He offered Walther a pen and a registration card on which appeared some undecipherable combination of letters.
Walther began to have a sense of unreality about the whole thing, as if he were still day-dreaming in the Venus warp.
"Really," he said, "I seem to be quite confused—"
With a smile of sudden comprehension, the clerk produced a Manual and thumbed rapidly through its pages. He pointed to a phrase with the tip of his pen, and Walther read:
What price room do you desire?
Opposite these words was the phonetic jumble:
Whprumuirer?
Walther shrugged to indicate that price was not important, but his thoughts were spinning. And they were still spinning when the robot bellhop left him alone in his suite. The possibility of a language barrier on Earth was something he had never considered. With only six months planned for his visit, it would be impossible to learn a new language and still do all he had dreamed of doing.
But the Von Koenigsburgs were noted for their stubbornness. Walther's chin set, and he opened the Manual to learn what this was all about.
He promptly realized that this was a Manual only for the most elementary needs of conversation, and that a great amount of study would be necessary for normal discourse. The first section of the Manual devoted a short chapter to each of the basic languages of Earth. Turning from one to another, Walther discovered that an extreme degree of condensation had taken place in all languages. It was as though a form of speedwriting and shorthand had been vocalized.