
was also finding things that were interesting. Part of the diary
was made up of many pages of numeric and tabular material-
suggesting, perhaps, a reference section of Useful Information. One
of the pages was divided vertically, columns of numbers alternating
with columns of words. A researcher noticed that one of the
numbers, when converted to decimal, came out to 1836-the
proton-electron mass ratio, a fundamental physical constant that
would be the same anywhere in the Universe. It was suggested that
the page might be a listing of equivalent Lunarian units of mass,
similar to equivalence tables used for converting ounces to grams,
grams to pounds. . . and so on. If so, they had stumbled on a
complete record of the Lunarian system of measuring mass. The