He looked at me intently. "You won't believe any of this." He pressed the coin into the palm of his hand. "You won't be able to."
"The photographs," he continued, as if lecturing, "were of characters projected by the sphere when placed before a focused light. The sphere was transparent, you see, imbedded with dark microscopic specks. By moving the sphere a certain distance each time, there was a total projection of three hundred and sixty different characters in eighteen different orderings. Or nineteen different orderings if you count one which was a list of all the characters."
I made a mental note of the numbers. I felt they were significant.
"As I said," he continued, "I obtained the photographs of the characters. Very strange shapes, totally unlike the characters of Oriental languages, but yet that is the closest way to describe them." He jerked forward in his chair, "Except, of course, ostensively."
"Later," I said. I wanted to get through the preliminaries first. There would be time later to see the photographs.
"The characters projected by the sphere," he said, "weren't like the characters of any known language." He paused dramatically. "There was reason to believe they had origin in an unknown culture. A culture more scientifically advanced than our own."
"And the reasons for this supposition?" I asked.
"The material ... the material of the sphere. It could only be roughly classified as ferro-plastic. Totally unknown, amazing imperviousness. A synthetic material, hardly the product of a former culture."
"From Mars?" I said, smiling.