"Can that be a science book?" asked Cal, leaning over his wife's shoulder. The beings were pictured as simply as possible, in no minute detail whatever, and their activities were of the dullest and most prosaic sort.
This pattern was followed through page after page—a picture (some of them were of things so alien they could not be placed by either the Fulls or himself), a single character, then a short word and another, long or short as the case might be. After a dozen of them had flashed on and off Adam noticed that the large character was always repeated at the beginning of the last word.
When he realized what it meant, the whole business clicked into focus. The whole damned deal, the lab and the scientists and the experiments and the meaning of the four magic slates, and everything. There was no particular reason why this last slate should have done it, for it was no more suggestive than many other things that he had seen; it was simply the last piece of evidence, the final push that sent him headlong into terrible knowledge.
Carefully, desperately, he went over it all in his mind, while the Fulls spoke in low tones.
God, he thought, oh, God! He was shivering now. He was more terrified than he had ever been before. His tongue felt thick.
The punishments, the high stool and the arbitrary cuffs and swats; the gadgets, the mazes, the puzzles; were they all a part of the conditioning to neurosis of a scientific experiment? They were not.
Adam had found an answer, the only possible answer. The fourth slate had given it to him, although a hundred hints of it had shown up every day. His psych teacher would be ashamed of him for muddling along so many days, believing in a theory that was so plainly impossible.
He addressed Mrs. Full. She was a little sharper than her husband, and this was more in her line, too. He had to make her discover the same answer. He had to know it was right. And then he had to get out of that place in a hell of a hurry.
"Ma'am, you know what this is?"