"Oh," he muttered half-mockingly, glancing toward Barnes, "so you have a reel with you?"
"Yes, and several more back in the cabin. They're blur pictures, garbles we picked up when we were hovering above Nodar."
"You're wasting the Commander's valuable time," Barnes shouted. "All nonsense if you ask me!"
"Only because you have a one-tracked mind." Stern laughed at his own remark. "That may turn out to be very funny in the next few minutes."
"Get on with it, Stern, before I change my mind," ordered the Commander.
"Yes, sir!"
He quickly slipped the reel onto the projector and, setting it for a very slow speed, turned the machine on. The screen showed the usual Nodarian television blur.
"There you are," Barnes said, "a complete waste of time!"
Disregarding him, Stern twisted the speed dial into slower and slower positions; all the while watching the screen. Suddenly, as projection speed came down to six percent of the speed at which it had originally been received, they all gasped. They seemed to be looking at the performance of some kind of drama with perfectly normal human characters but the figures were sufficiently transparent for another set of characters with another distinctive background to be seen behind them and these seemed to be acting out a separate drama. All the while equally transparent complex equations, charts and diagrams were pouring across the screen.
"That's what we find to be a blur!" observed Stern.