I was sneering too. I took out a pencil and threw it at him and said, "All right, wise guy. There's one. Let's see what you can do."
"Have you got a piece of paper?"
Almost savagely, Donovan ripped a page off the calendar. It was blank on the back. He threw it on the table and all the time I could see his eyes. They were asking, Why in the hell am I doing this? and trying to cover the question by showing contempt.
We glanced swiftly at each other and there was guilt in both our faces; like two realists meeting outside a fortune teller's tent. Then Dalrymple took over.
"We have certain facts," he began. "A dead man; the person who admits he went through the physical motions of killing him. We also have the method of producing death—poison—and the setting of the crime."
"I think we've had enough of this clowning," Donovan said in a husky voice.
Dalrymple ignored the interruption, not even bothering to sneer at Donovan. "As every school child on my planet knows, each of these facts must be given a symbol and must become a part of our exploratory equation."
I was a little rusty on such things but it sounded to me about the same way school children on our planet went about solving problems in algebra. I didn't say anything though.
Dalrymple had the pencil racing over the paper, laying out a series of weird symbols the like of which I had never seen. They were neither numbers nor letters; nor the kind of geometric or algebra symbols used on earth either. Of that I was sure.
The closest I can come is to compare them to Egyptian hieroglyphics and yet that's far from the mark. But whatever they were, Dalrymple seemed to know exactly what he was doing.