And at the word arrangements, applied to geometry, Rowston snorted audibly.
“It had one of the sides produced,” Jorkens went on, “to a distance about equal to its original length, while the other side was produced to about four times its length, stretching North to South across the plains of Mars. How they made such an enormous design in a week puzzled everybody who knew of it. Another thing that puzzled them was that there seemed no exact proportion in length of the lines produced.”
“You say that the length of one of the sides was doubled and the other quadrupled,” said Rowston judicially.
“Yes,” said Jorkens, “but not exactly. The right-angled triangle was exact, but not the proportion of the produced sides. That inexactitude, as it seemed to these men, puzzled them. They realized that the sign must have enormous significance, and that it had been made by a people of vast ability, as the speed with which they had answered clearly showed, and yet they. could find no mathematical formula for one exact length of the lines. Of course they were mostly mathematical men themselves, and expected the people of Mars to be the same, which was only reasonable when they saw those people using a mathematical diagram.
“They worried over it for weeks, a little group of men working out geometric formulae, knowing that they had received a message from folk who relied on them to understand it, and yet not being able to make head or tail of the message. And in the end it turned out to be an extremely simple one. Perhaps they overestimated the intricacy of the diagram, and were looking for something deeper than the message they actually got. One man worked it out, or rather it came, to him in a flash, an old fellow called Priteau. It was a great shock to him: it was a great shock to them all. And in the end they hushed the whole matter up. What Priteau hoped, and what they all hoped, was that the people of Mars have no hatred of us but only of our civilization, the civilization that is based so much on machinery, which in its turn owes all to mathematics; they believed that Mars had been through it all and had cast it away in disgust. And it is Priteau’s theory that the sight of a geometrical figure had infuriated them, so that they had hastily sent that message.”
“But what was the message?” asked Rowston. Which was what we all wanted to know.
“Well,” said Jorkens, “they all say now that that wasn’t the message at all; but it obviously was, or they wouldn’t have taken the trouble they did to hush it up; and, besides that, you can see it for yourselves by drawing figure on paper: it is very easily done, a long straight line, as I told you, going from North to South, and a shorter line at the top going away at right angles, and then—”
“Like a signpost,” said an ordinary member with no taste for science. “Wait a minute,” said Jorkens. “You’ve forgotten the base of the triangle. Signposts don’t usually have cross-bars.”
“Why no,” said another of us. “More like a gallows, you mean.”
“The message,” said Jorkens, “simply meant ‘Go and hang yourselves.’”
The End
The Thrill of “Something Different”
FANTASY AND SCIENCE-FICTION
Selected from Avon’s hundreds of better-selling books
AN EARTH MAN ON VENUS……………Ralph Milne Farley
Suddenly hurled to the sun’s second world, a young Bostonian fights to save a kewpie-doll race from a monstrous tyranny.
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